How to Migrate from FooEvents to Venuera: A Step-by-Step Guide

You picked FooEvents because it kept ticket sales inside WooCommerce — and that was a good instinct. But maybe the license renewals are adding up across the extensions you need, maybe you want a drag-and-drop ticket designer or seated venue maps, or maybe you simply read our Venuera vs FooEvents comparison and want to try the free route. The good news: because both plugins are built on WooCommerce, migrating is far less painful than moving between two unrelated ticketing platforms. Your store, your orders, your customers and your payment gateways all stay exactly where they are.

This guide walks through a safe, step-by-step migration from FooEvents to Venuera — what carries over automatically, what you need to rebuild, and how to handle events that already have tickets sold.

What actually needs to migrate (less than you think)

A “migration” between two WooCommerce ticketing plugins is mostly a re-configuration, not a data transfer. Here is what stays untouched:

Your WooCommerce foundation stays. Products, orders, customers, tax settings, and payment gateways like WooCommerce Payments, Stripe or PayPal are core WooCommerce — neither plugin owns them. Venuera sells tickets as regular WooCommerce products, so checkout, coupons, refunds and reporting keep working the way you’re used to.

Your pages and theme stay. Your shop, cart and checkout pages don’t change.

What you do need to set up fresh in Venuera: events (Venuera uses its own Events section in the WordPress admin), the link between each event and its ticket products, per-ticket settings like check-in rules, your ticket design, and any attendee information fields you collect at checkout. There is no automated FooEvents-to-Venuera importer, so plan for a manual setup — for most sites with a handful of active events this is an afternoon of work.

Step 1: Install Venuera alongside FooEvents

You don’t have to deactivate FooEvents on day one. Install the free Venuera plugin from the WordPress plugin directory and run both side by side while you rebuild. FooEvents keeps validating tickets for events you’ve already sold, and Venuera handles everything new. This parallel period is the single best way to de-risk the switch.

Two practical tips for this phase: first, do the initial setup on a staging copy of your site if you have one, so you can experiment freely. Second, decide on a cutover rule — the simplest is “every event that goes on sale from today is a Venuera event.”

Step 2: Recreate your events

In FooEvents, the event is the WooCommerce product. Venuera separates the two: you create an event (with its date, time and venue details) and then attach one or more WooCommerce ticket products to it. That separation is what lets a single event carry multiple ticket types — General, VIP, Early Bird — each as its own product with its own price and stock.

For each active event, create the event in Venuera and fill in the schedule and location. Venuera outputs Schema.org Event structured data on event pages automatically, which is what Google looks for when deciding whether to show event rich results — worth knowing if organic search matters to you, since you get it without extra SEO plugins.

The event and events-archive URL slugs are configurable in Venuera’s settings, so if your FooEvents product pages had meaningful URLs that rank, you can keep your new event pages on a sensible structure and add 301 redirects from any old URLs you retire.

Step 3: Turn your products into ticket types

Next, connect ticket products to each event. You can reuse the existing WooCommerce products FooEvents was selling — their sales history and reviews stay attached — or create clean new products if you prefer a fresh start. Stock management is plain WooCommerce inventory: set the stock quantity on each ticket product and that’s your capacity for that ticket type.

A detail worth understanding before you go live: Venuera generates tickets when an order reaches the Processing or Completed status. Each ticket gets its own unique QR code for check-in. The “Create Tickets On” setting controls when the ticket email goes out, not when tickets exist — so if you sell offline-payment orders, tickets are ready as soon as the order is processing, and you choose when buyers receive them.

If you followed our guide on selling tickets with WooCommerce, this step will feel familiar — it’s the same product-first logic.

Step 4: Rebuild attendee fields and your ticket design

If you used FooEvents to capture attendee names or custom details at checkout, recreate those fields in Venuera. The Custom Attendee Fields add-on supports nine field types, so registration forms with meal choices, t-shirt sizes or company names translate over cleanly.

For the ticket itself, the Ticket Designer add-on gives you a visual editor with 27 templates and 21 bundled fonts (including Cyrillic support for multi-language events). Have one of your old FooEvents PDF tickets open for reference and rebuild the layout — most organizers end up simplifying their design at this point rather than copying it one-to-one.

Before cutover, place a real test order: buy a ticket with a live (or sandbox) payment method, confirm the email arrives, open the PDF, and scan the QR code with the Venuera check-in app. Testing the whole chain once beats testing each piece separately. (New to QR scanning at the door? Our event check-in guide covers the full workflow.)

Step 5: Handle events with tickets already sold

This is the question that stalls most migrations: what about the 400 tickets you already sold through FooEvents for next month’s event?

You have two workable options:

Option A — let FooEvents finish its events. Keep FooEvents active (and its check-in method working) until every event it sold tickets for has happened, while all new on-sales run through Venuera. Zero risk to existing buyers; the only cost is running two plugins for a transition window.

Option B — check in old tickets from the order list. For smaller events, you can validate previously sold tickets manually against the WooCommerce order list at the door (the orders themselves never left your database), while Venuera’s QR scanning handles everything sold after the switch. This lets you deactivate FooEvents sooner at the cost of a slightly slower door for legacy tickets.

Whichever you choose, don’t reissue new tickets to existing buyers unless you must — replacing tickets people already saved to their phones creates far more support email than it prevents.

Step 6: Go live and decommission FooEvents

Once every FooEvents-sold event has passed, export anything you want to keep for your records, deactivate the plugin, and cancel the license renewals you no longer need. From then on your day-to-day lives in Venuera: attendee lists per event, CSV or printable PDF exports of tickets and attendee data, and check-in rules (maximum entries, availability windows, per-period limits) that you can set globally and override per event or per ticket type — handy for multi-day passes and workshop series.

If you’re moving because of cost, the math is worth stating plainly: Venuera’s core plugin is free with no per-ticket fee, and paid add-ons (Ticket Designer, Point of Sale, Venue Designer, Recurring Events, Custom Attendee Fields) are optional — you only buy what your events actually use. FooEvents’ pricing and feature set change over time, so check their current terms when comparing; the structural difference is that with Venuera you can run unlimited events and sell unlimited tickets before spending anything.

Frequently asked questions

Is there an automatic importer from FooEvents to Venuera?

No. Because both plugins are built on WooCommerce, your products, orders and customers don’t need importing — they stay in place. Events, ticket-to-product links, attendee fields and ticket designs are recreated manually in Venuera, which for most sites takes a few hours.

Will tickets I already sold through FooEvents still work?

Yes, as long as you keep FooEvents active until those events have taken place. The recommended approach is to run both plugins in parallel: FooEvents validates tickets it sold, Venuera handles all new on-sales. Alternatively, smaller events can check in legacy tickets against the WooCommerce order list at the door.

Do I need to change my payment setup after migrating?

No. Payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal are configured in WooCommerce itself, not in the ticketing plugin. Venuera sells tickets as standard WooCommerce products, so your existing checkout, coupons and refund workflow continue unchanged.

What does the migration cost?

Venuera’s core plugin is free with no per-ticket fees, so you can complete the entire migration without spending anything. Paid add-ons like Ticket Designer, Point of Sale and Venue Designer are optional and only needed if your events use those features.