Understanding and managing inventory limits

Hotplate gives you a lot of control when it comes to setting limits on item inventories, or limits on how many of an item can be ordered at a time. You'll notice a few places where you can edit inventory or limits, so let's get into the difference between them:

Item inventory

If you plan to make a set number of a specific item, this is likely the inventory you’ll set. This number refers to the maximum number of that item that can be sold. If you set no other limits or inventory, the item will be marked as available until the number you have in inventory is all sold.

You’ll set an item inventory when you add the item to your Event menu like this:

Max per order

This refers to how many of an item each customer can order. For example, you may have high demand for a special item and want to limit each customer to only one.

Max per Pickup Time/Day

This section allows you to limit the number of an item ordered for a particular pickup time, or a day. This setting is most useful when you offer an Event with multiple pickup dates, times, or locations.

For example, let’s say you sell ice cream and offer pickup Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but your freezer at the pickup location can only fit 15 pints. In that case, you may set this Max per Pickup Day to be 15.

Section Restrictions

Do you want to control inventory across an entire section of your menu?

For example: lets say you sell pizza. You've got 100 balls of dough and 5 pies on the menu, listed as separate items.

You can cook 10 pies every 15 minutes. It doesn't matter how many of each pie you sell -- selling 20 of each or 100 pepperoni works just as well -- you just need to make sure no more than 10 get ordered in each 15 minute time slot.

In order to do this, you can implement a section restriction which tells the cheese, pepperoni, pesto chicken, Hawaiian, and veggie pies to pull from a shared inventory.

You can set this by clicking the name of a section, then click the toggle next to Manage Section Inventory.

How inventories and limits interact

Hotplate is designed to make your life easier and so our system will always try and make sure that you don’t oversell any items. That means that we’ll use whatever the lowest set inventory for an item is. After that is reached, an item will be marked as “sold out” to customers.

For example, let’s say you’re selling pints of ice cream, and you set the inventory of the Chocolate Ice Cream Pint Item to 40. But then, you set the “Max per pickup date” to be 10. In that case, once 10 pints have been ordered for each pick up date, (even if 1 customer ordered all 10 pints), the item would appear as sold out.

My item shows as “sold out”, but I still have inventory

Because there are a few places you can set an inventory, its important that you check each of the settings above to figure out where the issue is. Our team is happy to help, but go through the list above and make sure they’re all set correctly.