Limit the Quantity of Products Purchased
You may want to limit the quantity of an item that shoppers can purchase at a time to prevent your store from running out of the product quickly. Fortunately, this is very easy to do!
To start, go to the product's Advanced Tab and look under "Price and Quantity Options." You will see three settings:
Min. Qty.:
Max. Qty.:
And Qty Options:
Min. Qty
This setting allows you to specify the minimum quantity that the shopper can place into the cart at one time. Perhaps the product is something that needs to be sold in quantities of two or more or as a set. For example, the product may be a 2-week supply of a dietary supplement, but it is sold in packs of two or more to provide at least a month's supply.
By specifying the minimum number in the Min Qty field, the store will always add this number to the cart when anything lower than this number is added. In other words, if the Min Qty is set for two, and the shopper tries to add 1 to the cart; the store will automatically update this to 2 units.
Allow only multiples
Next to the Min Qty field there is a checkbox labeled "Allow only multiples," which lets you further control the number of units that are added to cart. This setting will make it so that any additional quantity added to the cart will be multiples of the Min Qty number. In other words, if the Min Qty is 2, and the shopper tries to add 3 to their cart, the store will automatically update this to 4. If they try to add 5, the store updates the cart to 6, and so on.
Max Qty
This field allows you to set the maximum quantity that the shopper is allowed to add to the cart. Perhaps the product is a hot selling item and you want to limit the purchasing to 2 units per customer to preserve your inventory. If so, then you would place a 2 in the field and the shopper will be capped at that limit. If they wanted to purchase more, they would have to place multiple orders separately.
Allow fractional qty
Next to the Max Qty field, there is a checkbox labeled "Allow fractional qty," which allows you to sell fractional quantities of the item (up to the Max Qty). This is useful for products where the price is based on a unit of measurement, but the item can be sold in fractions of that unit. For example, fabric that is priced at $12 a yard, but can be sold in fractional quantities - up to and including a yard such as 0.5 yards. More information on Fractional Quantities can be found here.
Qty Options
Rather than having an open text field where your shopper can input the quantities they add to the cart, perhaps you'd like to directly control the available quantities that the shopper selects. For example, let's say your item is sold in packs of 5, 10, 15 or 20. Type in 5,10,15,20 in the "Qty Options" field (commas, no spaces) and the store will update the product with a drop-down Qty Selector instead of the open field.