Whether it’s tastings, pickup/release parties, vineyard tours, or any other special event at wineries – these are all a critical component of the winery experience and a great source of revenue. Yet, the tools available to them for managing these events are limited by features with a subpar user experience often redirecting to a new URL and managing off your platform.
“Appointment slots at many wineries are usually very limited. Often you want to book them at least a month in advance. This typically requires a back and forth email exchange or (gasp) phone call with whatever wineries you want to visit,” says Amber from SpitBucket.
Managing tickets via email or phone isn’t a scalable or profitable option—this is why wineries need to implement technology to allow seamless bookings.
There are a couple of good technology options—Tock and Evey. In this article, we hope to elaborate on both tools, the key differences, and why you should choose one over the other.
Overview
Tock is a product from Squarespace (yes, that website builder). It’s a tool that’s used mainly by restaurants to manage seat bookings among other things. They recently started onboarding wineries.
Evey, on the other hand, is a ticketing system app on Shopify that lets you sell tickets to tours and events for your winery. It’s pretty much the most seamless platform that not only lets you manage reservations, tastings, release parties, tours and other special events, but also sells merchandise since your site is already hosted on Shopify, the #1 ecommerce platform.
Evey vs Tock: Top Differences
Two platforms always differ and there are a handful of features that separate Evey and Tock but we’re talking about the important ones—the ones that are truly crucial to the success of your winery.
Integrations
Shopify Platform
As Evey is built on Shopify, it seamlessly integrates with it, allowing wine merchants to use one platform to manage both its online and physical stores and customers. This also allows you to sell merchandise (like t-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, etc.) to your customers, thus adding another revenue channel. Shopify has six thousand apps—email marketing and abandoned cart captures (Klaviyo, Mailchimp), text message marketing (PostScript, Attentive), upsell opportunities (to sell other events, products, or services), dropshipping, loyalty apps, review gathering services—you name it, Shopify’s got it.
Tock is simply a restaurant management software that can be used for ticketing. You can’t sell merch and you can’t use your favorite tools to market your business.
POS integration
You will be able to easily pull up reservations directly in Shopify POS. You can also sell tickets from POS, as easily as you can sell any other product. Simply find the event, add it to the cart and add customer information via the “Evey Events & Tickets” tile on the POS.
Check-in app for faster event management
To check people in using Tock, someone must have a computer open to the Tock admin. Although it is possible to do so on mobile, the user experience on mobile is not optimized. If you have a large event, each attendant checking in guests must have a laptop to access the Tock admin.
Events on Evey are easily managed via the Shopify admin, and Shopify POS, and there is even an additional app to assist with check-in that’s available on iOS or Android, to allow anyone on your team to quickly validate attendee tickets and let them attend the event.
To log in to the check-in app, you can use a check-in account that you set up inside the Evey app on Shopify. This is an excellent app if you want to have a lot of staff able to check people in, but don’t want to give everyone an account in the Shopify admin. Learn more about using the check-in app here.
Intuitive backend management
Intuitive admin user interface
The Evey Events app looks, feels, and operates just like the rest of Shopify. You can easily create, customize and update events directly from the Shopify dashboard.
Easy ticket inventory management
Whenever you sell a slot or ticket (online or in-store), Evey will update the inventory automatically, saving you hours of manual work.
Custom table management and assigned seating
Tock doesn’t allow you to sell tickets for specific tables or assign seats.
On the flip side, Evey can help you customize selling event tickets—separate tickets for specific tasting room areas/zones, specific tables, and assigning particular seats.
All sales go through Shopify
This means you don’t need to set up different payment accounts or struggle with bookkeeping for yet another platform. All sales, inventory, and customer reports are available through Shopify. Once your plugin to Evey, Shopify takes care of the rest, unlike Tock where you need to integrate payment methods and manage separate dashboards.
Seamless customer experience
Customization
Tock only allows merchants to customize the text on an event, not even the fonts or colors of the button.
Evey allows for nearly any customization of the event page (add images, videos, reviews, brand colors, pop-ups, and more), the email order confirmation (add in specific instructions for the event), and the PDF ticket. Learn more.
Fewer clicks on one site
Tock requires users to transact on another site, with a non-branded URL (e.g., https://www.exploretock.com/closduval).
Since Evey runs on your Shopify website, all transactions take place on your branded URL, with no new windows open, thus increasing conversion and trust in the transaction.
Improved understanding of the customer
Tock requires merchants to manage their customers for events separate from managing customers to their online store. This poses an inconvenience every time you need to see the purchase history of a customer.
Evey allows merchants to have one customer profile, ensuring that a customer’s online and in-store purchase history is synced, enabling staff to serve personalized recommendations. In-store sales reps can easily pull up a customer’s profile to see how much they’ve spent (both in-store and online), and make customized recommendations to the customer.
Pricing
From the following examples, you’ll find that Evey is cheaper than Tock.
Pricing comparison 1
Price comparison 2
Ready to scale your winery business?
While both tools have pros and cons, we’d recommend Evey. We’re slightly biased, yet we believe all businesses, including wine and spirits businesses are steadily moving away from platforms that don’t offer everything under one platform. Since Evey runs on Shopify, you get the best of both worlds—events booking and commerce. But enough words—try Evey for yourself and see the difference.
