How to cap tickets and stop overselling a class on Squarespace
By Kelsey Gilbert-Kreiling | Co-founder, Eventually
The short answer: To cap tickets on Squarespace, set a stock level on your service product that matches the seats you actually have. The catch is that stock is tracked per variant, so a class with several ticket prices needs a deliberate split, or one shared capacity that every ticket type counts against.
How a class ends up oversold
Overselling rarely comes from carelessness. It usually comes from settings that made sense for products and don't quite fit a room with 20 chairs:
Separate stock for every price. Set early bird, regular, and member tickets to 20 each so any mix can sell, and you've listed 60 seats for a 20-seat room.
Seats sold somewhere else. A friend pays by Venmo, a regular books by text, a partner gets two comps. None of them reduce your online stock.
Copied dates. Duplicate last month's class and the stock settings come along, whether they still apply or not.
Two people, one last seat. Two guests start checkout for the final spot at the same time.
Squarespace addresses that last one with a reserved cart option, which holds items in a customer's cart for 5 to 20 minutes, according to Squarespace's inventory guide. The other three are setup problems, and they're fixable.
How to cap tickets on Squarespace
1. Count your real capacity
Start with the room, then subtract. Chairs, wheels, mats, or place settings. Seats for assistants. Comps you always give. The number you sell is what's left.
2. For one ticket price, set stock on the variant
If everyone pays the same price, one variant with a stock level equal to your capacity does the job. When it reaches zero, the product shows as sold out.
3. For several prices, split capacity on purpose
If you offer a regular price, a sliding scale, and a member rate, decide the split up front, such as 12 regular, 6 sliding scale, and 2 member. It won't flex if one tier is more popular than you expected, but it won't oversell.
4. Subtract offline sales the same day
Every seat sold by text, cash, or trade gets taken out of online stock right away. Make it a habit before you reply "you're in."
5. Set a per-order limit
A cap on how many tickets fit in one order keeps a single buyer from taking the whole room by accident, and gives more people a chance at a popular class.
6. Decide what sold out leads to
A full class should point somewhere: a waitlist, the next date, or both.
Where the workaround runs out
Fixed splits work until your tiers sell unevenly and you're manually moving stock between variants. If you need one pool of seats shared by every price, or you run the same class every week, you'll spend more time managing inventory than the class deserves.
Squarespace developer Katy Carlisle summed up years of this: she's "used far too many hacky workarounds to sell events via Squarespace."
How Eventually handles capacity
Eventually is event ticketing for calendar-centric businesses, built as a Squarespace-first extension. Events sync to Squarespace Commerce as service products and tickets sell as variants, with checkout through your Squarespace Payments or Stripe account.
Capacity works in three layers: total event capacity, a limit for each ticket type, and a per-order limit. They work together. If total capacity is 100 and three ticket types are each limited to 50, the event sells out at 100 total guests. That's how a sliding scale and a regular price share one room. See Set event capacity and ticket limits
When seat holds are on, an incomplete checkout holds a seat for a period your team sets, from 5 to 60 minutes. And if a paid order ever lands over capacity, Eventually flags it so you can move a guest to a different ticket type or class, or raise capacity. Details in How capacity and "sold out" work and When a paid Squarespace order exceeds capacity.
What to do right now
If you sell one price per class: Check that every variant's stock matches your real capacity, including copied dates.
If you sell several prices: Add up the stock across variants. If the total is bigger than the room, fix the split today.
If you take bookings by text or cash: Write down a rule for updating online stock and follow it every time.
If you've already oversold: Contact the extra guests first, offer the next date, and give them first pick of it.
The bottom line
The number on your product page is a promise about the room. When it's right, nobody arrives to find there's no chair for them.
Count the seats you really have, make every ticket count against them, and let a full class point people to the next one.
Keep reading:
→ How to add a waitlist to a sold-out event
→Squarespace Recurring Events: Why It's Hard and What to Do About It
See it in action:
One room, one count
Set total capacity, ticket limits, and seat holds for every class on your Squarespace site. Get started at eventuallyticketing.com.