The Hosted Buyer feature helps event organizers schedule structured 1:1 meetings between two groups—like companies and potential clients, meetings for attendees with the similar interests, or meetings between companies.

Instead of managing spreadsheets and email threads, participants simply select and rank who they want to meet. Once the selection period closes, admins can start scheduling meetings based on those preferences.

What's good about the meeting feature is it also detects conflicts, ensuring there are no double bookings or overlapping meetings.

When the event and selection period opens, the participant can log in to the virtual event hub and access the Hosted Buyer tab to see the targets that may be a good match for them based on the provided criteria. Then, they can select a priority for each target, whether they are someone they must meet, nice to meet or to exclude them. When the selection period is over, event admins can review the participant's selection and set up meetings based on the selected priority. Both parties will be notified when the meeting is confirmed.

Before you begin make sure you've already done the following:

If in your event, exhibitors are participants selecting targets they want to meet with, you'll need to assign a Contact Expo User per booth. This exhibitor is the only booth representative that can select targets. The other booth team members can only view the target details.

Groups are used to organize participants into categories—such as Attendees and Exhibitors, Buyers and Sellers, Sponsors and Investors, or Startups and Mentors.

Creating groups is important because Hosted Buyer matching happens between groups. This ensures participants only request and schedule meetings with the correct audience (for example, Buyers meet Sellers, not other Buyers).

However, meetings don’t always have to be between different groups. You can also allow participants within the same group to meet each other—like founders networking with other founders, or investors connecting with investors who share similar interests.

This page is where your participants can select targets they want to meet with.

In the next step, you'll see filter options you can add to the page. If attendees are targets, their profiles are to be displayed on the page. The filter options you'll see are active dropdown ticket holder fields. If exhibitors are targets, their booth information are to be displayed on the page, the filter options are active dropdown custom properties.

In the profile card, you can choose which information to display. The options available for attendees are the active ticket holder fields. The options available for exhibitors are the active custom properties.

Set the meeting duration in minutes and the meeting location.

Define when selection period will be open, how many meetings can be generated per participant and how many targets can be selected during the selection period.

Review your page and can click the edit button to update the information or setting. If everything looks good, you can Confirm & Publish the page to make it appear in the virtual event hub. If you don't want the page to show yet, you can save it as draft.

The Hosted Buyer tab will appear below the lobby and can be accessed before the event (pre-event access date). The page will only be visible for the participants, not targets.

If the participant is an exhibitor, they can also see the Hosted Buyer tab in the exhibitor portal.

If the event is in-person, attendees won't have access to virtual event hub. In this case, only exhibitors can be participants, and attendees will always be targets.

Inside the selections page, the profile cards of the filtered target group will be shown. On top is a search option and the available filters. If limits are set, a counter will also show on the top menu.

On each card, there's a dropdown to select the priority, whether the target is someone they must meet, nice to meet or exclude them. Priorities can still be changed even after selecting.

If the limit on selection is reached, the buttons on the other profiles will be grayed out.

While the selection is ongoing, event admins can view who participants selected as targets.

The first tab with the participant's name, will show all their target choices by category (Must Meet, Nice to Meet, Exclude). If both participants selected each other as must meet or nice to meet (this is possible if the participants are also targets), they will appear in the Mutual tab.

The Other's selection tab will show other participants who rated this participant, making this participant a target. In this example, Anne is the target of 2 participants.

When the selection period is over, event admins can start scheduling meetings through the calendar icon. Add all the meeting information and click Schedule. It should show in the meeting tab. The meeting can still be updated or delete after confirming.

After scheduling the meeting as confirmed, both participants will be notified through email.

In the virtual event hub, they can see their scheduled meetings through the calendar icon.

If the event is in-person, attendees can see their scheduled meetings in the My Meetings button in the attendee app.