Delivery option: done in house or 3rd party?

[casscerasuolo]

for those that have begun offering delivery options a few questions:

We'd like to begin offering delivery on some of our smoothies and açaí bowls. At first I signed up for postmates but not only do they take 30% today they had no drivers available in our areas so we got no orders. I'm considering taking on the delivery in house- does anyone have any tips? we deliver larger purchases that are ordered two days in advance so we have time to plan those out. im just not sure how to go about doing smaller more frequent deliveries. any help much appreciated!

[blakeadesigns]

Yea we were looking at this option as well.

Was thinking I could just add a line item (menu item) for customer delivery and charge a flat fee like $7.00 and then have the customer add this to their order.    The only problem is that we would like to only do delivery for a couple of hours a night.    Say from 5 to 7pm.

I don't need fancy GPS maps and tracking.   Just take the order, payment and get an address and give them a 30 min window.   

Its too bad basic features like this are not embedded into the ap among many other simple to do 

[casscerasuolo]

@blakeadesigns @Yes I wish square would release a feature for the online store to limit delivery hours. It automatically gives people next business day but we’re only delivering 3 days a week! I have it written everywhere but we still get calls.

[AshleyK · Accepted solution]

@casscerasuolo thank you so much for adding your voice to this. I will share this with our Development Team and will post any announcements that we have in our threads as well. Thank you again.

[PreOrder_Apps]

We can do that with our standard, base plan mobile app easily.

- Ken

[PreOrder_Apps]

Hi all. Disclaimer: We're an official Square Partner and we've been helping our Clients offer and run their own Delivery operations. We specialize in creating branded, Square-powered Mobile Apps.

And, we've also built in a Checkout option called "Delivery" a Time Picker to choose the time, an amount field to automatically add a standard "delivery fee", a geo-fencing feature to prevent people from choosing Delivery who are out of range (and a popup to tell them that) and a built-in KDS, so you can not only see all your incoming delivery orders, but can also assign that feed to multiple delivery drivers (or just one) who can "claim" a delivery, drop it off and check it as "delivered" when done. 

In addition, we have real-time tracking statuses, alerts and push notifications so both the location and the customer know each phase of the delivery. 

It's all pretty simple now, but powerful. And, we cloned Uber awhile ago too, so one day we're going to combine it with our Delivery feature then both the Owner/Restaurant/Store and the Customer will be able to track the Drivers in real-time.

If anybody's interested, we can upload some pictures/screenshots or just give a live demo.

- Ken 

[PreOrder_Apps]

ps - Here's a tip - if you integrate Postmates API into your website or mobile app with a Partner as the API source, it only costs a flat delivery fee (usually $5). They don't take anything else out. 

We're a new global Postmates partner (and an official Square Partner) and those are the terms we have.

We can integrate it into a website or our Square-powered Mobile Apps for about $500 to $1,000 (if people want to chip in) and we'll create it in a way where we can give it to everyone.

- Ken

[gbrokloff]

We are a small pizza shop that is switching to square for restaurants and using online ordering. 

Our first issue was not being able to print the customers address on the kitchen printer. Square has helped us with a workaround where we have an item called delivery that charges a $2.00 fee and then we have to paste the customer's address into the notes so it prints on the kitchen ticket. This is not ideal but will work. What I can't figure out is how to assign a driver to the ticket. We have used an old POS called Selby Soft that allows you to assign an order to a driver when it's ready. I can't see where we can do this with Square for Restaurants. Any suggestions?

[nika]

Hey @gbrokloff! You may want to consider reaching out to @PreOrder_Apps. I've moved your question to this thread so you can see what they're able to provide above. Feel free to tag any of the other sellers you see on this thread to get some additional insight on how they go about assigning drivers, too.

[PreOrder_Apps]

Yep, this is easy. We primarily specialize in making Square-powered Mobile Apps, but we also have a website Admin Dashboard that we give each business/client which controls the Orders "from" their mobile app - so we can just use the website dashboard to help you either assign or auto-assign to Drivers because we can quickly tweak it to pull and list all your Orders from Square.

Let me know if you're interested. We're cheap and fast.