Per-Customer Purchase Caps

Purchase caps limit how many of a product each customer can buy across all their orders, either for good or over a rolling number of days. Use them for limited releases, launch drops or anything you want to share fairly, such as "2 per customer" or "1 every 30 days". A per-order maximum (Product Quantity Rules) stops a large single order; a cap also stops the same customer from coming back for more.

Setting Up a Cap

• Go to Purchase caps in the app menu and click Add purchase cap
• Give it a Name (only you see it)
• Set Most a customer can buy, for example 2
• Choose what the count covers in Counted over:
  • Lifetime (all orders) – every order the customer places counts
  • Every 7, 30, 90 or 365 days (rolling) – only orders from that many days back count, so the customer can buy again once older orders fall out of the window
• Click Add products, Add variants or Add collections to pick what the cap covers
• Save the cap

Each product, variant or collection you pick has its own count: a cap of 2 on two products lets a customer buy 2 of each. A collection counts all of its products together, so a cap of 3 on a collection means 3 items from that collection in total.

Allow the App to Count Purchases

The first time you open Purchase caps, the app asks for permission to save each customer's purchase count on their customer record in Shopify. Click Allow access and approve. Only the number of units bought of each capped product is saved, nothing else about the customer or the order. Caps are not enforced until you allow it.

Logged-In Customers Only

A store can only tell who is buying when the customer is logged in to their account. Caps therefore apply to logged-in customers. A guest is not capped, because the next guest checkout could be anyone.

To close that gap, turn on Require login to buy capped products on the cap. A guest with a capped product in their cart can still add to the cart, but checkout asks them to log in before they can pay. This needs customer accounts to be turned on in Shopify Admin > Settings > Customer accounts.

What Customers See

• Product page – next to the quantity field: "You can buy at most 2 of this product." A logged-in customer who already bought some sees how many they have left, and the quantity field stops at that number. (This needs the Order Limits app embed turned on in your theme.)
• Cart and checkout – a customer who would go over the cap sees "Sneaker is limited to 2 per customer" and cannot complete the order until they lower the quantity. You can change the wording on the Texts page (key product_max_per_customer; it can use {product}, {max}, {bought} and {remaining}).

What Counts

• Orders count from the moment a product is capped. Orders placed before you created the cap are not counted.
• Cancelled or refunded orders still count.
• Changing a cap's products, window or status recalculates every customer's count straight away.

Plan

Purchase caps need the Pro plan. If your store moves to Starter, caps are paused: checkout and the product page skip them, and the caps list shows Paused: needs Pro. They are kept, and work again as soon as you upgrade.