If you’re a Google Forms and Payable power user, you’ve likely experimented with using other add-ons in conjunction with Payable. One of the most popular requests we hear is a way to limit your total submissions. If you only have 500 tickets available for a movie screening, you may be wondering how you can limit your sales to 500 in Forms. This is where the FormLimiter add-on can be extremely helpful—but it does have some limitations you should be aware of.
The FormLimiter Add On does just what the title suggests: Allows you to set a number of submissions or a specific cell value reached in your corresponding Sheet before the Form stops taking responses. This can be helpful if you’re worried about a fast sellout, like for a concert or limited offering like handmade mugs around the holidays. (The Pop-Up Lockers guys use Form Limiter to manage inventory to ensure that every person who registers gets a locker.)
Ironically, the FormLimiter does have some—ahem—limitations.
It can only read your Form submissions, not who’s been through the Payable checkout process and paid. That means you may have a few submissions that are counted, despite the fact that the cart was ‘abandoned.’ It will also read accidental submissions as individual submissions, so if you often have people filling out your Form several times accidentally, that will potentially skew your total.
It can also be tricky to use if you know you’ll be selling different numbers of products in each Form, rather than 1 ticker per Form submission. You can set up the Limiter to correspond with a cell value rather than the number of submissions, though, so you can make a SUM cell that calculates your total number of mugs or tickets sold rather than Forms submitted. However, this can get tricky, so make sure you test it a few times before going live, especially if you anticipate a fast sell-out.
Because of these limitations, though, we like using FormLimiter as an emergency backup system, but we recommend actually just keeping an eye on your corresponding Sheet if you’re expecting a large amount of sales, and closing your Form manually when you get to your max number of sales. Alternatively, use the FormLimiter add-on but make sure you have email notifications set up so it notifies you that you’re at your limit. Then, when you get that email, ensure that you actually have the number of sales you need.