Offerings are a terrific way for your new (and even established!) clients to book a session with you, purchase your course, join one of your groups, and more, and do so all in a COMPLETELY self-service way.

This generally works great, empowering your clients, new and old, to further engage with what you have to offer at their own initiative.

But sometimes it’s useful to put restrictions on when they can do so: perhaps you’ve got a group program that has a hard limit on the number of participants, or a deal that’s meant to expire at midnight next Friday.

For that sort of thing, you can now set Offering Restrictions.  Let’s see how they work!

You can set whichever restrictions should apply to each of your Offerings.  By bringing up the editor for an Offering (or when creating a new one), you’ll see the new Restrictions section in the left menu:

You can opt to enact all, some or none–all totally optional!

There are 3 flavors of restrictions that you can set:

• Limit the number of sign ups for this Offering.  Great for any scenarios in which limiting enrollment is important (this also includes a discounted Offering which you might, for example, limit to the first 10 registrants!).
• Begin Offering availability on a specific date.  Generally you’ll want your Offerings to be available immediately whenever you share the link to it, but this can be handy if you want to tee things up in advance, or have certain Offerings automatically appear (or become newly available) in your Offering Collections when the time is right.
• End Offering availability on a specific date.  Handy to enact an expiration date for a given Offering, be it a standard program or a discounted one that’s available only for a limited time.

For each of these 3 flavors you can set what should happen when the restriction applies.  Should it be removed entirely, with CA outwardly pretending it never existed?  Or should it still show with a brief message about how it isn’t currently available?  The choice is yours.

For example, if you have an Offering in a collection, and it happens to be restricted per one of your rules, it will either be removed from the menu entirely, or show in the menu with your message as follows:

It can be nice to have even a restricted Offering show up in the collection, giving your clients a more complete picture of what is (or can be!) on offer.

Another example: making an Offering Collection that consists of a single Offering can be a nice way to show a mini landing page for it, as the Offering’s description displays in full.  On such a page, the Offering’s restricted message will show in lieu of the “Proceed to purchase/sign up” button, like so:

Kind of a tease, but at least nice to see a little more info about what might be open some other time.

And there you have it!  Most Offerings won’t need to have any restrictions placed on them, but given the entirely self-service nature of Offerings, sometimes it’s nice to be able to place certain restrictions that the system can automatically enforce for you.

Enjoy!