Boosting conversions often comes down to motivating customers to act fast—and that’s where urgency marketing tactics shine.
By using ThriveCart’s product scarcity settings, you can set genuine limits on product availability or intentionally create a powerful eCommerce FOMO strategy that encourages buyers to complete their purchase before spots run out.
Whether you’re managing limited-capacity offers or simply want to increase urgency, ThriveCart makes it easy to display remaining quantities and control exactly what happens when availability hits zero—helping you drive more sales with smart, ethical scarcity.
How to set up product quantity limits
ThriveCart supports both:
- Individual pricing options limits
- Overall product quantity limits
- A combination of both
To set up your quantity limit you need to head to the Product > Pricing tab in your product settings.
If you have a single pricing option
When editing/creating a payment option you can select from the quantity drop down, the ability to Limit to…
On the first window, will be an option to set a quantity limit. By default, this is set to unlimited, but you can set it to limit to and then enter a number.
After clicking Next and saving your payment option, you’ll see a couple of new options on the overview of your pricing options
- A set quantity button that lets you quickly and easily edit the quantity settings for that payment option
- A Set out-of-stock options button which is where you can set up the actions for when the product is out of stock
Set out-of-stock options
Clicking the button Set out-of-stock options, you will be presented with a modal window where you can choose the desired action when all copies are sold. If you have multiple payment options on your checkout; when a specific payment option reaches 0 it will be disabled, these actions will only occur when all payment options on the checkout reach 0.
- Replace cart with a message allows you to replace the cart with a message written in the box. This is helpful if you just want a quick message to be displayed to the prospect without needing to create a web page for them.
- Redirect to another page allows you to set a custom URL to redirect the prospects to when the quantity hits zero. This is great if you maybe have a follow-up page on your website you wish to direct them to. Another great use for this would be if you only had X copies at a specific price point. You could automatically redirect users to a higher-priced copy of your product once all the lower-priced copies were sold.
- Reset the countdown will make sure your evergreen promotions continue to run but still retain that sense of urgency the scarcity brings. Once the countdown reaches zero it will simply reset to the original limit, automatically.
If you do not set your out-of-stock options, the default setting is “Replace cart with a message”, but there is no default message set within these settings.
Do not forget to set your options so that customers do not encounter a blank checkout page.
If you have multiple product/pricing options
When you have multiple pricing options on your checkout page, you can set individual pricing limits as discussed above, but you can also set a product global quantity.
This option allows you to limit the total quantity of sales for the product.
An example of this use would be where you’re wanting to sell tickets or access to an event and want to put a cap on the total number of tickets sold, but offer your customers the option of a one-time payment or a payment plan.
With ThriveCart you have the power to limit set quantity limits as you need for your products and their pricing options.
How does this work?
When a user arrives on your checkout page, the system checks to see how many copies of your product (or pricing options) are available. This is then displayed to the user or if the stock has reached zero, trigger your out-of-stock action/disable the pricing option.
Each time a customer completes an order, the stock quantity is reduced and the next person arriving on your checkout page will see fewer copies available.
This all occurs automatically as customer complete orders and new prospects arrive on your checkout page.
Note: Customers can complete an order if the checkout is showing available quantity.
For example, if you have a product with 10 copies available for sale and 11 people open your checkout page; if 10 of those eleven people purchase, the next visitor to the checkout page will see no copies available.
However, that eleventh person who was already viewing the checkout page will still be able to purchase and complete their order (unless they refresh the checkout page first).
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Q: Will this work to set limits per customer?
- A: In short, no. The quantity limits set here will be for total sales of your product, and the system does not verify whether the customer purchased the item previously to restrict additional purchases. Customers can still refresh your checkout to purchase an additional product, if they wish. It’s not currently possible to restrict users to only a single purchase, but you can set whether a customer can purchase more than one item at a time on a one-time price product like so:
- Q: Does adjusting the quantity limit on my product factor in already placed sales?
- A: No, the limit you set on your product would be for future sales only. If your limit was initially 15 and you sold 5, then when editing your product, you would see 10 set as the limit. If you set this to 15 again and save your product, then the system will allow for the sale of 20 products (15 after the save + 5 already processed).