Hotplate gives you full control when it comes to setting inventory and order limits.
These features protect you from overselling and ensure things go according to plan when orders open.
Let’s go over how to set inventory and limit how much a customer can order.
Item inventory
When you add an item to your Drop menu, its inventory is set to 10 by default.
To change this, open the item and click the number next to Inventory to edit it.
This number is the maximum quantity available for sale. If no other limits are set, the item will remain available until that quantity sells out.
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Max per order
This limits how many of the item can be added to a single cart. If you have high demand for a special item, you might want to limit each customer to only one.
Max per Pickup Time/Day
This setting lets you limit how many of an item can be ordered for a specific pickup day or time.
This setting is most useful when your drop has multiple pickup dates, times, or locations.
For example, if you sell ice cream and offer pickup on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday — but your freezer can only hold 100 pints per day — you can set the Max per pickup day to 100.
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.
Cheese
Pepperoni
Pesto chicken
Hawaiian
Veggie
Let’s say you can make 10 pies every 15 minutes.
It doesn’t matter which flavors are ordered - 10 pepperoni or 2 of each - you just need to make sure no more than 10 pies total are ordered per 15-minute time slot.
To do this, use a Section Restriction. This allows all pies (cheese, pepperoni, pesto chicken, Hawaiian, veggie, etc.) to pull from one shared inventory.
How to set up a section restriction:
Go to the Menu tab of your drop
Click Add section
Click on the section header (where it says 'New section') to rename it
Next to Section Inventory, click Enable
Using the above example, you'd
Set the section inventory to 100
Set Max per pickup time to 10
Max orders per pickup time
This limits how many orders can be placed per time slot. It does not limit how may items can be ordered. This setting is useful if you need to limit foot traffic or want to space pickups out so that a whole swarm of people doesn't arrive at once.
Go to the Basic Info tab of your drop
Click the gear icon next to "When customers pickup"
Next to Max orders per pickup time, click No limit and type in a number
Click Update
Keep in mind, the number of orders per pickup time doesn't have any affect on the items that can be ordered. If you set this to 1, and had only 1 pickup time, you'd be sold out after 1 order, regardless of how many items were purchased.
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 respect the strictest inventory limit for your item. After that is reached, the item will be marked as “sold out” to customers.
For example, let’s say you’re selling pints of ice cream with pickups on Friday and Saturday. You set the inventory of the Chocolate Ice Cream Pint to 40. But then, you also set the “Max per pickup day” to 10. In that case, once 10 pints have been ordered for each day, the item would appear as sold out, and you would have only sold 20 pints.
My item shows as “sold out” but I still have inventory
Because there are a few places you can set inventory, it's important to check each of the settings above to figure out what the limit is. Our team is happy to help, but go through the list above and make sure they’re all set correctly.