I am unable to uncheck Free Orders payment gateway
you tried to disable the Free Orders payment gateway in Tickera → Settings → Payment Gateways, and the checkbox refuses to stay unchecked — every time you save and reload, it’s back on.
Why this happens
Free Orders isn’t a normal payment gateway. It’s the fallback Tickera requires to be active whenever any of the following exists:
- A ticket type with a price of $0 (a free ticket).
- An active 100% discount code that zeroes the order total.
- Any combination of discounts + fees that can produce a zero or negative total at checkout.
Without Free Orders active, a buyer who lands at checkout with a zero total has nowhere to “pay” — no card processor wants a \$0 charge, no PayPal redirect makes sense. Tickera locks Free Orders ON in those scenarios to avoid the checkout hanging.
How to actually disable it
If you genuinely want Free Orders OFF (because you only ever sell paid tickets and you don’t want the zero-order gateway showing up), you need to first remove every reason Tickera is keeping it on:
- Go to Tickera → Ticket Types (or Products if running Bridge for WooCommerce). Confirm no ticket type has a price of \$0. Either bump them above zero, or deactivate them entirely.
- Go to Tickera → Discount Codes. Confirm no active discount code is 100% off. Either reduce to less than 100%, set an expiry in the past, or delete the code.
- Save your changes.
- Go back to Tickera → Settings → Payment Gateways. The Free Orders checkbox should now be un-lockable. Uncheck it and save.
If you can’t find what’s keeping it on
Less common, but: a custom add-on you’ve installed might be programmatically marking some orders as eligible for Free Orders. Try deactivating non-essential plugins one by one and re-checking. The likely candidates: bundle/discount plugins, loyalty plugins, custom checkout-modifier plugins.
Why we recommend just leaving it on
Free Orders being enabled doesn’t hurt anything. It only triggers when an order’s total is genuinely \$0 — which won’t happen on a paid-tickets-only event. For 99% of organizers, the right answer is “leave it on, ignore it.”
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