Online ticket limits tend to get attention twice. The first time is when someone buys 40 tickets to a sold-out evening program and resells them. The second is a few months later, when a teacher trying to book a class of 28 gets an error and calls to ask why the website won’t take her order. One limit set for one reason ends up blocking a very different kind of buyer.
This article covers where Altru’s online purchase limits come from, why the error can show up when an order looks like it’s under the limit, and what your options are when you want the limit gone.
Where the limit actually lives
In Altru, online ticket sales run through your web forms, and the per-order cap is set as part of that online sales setup, not on each program. So the limit generally applies to the whole form, not to a single program or a single program event.
This is the main source of frustration. Most organizations want different caps for different things:
- A tight cap on a popular special event, so a few buyers can’t take most of the seats.
- A generous cap, or none at all, on general admission, where families and small groups buy together.
- No practical cap on programs aimed at schools or camps.
As far as we know, Altru doesn’t offer a separate online purchase cap per program or per program event. Settings change between releases, though, so before you rebuild anything, check the current web form and program settings in your own database, or ask Blackbaud support whether a per-program limit is available in your version.
Why the error appears for an order that seems under the limit
Buyers sometimes hit the limit message with fewer tickets than the number you set. Before you assume it’s a bug, check these likely causes in a test environment:
- The cap counts all price types together. Two adults, three children, and a senior is six tickets. Buyers don’t always add them up, and the message may not explain that the count covers every price type.
- The cart already has tickets in it. If the buyer added tickets for another time slot or another program earlier in the session, those can count toward the same per-order cap.
- Capacity, not the cap, is the real limit. If only four seats are left and someone asks for six, the order will fail. Depending on how the form reports it, that can look like a purchase-limit problem when it’s really an availability problem.
- A stale page or an abandoned session. A buyer who goes back, changes quantities, and tries again may still have the earlier selection held. A fresh browser session is a quick way to rule this out.
To reproduce a report, ask the buyer for the date, time, program, and the exact quantity of each price type. Then place the same order on a test form. If you can’t make it fail, the cause was probably in their session. If you can, you’ll know which of the four causes above applies.
Removing or loosening the limit
Before you change anything, decide which problem you’re trying to solve. A limit that blocks school groups and a limit nobody needs call for different fixes.
If you want no limit at all
Look at the per-order setting on the web form. Some fields read a blank or zero value as “no limit,” and others reject it or read zero literally. We aren’t sure which way Altru handles this in every version, so test it on a copy of the form before you change the live one. If you can’t remove the limit outright, setting it well above any realistic order, such as your largest room’s capacity, works the same way in practice.
If you want a limit on some programs but not others
If the cap is set per form, the usual workaround is separate forms:
- One form for general admission with a high cap.
- A separate form for high-demand events with a low cap.
- Group and school bookings handled outside public web sales, through group sales, so they don’t run into either cap.
The cost is upkeep: more forms to brand, test, and link from the right pages on your website. Keep a short list of which form serves which programs so that changes later in the season don’t land in the wrong place.
If the real concern is resellers or bots
A per-order cap only slows down a determined buyer, who can just place several orders. A query on recent online orders, grouped by email address or constituent record for a given event, will show you whether repeat buyers are actually the problem. If they aren’t, a strict cap may be costing you legitimate family and group sales without stopping anyone.
Make the message match the rule
Whatever you decide, the buyer should know the rule before they see an error. Put the limit on the event page or next to the quantity selector, in plain words: “Up to 8 tickets per order, all ticket types combined. Booking for a larger group? Contact us.” That one sentence prevents most of the confused calls, and it gives large groups a route to staff instead of a dead end.
A note on checkout tools
Some organizations replace Altru’s public web forms with a separate checkout so they have more control over the page buyers see. Social Good’s Checkouts is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations that writes its data back to Altru. If you’re evaluating it with purchase limits in mind, ask during a demo how limits and their messages would work for your specific programs, so you can judge it against your actual rules rather than a general description.
Quick answers
Does the online limit affect sales at the front desk?
The cap described here applies to online web form sales. Daily sales at the desk follow their own process. Run one test transaction to confirm this in your setup.
Will changing the limit affect orders already placed?
No. A new cap only applies to orders placed after you save the change.
