The SeatLayer plugin puts a real seating chart on a page or post. Visitors see live availability, pick the seats they want, and pay — with the money going straight into your own Stripe or Razorpay account.
Friday · 7:30 PM · The Lantern Theatre
You can already paste a SeatLayer embed into a Custom HTML block, and it will work. The plugin exists because three things are awkward that way, and each of them is a way to leak a credential or lose a buyer.
Listing your events needs a key that can also create and modify them. The plugin makes that call from WordPress itself, through an admin-only route, so the key is never written into a page a visitor can read.
server-side · never in the browser
Whoever writes the page chooses the event by name in the block sidebar. No copying identifiers between two browser tabs, and no silently-wrong chart because a character was dropped.
[seatlayer_chart event="…"]
With in-page checkout on, a card payment that leaves for the gateway returns to the exact page holding the chart, read in the browser at load so a cached page cannot send a buyer to the wrong address.
declare the site in embed domains
What it is not: the plugin is a safe, no-code wrapper around the buyer-facing chart — not a second copy of SeatLayer. Designing venues, creating events, connecting gateways, refunds, and check-in all live in your SeatLayer dashboard, and the plugin deliberately does not try to reproduce them inside wp-admin.
The chart needs an event key and nothing else. The optional secret key only buys you the dropdown, so a site that would rather not store one simply does not.
Design the chart in your SeatLayer dashboard — rows, tables, booths, general-admission areas, multiple floors — then create the event that sells against it. One chart can carry every later performance.
Connect your own gateway under Payments and assign it to the event. Buyers pay you; SeatLayer never sits in the middle of the money.
Activate it, then optionally paste a secret key under Settings → SeatLayer. Leave it blank and everything still works — you type event keys by hand instead of choosing them from a list.
Search for SeatLayer seating chart in the block inserter and pick your event. On a classic-editor site, the shortcode does the same job and renders through exactly the same code.
[seatlayer_chart event="your-event" height="640"]By default the buyer is handed to SeatLayer's page to pay. Switch Checkout to keep them on your site, and add your site under embed domains so the card return lands back on your page. Preview it, buy a test seat, then go on sale.
SeatLayer is not a payment processor and never holds your money. It is the seating and ticketing layer beneath a sale that stays yours end to end.
The current standard rule uses one credit when a seat is first confirmed sold. Payment-provider fees, taxes, enterprise terms and entitlements can still apply.
It does not work standalone, so installing it means your pages and your visitors talk to SeatLayer. The same disclosure ships inside the plugin's own readme, and it is the whole list.
On a page that contains a chart — and only on such a page — the browser loads the chart renderer and asks SeatLayer for the seating layout and live availability. Selecting seats places a hold; buying starts a payment.
Only if you saved a secret key, and only inside the block editor: your server asks SeatLayer for your event list to fill the dropdown. That request carries the key and no visitor data, and the response is projected down to the four fields the dropdown shows.
Deleting the plugin removes its settings, including any saved key. Deactivating deliberately leaves everything alone.
If your site needs to run its own checkout, react to seat selection in code, or sell through an existing cart, the plugin is the wrong tool and the SDK is the right one.
Look at the SDK path →No. The chart renders from the event key alone, which is not a secret. Saving a secret key only makes the editor nicer, by listing your events in a dropdown instead of you pasting keys by hand.
Into your WordPress database, like any other plugin setting, and it is used only in server-side requests. It is never sent to a browser. Anyone with administrator or database access to the site can read it, so if that is not acceptable, leave it blank and type event keys by hand.
To the Stripe or Razorpay account you connected. SeatLayer is not a payment processor and never holds the money. Refunds happen in your own payment dashboard, and SeatLayer releases the seats back on sale when it sees one.
Not today. Buyers pay through SeatLayer checkout using your own connected gateway. A WooCommerce integration, with seats as cart line items paid through your existing Woo gateway, is a separate piece of work.
The chart's code is enqueued only on pages that actually contain a chart, so pages without one load nothing extra.
No. A seat is held on SeatLayer's servers the moment a buyer selects it, and only one hold can exist per seat. If they do not pay in time the hold expires and the seat returns to sale.
Design the venue, create an event, connect your gateway, and drop the block on the page you already send people to.