📊 What is Capacity?

The capacity setting for a product limits how many bookings can be made at a given date and/or time.

When the number of bookings for a product reaches its capacity, the date and/or time slot becomes unavailable. Customers will see it greyed out, indicating they cannot select it.

Examples of Capacity by Booking Type

• Classes: The number of students that can be enrolled in the class. 🎓

• Product rentals: The number of physical items available across different options. 📦

• Appointments (e.g., salons): The number of staff or technicians available. 💇‍♀️💅

🆚 How is Capacity Different from Inventory?

Shopify’s inventory does not account for the time or duration of a booking. This is why inventory tracking should be set to “Do Not Track” on each product page when using the app.

Example:

• Product capacity: 1

• Available date: January 1st

• Customer books it for 1 day

If using Shopify inventory:

• Inventory count decreases by 1 → becomes 0

• Product appears unavailable in the storefront

• Other dates cannot be booked, even if technically available

By using capacity, customers can still select other dates that have availability. ✅

🏷️ Capacity Types

BookThatApp allows you to configure capacity based on:

1. Product

2. Variant

3. Resources

Product-Based Capacity

When capacity is based on the product, all bookings for that product—regardless of the variant—count toward capacity.

Example: Appointments

• Product: Barber appointments

• Capacity: 4

If there are already 4 bookings for a Hair Cut at 10:00 AM, no more bookings can be made at that time.

• If capacity was set to 5 → 1 additional booking would be possible at 10:00 AM. 💈

Variant Based Capacity

Variant Based capacity which counts bookings at the variant level when determining if it is available.

Example: Dress Rental

If we are renting dresses that come in three sizes you can set the capacity to how many dresses you have in stock.

When the size 12 dress is booked, no one else can choose those dates since there is only 1 dress in size 12, however, the size 10 and 14 variants will still show as available.

Please note that the variant option(s) used for capacity in BTA must be ordered first in Shopify.

 

🛠️ Resource-Based Capacity

Resource-based capacity lets you limit bookings across products that share the same resources.
Examples of resources include:

• Staff with specialized skills (e.g., instructors) 👩‍🏫

• Rooms 🏢

• Equipment 🏄

Example: Paddle Board Resources

Imagine you offer:

• Hourly paddle board rentals

• Daily 10 AM classes

The same boards are used for rentals and classes, so you need to ensure there are enough boards for class students while still allowing rentals.

Setup:

1. Create the Paddle Board resource in BookThatApp using the “Equipment” type.

   • Enter how many physical units are available (for this example: 10 boards).

2. Set up 2 products:

   • One for classes

   • One for hourly rentals

   • Configure resource-based capacity for both and assign the Paddle Board resource.

How it works:

• If a class has 5 students signed up at 10:00 AM, the hourly rental product will allow renting up to 5 boards.

• If the customer chooses 11:00 AM, all 10 boards are available.

For more examples, see the Resources article. 🔗

📅 Scheduled Products and Capacity

Scheduled products include classes, courses, activities, and tours where you create the schedule directly on the product page.

• Capacity is applied per scheduled event.

• Overlapping events each have independent capacity.

Location-Specific Schedules

• If a product has multiple locations and location-specific schedules, each location has its own independent capacity.

• Example: A business offers classes at the same time at multiple locations. Each location has its own capacity, even if start and end times are the same.

Limitation:

• Locations share the same capacity value.

• To set unique capacities per location, see Example 4 in the Resources article. 🔗