Let’s say your venue holds 100 people, and you want to sell multiple price levels of a ticket type, such as Child, Adult, Senior, etc, and total sales not to exceed 100 total. Event capacity is the solution for you!
How to enable
When creating a new event, or editing an existing event in the app, look to the Tickets section and enable the Set total capacity setting.
Save the event and you are done! Easy peasy.
In Shopify, you will see more total inventory than the capacity (e.g. double if you have two ticket types, triple for three, etc). This is because each ticket in the event needs its inventory set to the total capacity of the event. When one ticket is sold, all other tickets in the event have their inventory automatically reduced by 1. This ensures the total sold cannot exceed the capacity.
FAQ
What about multi-day events?
The capacity you set is set for each of the dates in the multi-day event. This means if you set capacity to 100 and have 5 dates, you are selling 500 total tickets (100 per date).
Do not create separate Tickets to represent a date or arrival time. Always create a Date for the timeslot. Otherwise, Capacity will not work correctly.
How does it work with Shopify?
As you may know, Shopify only supports setting inventory per variant. With a little workaround, we’re able to accomplish a “shared inventory pool” across many variants.
- The initial inventory of each variants within the event is set to the capacity you specified
- When you sell any one of these variants, the inventory of the other variants is decremented by the same amount. For example if you sell 5 Child Tickets, the available Adult tickets will be reduced by 5, as well.
What about the ‘group size’ option on tickets?
It works as you would expect. If you sell one group ticket of 8, then the capacity will be reduced by 8, too.
Gotcha’s
Overselling
There is a small chance of overselling. The inventory of the other variants in the event will be reduced within a couple seconds of an order being placed.
It’s possible to add more than the capacity to a single cart. If capacity is 20, and you have an Adult and Child Ticket, it would be possible for a single customer to add 20 Adults and 20 Childs to the cart. You can combat this a little bit by setting purchase limits, using either the event calendar or product ticketing widget.
Adding more to cart than allowed
Because Shopify does not support the concept of “shared inventory between variants”, then a customer could add
