Event capacity

Every event can have an optional total capacity — a hard ceiling on seats sold across all ticket types combined. Once the event is full, every ticket flips to sold out, regardless of the individual stock on each ticket.

You’d use this whenever the real-world cap on attendance isn’t the same as your per-ticket stock. A venue has 200 seats total, but you sell a mix of early-bird, regular, and VIP tickets — you want the combined sales to stop at 200, not 200 of each type.

When to use it

Fixed-seat venues: fire code or physical layout caps you at a specific number
Hotel or package deals: only 30 rooms exist, but you sell different price tiers
Couples, VIPs, guest lists: you want a shared limit but different prices / perks per tier

You don’t need capacity when your per-ticket stock already matches physical reality — for example, a concert where you sell exactly 500 GA tickets and nothing else.

How to set it

In the admin dashboard, open an event and find the Total capacity field (under the minimum-age field in the form). Enter a positive integer, or leave it blank to keep the event uncapped (the default).

You can change the value at any time. Lowering it below the already-consumed seats simply freezes bookings — existing reservations and paid orders stay valid, but new buyers see “sold out” immediately.

What counts as a consumed seat

Usetix counts one seat per order item against the capacity:

Standard tickets: one seat per ticket bought
Group tickets: the full group size counts. A “2 for €50” group ticket counts as 2 seats against capacity, not 1
Paid orders: always count
Reserved orders (someone mid-checkout): count for the duration of the reservation hold
Refunded, cancelled, disputed, expired-reservation orders: free the seats back up automatically

You can see the live count in the event dashboard: “X of Y seats taken”.

What the buyer sees

When the event reaches capacity:

Every ticket on the event page shows as sold out
The event card in the shop grid shows a red Sold out badge in the bottom-right corner
Attempts to add tickets to a cart from a stale page return a friendly error explaining the event is full

Hidden tickets (those gated by an access-code link) also become unavailable — capacity is a hard ceiling that ignores access codes.

Interaction with per-ticket stock

Capacity and per-ticket stock are independent gates — a ticket is sellable only if both say yes:

Event capacity	Ticket stock	Ticket sellable?
Unlimited (blank)	any number	Yes, until ticket stock hits 0
30, with 10 taken	5	Yes, until either ticket stock or 20 more seats sell
30, with 30 taken	999	No — event is full
30, with 10 taken	0	No — this ticket type is out, but others may still sell

This lets you combine them — for example, “30 total seats, of which at most 5 are early-bird priced”.

Edge cases

Capacity below 1: not allowed. Zero or negative values are rejected; blank means unlimited.
Increasing capacity: safe. New seats become available immediately.
Decreasing capacity below current consumed: allowed. No new bookings are accepted, but nothing existing is cancelled. Useful for emergency caps.
Two buyers racing for the last seat: Usetix holds a row lock on the event during reservation, so only one wins — the other gets a sold-out error and nothing is sold that shouldn’t be.