How to manage inventory in Gravity Forms

Separate a simple total-entry limit from real inventory. A total-entry limit closes the whole form after a set number of submissions. Product inventory needs to reduce stock by the quantity ordered, while variation inventory may need separate limits for sizes, colours, dates or ticket types.

Also decide when stock should be claimed. If payment is required, choose whether a submission should reserve stock immediately or only after payment succeeds. This matters because a failed or abandoned payment can otherwise make your available quantity misleading.

In the form editor, add a Product field for each item or ticket type. Add a Quantity field when people can order more than one, then map it to the correct Product field. Gravity Forms supports one Quantity field per Product field, and a quantity field hidden by conditional logic becomes zero.

For fixed alternatives such as Small, Medium and Large, use a choice-based field such as a Drop Down or Radio Buttons field. Keep the labels and values unambiguous so you can reconcile submissions later.

For a form with one overall capacity, go to the form settings, open Restrictions, enable the entry limit and set the number of entries. You can choose a total, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly limit and write the message shown after the limit is reached.

This is the workable manual route when every submission consumes exactly one place, such as 50 registrations for a single session. It does not track separate product quantities, variation stock or a shared pool across several products. When the limit is reached, the form becomes inactive, so check that this behaviour matches your booking process.

Without an inventory add-on, export or review entries and subtract the submitted quantities from a stock sheet. When an item reaches zero, remove its choice, change its description or disable the form. Gravity Forms can store the order details, but the stock calculation and out-of-stock decision are your responsibility.

This route is acceptable for low-volume forms with one person checking orders. It breaks down when two people submit at the same time, when one order contains several quantities, or when a payment later fails. A Friday afternoon oversell usually comes from treating the entry count as stock when one entry actually represents several units.

For automatic deductions, add Gravity Perks Inventory. After activation, inventory controls appear in the field settings for Product and choice-based fields under the Perks section. Simple inventory lets you set stock on a product or on each choice, and submitted quantities are deducted from the available amount.

For variations, shared ticket pools or date-based capacity, use Advanced inventory. Create a Resource with its inventory level, assign it to the relevant fields, and add scopes when availability depends on another field such as a date. The same Resource can be shared across fields or forms.

Choose what visitors see when stock reaches zero. Depending on the field, you can hide the form, disable or hide an exhausted choice, show an insufficient-inventory message or display the remaining quantity. Test a single-unit order, a multi-unit order, the final available unit and an order requesting more than remains.

Then test payment failure, entry editing, deletion and simultaneous submissions. Check that the confirmation and notification show the selected product and quantity. Do not rely only on the form preview: submit real test entries and verify the inventory count in the form editor or inventory settings.