How to Collect Custom Attendee Information at WooCommerce Checkout

You sold forty tickets to your workshop. Now you need everyone’s T-shirt size, and half the buyers bought tickets for friends whose names you don’t even have. So you send a follow-up email, a third of people never reply, and you spend the week before the event chasing answers in three different inboxes. Sound familiar?

The fix is simple: ask at checkout, while the buyer is already filling in a form and motivated to finish. This guide shows how to collect custom attendee information — dietary requirements, shirt sizes, membership numbers, accessibility needs — directly at WooCommerce checkout with Venuera, one answer per ticket holder, saved where you can actually use it.

Per order vs. per ticket: why the difference matters

WooCommerce checkout collects billing details: one name, one email, one address for the whole order. That’s fine for selling socks, but events have a wrinkle — one buyer often purchases several tickets. If Maria buys four tickets to your gala, WooCommerce knows about Maria and nobody else. You don’t know who the other three guests are, what they can eat, or how to contact them if the venue changes.

Per-ticket collection solves this. Each ticket gets its own block of questions at checkout, so every guest answers for themselves — even when a single buyer pays for the whole group. When Maria buys four tickets, checkout shows four “Attendee Information” sections, labelled #1 through #4, and each answer set is saved to its own ticket.

What the free Venuera core collects out of the box

The free Venuera plugin includes standard per-ticket fields with no add-on required: attendee name, attendee email, and attendee phone. Name and email are enabled by default; phone is off by default and can be switched on when you need it — for example for SMS reminders.

You control these in two layers. A global toggle in Venuera’s settings sets the default for your whole shop, and each ticket product can override it: inherit the global setting, force a field on, or force it off. So your free community meetup can skip attendee emails entirely while your conference tickets require them. One thing to know: when a standard field is enabled for a product, it’s always required — a half-filled attendee record isn’t much use at the door.

Per-ticket attendee emails are worth enabling for almost any event. They let you send tickets to the person actually attending (not just the buyer) and they feed your marketing list with real attendees — see our guide on building an event email list that sells tickets.

Adding your own custom questions

Name and email cover the basics, but a cooking class needs dietary restrictions, a 5K needs shirt sizes, and a members-only screening needs membership numbers. That’s what the Custom Attendee Fields add-on is for: a field builder on each ticket product where you define extra per-ticket questions.

The nine field types

The builder offers nine field types: text input, email, phone number, number, text area, dropdown, checkbox (multiple choice), radio buttons (single choice), and date. Between them they cover nearly any question an organizer needs to ask. A few pairings that work well in practice: a dropdown for T-shirt size (S/M/L/XL keeps your export clean — free-text sizes are a merch nightmare), radio buttons for meal choice where exactly one answer is needed, checkboxes for dietary restrictions where several can apply at once, a text input for membership or license numbers, and a text area for accessibility needs where people should describe things in their own words.

Setting it up

The workflow takes a few minutes per event. First, edit the ticket product in WordPress. Second, open the attendee field builder and add your questions — choose the type, write the label, add options for choice fields, and mark each field required or optional. Third, save and place a test order.

Fields are defined per product, so every ticket type can ask different questions — including variable products. Your VIP dinner ticket can ask for a meal choice while the standard entry ticket asks nothing extra. Because the add-on feeds its fields into the same checkout engine that handles the standard name and email fields, everything is rendered, validated and saved consistently, on both the classic WooCommerce checkout and the newer block-based checkout that WooCommerce ships as its default.

Where the answers end up

Collecting data is pointless if it’s buried. Answers are saved onto the order itself, so they appear on the customer’s order confirmation, in the order emails, and on the order screen in your WordPress admin — no separate database to check.

From there, the answers flow to the places you’ll actually need them. The attendee export adds a column for each custom field, so the caterer gets a spreadsheet with meal choices and the merch table gets shirt sizes, no manual matching required. If you sell at the door with the Venuera Point of Sale, the receipt designer includes a toggle to print collected attendee answers on the receipt. And with the Ticket Designer add-on, you can place a custom attendee field element directly on the ticket PDF itself — useful for printing a meal choice or seat preference right on the ticket a guest presents at the door. For the door workflow itself, see our guide to checking guests in at the door.

Ask less, convert more: field design tips

Every extra checkout field costs you a little conversion, so ask only what you’ll act on. If nobody is cooking, don’t ask about dietary needs. A good test: for each field, name the person who will use the answer and when. No answer, no field.

Prefer structured fields over free text wherever possible. Dropdowns and radio buttons produce clean, sortable export columns; free-text answers produce “L”, “large”, “Large-ish?” and a headache. Save the text area for genuinely open questions like accessibility needs.

Mark fields required only when a missing answer would break something. A missing meal choice breaks the seating plan — require it. A missing “how did you hear about us?” breaks nothing — keep it optional. And keep the total short: for a multi-ticket order, remember every question is answered once per ticket. Five questions on a four-ticket order is twenty answers before payment.

Attendee data and privacy

Attendee answers are personal data, so collect them with the same care as any customer information. Only ask for what you need for the event, tell attendees why you’re asking, and delete the data when it has served its purpose. Fields like dietary or accessibility information can reveal health details, which are treated as a special category under the GDPR — a good reason to keep such questions optional and open-ended. Because Venuera stores everything in your own WordPress database rather than on a third-party ticketing platform, you stay in control of the data and there’s one less processor in your privacy policy. Our guide to GDPR for event organizers covers this in depth.

Getting started

Per-ticket name and email collection is built into the free Venuera core — install it, enable the fields, and you already know who’s coming. When you need more than that, the Custom Attendee Fields add-on adds the field builder, export columns and POS receipt support. Browse the full add-on lineup to see what else pairs well with it.

Frequently asked questions

Can I collect different information for each ticket type?

Yes. Custom attendee fields are defined per ticket product, so every ticket type — including variable products — can have its own set of questions. A VIP ticket can ask for a meal choice while a standard ticket asks nothing extra.

What happens when one person buys several tickets?

Checkout shows a separate attendee section for each ticket, numbered #1, #2 and so on. Each ticket holder’s answers are collected and saved individually, so a single buyer can enter details for their whole group.

Do I need a paid add-on to collect attendee names and emails?

No. Per-ticket name, email and phone collection is built into the free Venuera core plugin. The Custom Attendee Fields add-on is only needed for additional custom questions such as T-shirt sizes, dietary requirements or membership numbers.

Where can I see and export the answers?

Answers are saved to the WooCommerce order and appear on the order confirmation, order emails and the admin order screen. Each custom field is also added as a column in Venuera’s attendee export, and answers can be printed on Point of Sale receipts.