How to Set Minimum and Maximum Order Quantities on Shopify

If you've ever run a limited product drop and watched one person buy your entire stock in a single order, you know the frustration. Or maybe you sell wholesale and your margins only work when customers order at least a case of 12, but Shopify lets them add a single unit to their cart. Or you're running a free sample promotion and someone orders 50 of them.

Shopify tracks inventory and stops selling when stock hits zero. But it doesn't give you much control over what happens between zero and sold out. Shopify recently added native quantity rules for B2B wholesale buyers across all plans, which is a big step forward. But for your general storefront there's still no built-in way to enforce a maximum per customer, require products to be purchased in specific increments, or set cart-level minimums. The quantity selector on your product page goes from 1 to whatever, and the customer picks any number they want.

For a lot of stores, that's fine. For stores where quantity control actually matters, it's a problem that shows up in support tickets, wasted inventory, and margin erosion.

We built Order Limits to handle this.

Min and max quantities

The most straightforward use case. Set the lowest and highest quantity a customer can buy for any product or variant.

A wholesale bakery supplier that only sells flour in minimum orders of 5 bags. A sneaker store capping a limited release at 2 pairs per order. A candle maker who sells in minimum sets of 3 because that's how their packaging works. These are all situations where the default "buy any quantity" behavior creates problems. Either the order is too small to be worth fulfilling, or one customer cleans out inventory that should have been spread across more buyers.

With Order Limits, the product page enforces these boundaries before the customer reaches checkout. They see the allowed range, not an open-ended quantity field.

Quantity increments and presets

Some products aren't sold by the unit. Tiles sold by the square meter. Fabric sold by the yard. Beverages sold by the case of 6 or 12. Custom stickers sold in batches of 25.

Shopify's default quantity selector goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That doesn't work when the product only ships in multiples of 6. A customer adding 7 tiles to their cart creates a fulfillment problem you have to sort out manually.

Order Limits lets you set fixed quantity increments so the selector only offers valid amounts. You can also define preset options, showing the customer buttons for 6, 12, 24 instead of a freeform number input. The customer picks from quantities that actually make sense for how you sell the product, and you don't get orders for amounts you can't fulfill cleanly.

Cart-level limits

Product-level quantity rules are one thing. Sometimes you need to control the whole order.

A minimum cart value of $50 before a customer can check out. A maximum of 10 total items per order to keep fulfillment manageable during peak season. A cap on total order value for fraud prevention.

Order Limits handles these at the cart level, so the rules apply across everything in the order, not just individual products.

Collection-based rules

Setting limits product by product works until you have 200 products and need the same rule on all of them. Order Limits lets you apply rules to entire collections instead.

Running a limited seasonal drop with 30 products? Apply a max-2-per-customer rule to the whole collection at once. Have a wholesale collection with minimum quantity requirements? One rule covers everything in it. Change the collection, and the rule follows.

What Shopify now handles natively for B2B

Shopify just rolled out native B2B features to all plans, not just Plus. That includes company profiles for wholesale buyers, custom catalogs with tailored pricing, and volume discounts with quantity rules. If your only need is setting wholesale minimums for identified B2B customers who log in through a company profile, Shopify can now handle that.

But native B2B quantity rules apply specifically to company profiles. They don't cover retail customers, general visitors, or any of the broader scenarios where quantity control matters. Capping a sneaker drop at 2 per customer, selling tiles in increments of 6, setting a minimum cart value for free shipping eligibility, limiting how many free samples someone can grab, none of that is handled by the B2B feature.

Different rules for different customers

If you sell to both retail and wholesale from the same store, you might need both approaches working together. Shopify's native B2B handles the wholesale side with company profiles and catalog-specific pricing. Order Limits handles everything else: per-customer purchase caps, quantity increments, cart-level limits, collection-based rules, and segment targeting for customer groups that don't fit neatly into Shopify's company profile structure.

Per-customer purchase limits

High-demand drops, promotional items, and sample products all share the same problem: you need to make sure one customer doesn't buy everything.

Per-customer limits cap how many units of a specific product a single customer can purchase. Not per order, per customer. So even if they come back and place a second order, the limit still applies.

This is different from inventory management. You might have 500 units in stock but only want each customer to buy 2. Shopify's inventory system tracks how many you have, not how many each person should be allowed to buy. Order Limits handles that.

Who needs this

Most stores don't think about quantity rules until something goes wrong. A reseller buys out a limited drop. Someone orders 100 free samples. A customer adds 3 items to their cart when the product only ships in pairs. A promotional offer meant for one per customer gets exploited.

If any of that has happened to you, or if your products have built-in quantity logic that Shopify's default setup doesn't support, Order Limits is built for exactly this.

Order Limits is available now on the Shopify App Store. Free to install