What is Capacity?

The capacity setting for a product is used to limit how many bookings can be made at any one time. 

When the number of bookings for a product reaches its capacity for a particular date and/or time, it is no longer available to be booked at the same time. Customers will see the date and/or time slot greyed out to let them know they are unable to select it.

Examples of how capacity is used for different booking types:

• For classes, it represents the number of students that can be enrolled in the class.
• For product rentals, it would be how many physical items in different options you have.
• For appointments in a salon, it could be how many nail technicians are available

How is Capacity different from Inventory?

The inventory kept in Shopify does not take into account the time or duration of a booking (this is why a key requirement of using the app is to set the inventory tracking setting on each of the product pages as Do Not Track. 

For example, imagine you have a product with a capacity of 1 and it is currently available on January 1st and then someone books it for 1 day. If you were using the inventory setting in Shopify, the inventory count would be reduced by 1 when the order was received. Since it would now be zero it is no longer available in the storefront and regardless of what date other customers would like to book it is not possible. By using capacity, the customer is still able to choose other dates that have not been booked yet.

 

Capacity Types

BookThatApp allows you to configure capacity based on product, variant, or resources.

 

Product Based Capacity

When capacity is based on Product, all bookings for that product (regardless of the variant) count towards capacity.

Example: Appointments

For example, in the screenshot below, we are booking Barber appointments and the capacity has been set to 4. When there are already four bookings for a Hair Cut at 10:00 AM then it is no longer possible to take another booking at that time because there is no more capacity available. If capacity was set to 5, then the barber would be able to take 1 more booking 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 allows you to limit the number of bookings based on bookings across products that share the same resources. Examples of resources would include staff with specialized skills (ie. an instructor), rooms, or equipment.

 

Example: Paddle Board Resources

In this example, imagine you offer stand-up paddle board rentals by the hour and also run classes at 10 am daily. The same boards are used for rentals and classes so we need a way to ensure there are enough boards available for the class students while still allowing customers to book any boards not being used.

To start you need to create the Paddle Board resource in BookThatApp using the 'Equipment' type. For equipment resources, you enter how many physical units (inventory) you have available. For the purposes of this example assume there are 10 boards.

Now set up the 2 products to represent the classes and hourly rentals. Each product should be configured to use resource based capacity and in the resources section assign the Paddle Board resource.

The setup is now complete. If you go to the hourly board rental product page and choose 10:00 AM, the maximum quantity that can be entered will take into account how many people have signed up for the class that day. So if the class has 5 students signed up it will only allow you to rent 5 boards. However, if the customer changes the time to 11 AM it would allow you to enter a quantity of 10.

 

For additional examples please visit: Resources

 

Scheduled Products and Capacity

Scheduled products are products where you are creating the schedule on the actual product page such as classes, courses, activities, and tours. With scheduled products capacity is applied to each scheduled event. This means that if an event overlaps with another event they will both have an independent capacity. 

If you have added locations to the product, and have created location-specific schedules within the product each location will effectively have an independent capacity. A real-world scenario of this is a business that has several physical locations and offers classes at the same time at each of the locations. Even though the start and end times are the same for each location they will each have an independent capacity. 

The only limitation with the above is that while the locations have independent capacities they do not have unique values for capacity. For details on how to have unique capacity values based on location, you will want to see example 4 of the Resources article.