We are selling our shows as unseated then turning off sales 24 hours in advance to hand seat the audiences. We oversold a show the other day as we have hold codes in place but these aren't locking our capacity to web sales. Any advice as to how you are handling your sales when they begin closing in on selling to your set capacity?
It's not perfect/immediate, but I had some luck using the Pulse feature in Analytics to keep tabs on capacity. I created a widget that calculates percent filled using the equation
[Total Ticket Paid/Reserved Count] / ([Total Seat Count])
I then filtered that widget on one performance at a time, setting up a pulse for each one. It was a bit tedious at the beginning of the season to set it up for each and every event, but then it was good to go. The main downside is that you don't get the notification until the next morning so I set my pulse for slightly lower than the actual limit.
I haven't done it, but I've kicked around the idea of a pricing rule that "changes" the price type - that would allow you to set the max number of seats per product. I haven't had to do it, but it's an idea I've put some thought into in case I need to.
I’m making some assumptions here, but I assume the majority of your sales are online. Your solution is to implement Allocations. You could have a Non-Online allocation that is not available to your online MOS(s). You also need a Hold Code that only a few people at your org can break (Sys adm). If the user group has rights to break a hold, this means they can also seat it without actually breaking the hold. We use a Sys adm only hold code as a hard ceiling for the maximum allowed tickets.
Another issue can be that when you copy a performance, it does not copy the applied hold and allocation maps.