Case study · Event platform for trading card shows
Card Show Network
A show calendar, organizer tools and QR check-in for card shows.
An event platform for trading card shows: a public calendar, organizer accounts, a paid premium tier through Stripe, and table requests with QR check-in at the door.
01 What needed solving
Card shows are usually promoted through scattered social posts and flyers, which makes them hard for collectors to find and hard for organizers to run. Vendor tables get handled over messages, and nobody has a clean list at the door.
Card Show Network wanted one place to publish shows, help collectors find them, and give organizers real tools: accounts, featured placement they can pay for, and table bookings they can check in on show day.
02 What we did
A design that feels like the hobby
The whole site uses a trading-card design language. The homepage opens on a fan of event cards that flip, and featured shows get a holo "rare" treatment.
A public calendar people can actually use
Month and list views, a day drill-down, search that switches to a list as you type, a featured-only filter, and a detail page for every show with photos and what to expect.
Organizer accounts
Organizers sign up, create events, save drafts and manage them from an account dashboard. Uploaded images are compressed and fitted to a 4:3 frame so nothing gets cropped.
A paid premium tier
Premium organizers subscribe for $9.99 a month through Stripe Checkout and get their shows featured in the spotlight.
Table requests and QR check-in
Vendors request a table, organizers approve it, and each booking gets a real QR code. On show day the organizer scans it with their phone camera to check the vendor in.
Spam protection, search and reach
Cloudflare Turnstile on every public form, a sitemap, canonical tags and structured data for search, a post-event survey, and the API moved to cardshownetwork.com’s own domain so school and work networks that filter unknown sites can still sign up.
03 How it works
The frontend is SvelteKit running on Cloudflare Workers, so pages render close to the visitor. WordPress runs headless behind it as the place where events, accounts and table requests are stored.
Payments go through Stripe Checkout, so card details never touch the site. Event pages carry the structured data search engines use, and Google Tag Manager handles analytics.
04 What they got
- One public calendar for card shows
- Self-serve organizer accounts with a paid tier
- Vendor tables booked, approved and checked in by QR
- Spam-protected forms and search-ready event pages