Calendar Spotlight: Yoga Calendar and Commerce Working in Harmony

You might not think yoga and retailing have much in common, but Kia Miller’s yoga website is the perfect intersection of calendars and commerce. Her site promotes her appearances at events, retreats and festivals all while using The Events Calendar as the showcase.

But it’s not so much the focus on events that makes her site interesting. Instead, it’s the way she blends the calendar with WooCommerce to create a seamless calendar-to-cart experience.

Let’s dig into that a bit.

Using the calendar as a catalog

The first thing to notice about Kia’s calendar is that Photo View is the default layout. While other layouts are available, using Photo View up front makes a compelling visual experience. It’s the same way you might think of flipping through a catalog of products.

The landing page of the calendar, showing upcoming events in a masonry-type layout where each event is a card with an image and summary of the event.

Strong visuals are consistent throughout Kia’s site which makes Photo View the perfect fit for her calendar. Notice, too, how the style and size of the images are similar throughout. This adds a sense of balance and harmony — pretty on point for a yoga schedule!

Kia uses WooCommerce for ticket purchases and it includes a “catalog” feature that could display her events as products. But using a calendar format allows her to showcase events in chronological order in a way that is difficult for a standard catalog to do.

Linking directly to products

One super interesting thing about Kia’s calendar is that some of the events link to WooCommerce pages instead of event posts. In other words, Kia displays event posts on her calendar, but some have modified links that redirect users to a purchasing page instead.

Here are a few of her upcoming events.

A row of three event cards on Kia's calendar.

The second event links directly to an event post. That’s what we would normally expect when clicking on an event in a calendar. The third event, however, links to a different page altogether.

What’s the deal? It’s likely that there are some instances where it makes more sense to treat an event like a product than, well, an event. Using a product might allow her more flexibility to create different registration packages, suggest add-ons, and even cross-sell other products. That makes a lot of sense, even though The Events Calendar offers a ton of features that make formatting event posts super flexible.

Interesting in doing something similar? You can use a plugin like Redirection to redirect users from one URL to another without touching code.

Feng shui your way to an organized calendar

One other noteworthy thing about Kia’s calendar is the way she uses shortcodes to punctuate certain types of yoga activities.

Take her Retreats landing page as an example. It’s a typical WordPress page outlining what to expect on a yoga retreat, but she uses the Event List Widget to enhance it with a list of upcoming retreats. That widget allows her to embed a list of upcoming events that are specifically categorized as retreats rather than a list of all events.

Check out The Events Calendar PRO and Event Tickets Plus if setting up a site like this sounds like it’s up your alley.