How to Switch Your Farm to TicketSpice Without Losing Your Season

The number one reason farms stay on a ticketing platform they don’t like is fear. Not fear of the new system. Fear of the switch itself. What if the customer list doesn’t come over? What if the scanners don’t work on opening day?

Those are fair worries. A farm’s season is short, the margin for error is small, and a botched ticketing weekend is the kind of thing guests remember. We’ve sat at enough farm kitchen tables to know the worry is real.

Yes, you can switch ticketing platforms without losing your season, as long as you respect the calendar. Switch in your off season, at least eight weeks before your first big sales push, and export your customer list before you touch anything else. Done in that order, a migration is a careful project, not a gamble.

This is the playbook we follow when we move a farm to TicketSpice. It works because every step respects the calendar.

When should you switch (and when should you wait)?

The single biggest factor in a smooth migration is timing. The work itself is very doable. Doing it under deadline pressure is what causes mistakes.

We count backward from your first big sales push, not your opening day. Those are different dates. If you run a pre-sale, the pre-sale launch is your real deadline, and everything needs to be built, tested, and live eight weeks before it.

Here’s how the windows break down by farm type:

Farm type	Best switch window	Hard deadline	Do not switch during
Pumpkin patch / fall festival	November to June	8 weeks before opening	August through October
Christmas tree farm	January to August	Early September	October through December
Spring events (tulips, Easter)	May to December	8 weeks before opening	February through April
Year-round venues	Your two slowest months	8 weeks before your next peak	Any peak month

Tree farms need to move earliest. Across the farms we run, Black Friday pre-sales carry 30 to 50% of season revenue for tree farms, which means the real season starts in late November and the ticketing system needs to be settled well before that. If you’re a Christmas tree farm reading this in September and thinking about switching for this season, our honest advice is usually to wait until January and switch with breathing room.

Every year a farm gets frustrated enough with a mid-season platform failure to consider an emergency switch. We understand the temptation. We still talk almost everyone out of it.

Step 1: export your customer list before anything else

Your customer list is the most valuable thing your old platform is holding. Get it out first, before you cancel anything, before you announce anything, before you even build the new pages.

What to export:

• Every order, all years. Not just last season. Name, email, phone number, order date, event, ticket types, and amount paid.
• Waivers, if your platform stored them. Some platforms make these hard to bulk export. Ask support directly and get their answer in writing.
• Discount and season pass holders. If you sold season passes or memberships, you need to know exactly who is still owed access after the switch.

Most platforms have a CSV export buried in their reporting section. If yours doesn’t, email their support and request a full data export. They are generally required to provide your own customer data, even if they drag their feet.

Once you have the file, check it before you trust it. Open it, sort by order date, and confirm the oldest and newest orders are both there. We’ve seen exports quietly cap at 12 months, and a farm that doesn’t catch that loses years of email contacts without ever knowing it.

That list becomes the seed for everything in your new setup, and the numbers explain why we treat it like the crown jewels:

Those open rates only exist because the list came over intact. Protect it first and everything downstream gets easier.

Step 2: rebuild your tickets, bundles, and calendar

This is the part farms expect to be hard, and it’s usually the part they enjoy. Rebuilding from scratch on TicketSpice is a chance to fix everything that annoyed you about the old setup.

Work in this order, because each layer sits on the one before it.

Start with your ticket types, not your dates

List every ticket you sell: general admission, kids, seniors, season pass, group rates, add-ons like wagon rides or pick-your-own bags. Decide now which ones you’re keeping, which ones confused guests last year, and which prices are changing. It’s much easier to simplify before the build than after.

Rebuild bundles deliberately

Bundles are where farms make their money on average order value, so don’t just copy the old structure. If your old platform forced clunky workarounds, like a “family four pack” that was secretly four separate tickets, TicketSpice lets you build it as one clean item. Fewer clicks at checkout means fewer abandoned carts.

Build the calendar last

Time slots, capacities, and blackout dates go in after the ticket types are settled. If your farm runs different schedules for weekdays and weekends, set those as separate slot patterns now rather than editing one-off dates all season. We wrote a full walkthrough in our guide to color coded calendars in TicketSpice, and it’s worth reading before you build, because the structure you choose here is the one your staff lives with all season.

Step 3: hunt down every old ticket link

This step is the one farms skip, and it’s where sales quietly leak away. Your old ticketing links are scattered across the internet in places you’ve forgotten about.

Make a hunting list and work through it in one sitting:

• Your website’s “Buy Tickets” buttons, every page, including old blog posts
• Your Google Business Profile link
• Facebook and Instagram bio links and any pinned posts
• The “Book Now” button on Facebook
• Old email campaigns that still get opened and clicked months later
• QR codes on printed signs, flyers, rack cards, and billboards
• Local event listing sites and tourism directories

For your own website, set proper redirects so any old URL lands on the new ticket page. For everything else, update the link at the source. The QR codes on physical signs are the sneaky one. If reprinting isn’t practical, point new QR codes at a page on your own website rather than directly at a ticketing platform, because then you can change the destination anytime without reprinting.

When you announce the change to your list, keep it short and guest-focused. Here’s a snippet you can steal:

“We’ve moved to a new ticketing system this season to make checkout faster on your phone. Your old account won’t carry over, but nothing you bought is lost. Just use the new Buy Tickets button on our website. Reply to this email if anything looks off and a real person (probably Jenna) will sort it out.”

One more piece: if your old platform hosted a public storefront page, ask whether they can post a notice or forward visitors after you leave. Some will, some won’t. Either way, assume a few guests will land on the old page for months, which is exactly why you switch in the off season.

Step 4: test the scanners like opening day depends on it

Because it does. A checkout page can be fixed remotely in ten minutes. A scanning failure at the gate with two hundred cars in the field is a different kind of morning.

Run this drill with real staff two weeks before opening, then a quick repeat the morning of your first day. It takes about 30 minutes and it’s the cheapest insurance you’ll buy all year.

The point of the drill is not to prove the scanners work. It’s to make the failure cases boring, so that when a phone dies or a ticket scans twice, your gate crew shrugs and handles it instead of waving cars through for free.

1. Test on the actual devices Not your office phone. The phones your gate staff will hold, with the cases they'll have on them.
2. Test in the actual location Cell coverage at the parking gate is not the same as coverage in the farmhouse. Check it where the scanning happens, and know your offline plan if the signal drops.
3. Test in sunlight Screens are harder to scan in direct sun. Your gate crew should know to angle the guest's phone, not squint at it.
4. Test the failure cases Scan the same ticket twice and watch what the duplicate warning looks like. Pull up a ticket by name without scanning. Practice the "my phone died" lookup.
5. Train more people than you need Whoever knows the system best will inevitably be dealing with a parking problem when the scanner question comes up.

What does the first weekend look like?

Print this checklist. Tape it in the office.

• A laminated cheat sheet at the gate: how to scan, how to look up by name, who to call
• One person designated as the ticketing point of contact, phone charged
• Battery packs at every scanning station
• A handwritten backup log in case everything fails: name, party size, ticket type, sorted out Monday
• Someone watching the inbox for guest emails about old platform tickets
• A test purchase made that morning, start to finish, on a phone
• End of day: compare scanned counts to sold counts, and investigate any gap while memories are fresh

The first weekend is also when you start seeing what the new system gives you. Real time sales numbers, clean guest data, and recovery tools you may not have had before. Abandoned cart recovery alone brings back 5 to 10% of would-be lost orders across the farms we run, and it starts working the day you go live.

A platform switch is not risky if you do it at the right time, in the right order.

How we handle switches for the farms we run

When a farm partners with us, the migration is something we do, not something we hand them a checklist for. We run the export, audit the data, rebuild the tickets and calendars, set up the redirects, and stand at the gate with the scanners on the first morning if that’s what it takes. We run the full online side for Maris Farms in Buckley, Washington, and that same hands-on setup is how every one of our farm relationships starts.

The switch is also usually the moment a farm’s whole sales engine gets rebuilt. The email list gets cleaned and re-engaged, the pre-season sales calendar gets planned properly, and the pieces start working together. That combination is a big part of why farms we take on typically see 40 to 50% ticket growth in year one. You can see everything that’s included on our services page.

If you’re weighing a switch and want a second set of eyes on your timing, your current setup, or whether it’s even worth doing this year, get a free farm review. We’ll look at what you have, tell you honestly when we’d make the move, and you’ll leave the call with a plan either way.