How to limit orders per day on Shopify

Your limit is not stock on a shelf. It is how much you can make, pack or deliver on one date, and Shopify has no setting for that.

If you make things to order, your real limit is not stock. It is how much you and your team can make, pack or deliver in one day. A bakery can finish maybe twelve custom cakes. A meal-prep kitchen can cook a set number of boxes. A florist has one van and a few hours of delivery.

The problem is that Shopify will keep taking orders for the same day until you stop it. This guide covers what Shopify can do on its own, a workaround that holds up for simple cases, and what to use when you need a real cap per pickup or delivery day.

What Shopify does on its own

Shopify has no setting for "maximum orders per day." There is also no native way for customers to pick a pickup or delivery date in the online store checkout. The pickup settings let you turn pickup on for a location and choose an expected processing time that customers see at checkout, but they do not let a customer choose a day, and they do not count how many orders are already booked for that day.

What Shopify does have is inventory tracking. If you track quantity on a product and leave "Continue selling when out of stock" off, customers cannot buy that product once its quantity reaches zero until you add more stock.

Why stock counts fall short

Inventory feels like it should work as a daily limit. Set the cake to 12, and once 12 are sold, it stops. The catch is that Shopify's count has no idea about dates.

It is one number for all days. If 12 people order a cake for next Saturday, the cake shows as sold out for tomorrow, Tuesday and every other day too.
It counts per product, not per kitchen. If your limit is 12 cakes of any flavor, setting each flavor to 12 lets 60 through. Setting each to 3 turns people away when one flavor is popular.
It does not refill itself. Someone has to reset the number every day.

Stock is one number for every day. A daily limit is a number per date. Shopify only has the first, so stock works only if you sell for one day at a time and reset it by hand.

A native workaround for simple cases

If every order is for the same day or the next day, and you only have one or two capped products, this can be enough:

Turn on "Track quantity" for the capped product and make sure "Continue selling when out of stock" is off.
Each evening, after your cutoff, set the quantity to what you can make for the next day.
Put the pickup or delivery day in the product description or at the top of the store, so customers know which day they are buying for.

If you are comfortable with Shopify Flow, it can run a workflow on a schedule, as often as every 10 minutes, and it has a "Send Admin API request" action. In principle that lets you reset a quantity automatically each night. It takes some technical setup, and it still gives you one shared number, not a separate limit for each date.

Where this breaks down: as soon as customers can order for more than one day ahead, the stock count mixes all those days together. It also cannot tell the difference between a quiet Tuesday and a busy Saturday.

Decide what you are actually limiting

Before you pick a tool, write down what "full" means for your business. It usually falls into one of these:

Orders per day. Good when every order takes roughly the same effort, like local delivery stops.
Items per day. Better when one order can hold one cupcake or forty. One large order should use up more of the day than a small one.
One product per day. Useful when only one thing is the bottleneck, like custom cakes or whole roasts, while everything else can sell freely.
Per time slot. If you hand over orders in windows, such as 9 to 11 or 2 to 4, each window may need its own cap so the counter is not swamped at once.

Many merchants need two of these at once, for example a daily cap on everything plus a smaller cap on one product. Also decide which days are closed and when the cutoff is for same-day orders, because a daily limit only makes sense alongside those. Our guide on lead times for a bakery on Shopify walks through cutoffs and closed days in more detail.

What a proper daily limit needs to do

Whatever you use, check that it does these things. Plenty of setups miss at least one.

The customer picks a date, and full dates disappear. A message after checkout saying "sorry, we are full" means a refund and an unhappy customer.
It counts the cart, not just the order. If a day has room for 3 more items and someone has 5 in their cart, that day should not be offered.
It respects your store's time zone, not the customer's, so cutoffs and "today" mean the same thing for everyone.
The date lands on the order where you and your staff can see it, ideally on each line item, so you can build a prep list for each day.

For a side by side look at the main apps, see which Shopify app for delivery dates and pickup. If you deliver flowers, delivery dates for a florist on Shopify covers how this works with a single delivery run.

How Readyby handles daily limits

Readyby is our app for pickup, local delivery and shipping dates. Customers pick a date, and optionally a time slot, on the product page or in the cart. Limits are part of it:

Store-wide daily limit that counts either orders or items. A day stops being offered once it cannot fit the quantity being ordered.
Max per day for a single product, such as 10 custom cakes, while other products keep selling. The picker counts items already in the cart.
Capacity per time slot. A full slot is greyed out for that date, and a date with every slot full drops out of the picker.
Cutoffs, lead times, open days and blackout dates, including date ranges and holidays that repeat every year.
An optional cart check at checkout that rechecks limits on the whole cart.

The date, method and time are saved to the order, and the Upcoming orders view shows dated orders by day with a prep list and CSV export. Daily limits are included on the free plan. You can find it on the Shopify App Store.

Quick checklist

Write down your real limit: orders, items, one product, or slots.
Set your cutoff time and closed days first.
If you only sell for tomorrow, try the stock workaround and reset it each night.
If customers book days ahead, use a date picker that hides full days and counts the cart.
Place a test order for a nearly full day and confirm the date shows on the order.