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!

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.

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.

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.

It works as you would expect. If you sell one group ticket of 8, then the capacity will be reduced by 8, too.

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. In only but the most extreme cases (very high volume flash sales) the risk of overselling is very low. If this a concern, I recommend to rethink your supply and demand, and to stop doing very-limited, severely discounted early bird sales. These situations create more angry and frustrated customers than happy ones, anyway.

View this article in the Guest Manager Help Docs