Online Pickup Orders: When are automatic orders printed?

[SoMa-BBQ]

Hi. We enabled our customers to place orders for pickup via our Weebly on-line store.

In general, has been working very well. Have question to understand prep time and auto-printing.

As example, I receive a "pre-order" in the morning before my location's 4-7PM hours - where my prep time is 30 minutes. The customer has selected 6PM as their pickup time. 

With automatic-printing turned on, will the ticket for this pre-order be printed? If so, when will it be printed? At 4PM when we open, or at 530PM when we need to begin prep.

And while we are open, a customer places an order at 5PM for pickup at 7PM. Will the ticket be printed immediately on receipt or at 630PM.

Thanks!

Pete

@AdamB

[pessosices · Accepted solution]

[Note: This post was edited by a moderator to improve the link to a different post.]

Hey @SoMa-BBQ 

Congrats on setting everything up for pickup!

For scheduled orders, the tickets will automatically print when you need to start prepping - according to the prep time & the order time.

So in your first case it will automatically print at 5:30 PM and in the second case at 6:30 PM

You can see more on this post about printing orders in advance.

[SoMa-BBQ]

Thanks so much @pessosices 

[SoMa-BBQ]

If you have time, one additional question I forgot to include. If the customer has selected to be notified via text when their order is ready for pickup, will the text message be sent when we click "Mark-as-Ready" for the order?

If the customer supplied phone number is not able to receive texts, I don't imagine we get any indication of that?

Thanks again @pessosices 

[pessosices]

Yup, they'll get a text when you mark it as ready.
They'll also get an email when you mark it as ready whether or not they checked the box for a text, or if their number cannot receive texts.

You will not be notified if the text is undeliverable, but that's a great idea!

[SoMa-BBQ]

Muchas gracias!

[sotexbbqco]

@pessosices I have an additional question to this.  Are customers allowed to all pick the same pick up time? For example, Is there something to prevent all customers from choosing 12 noon pick up?  We trying to prevent everyone from slamming our parking lot.  Thanks!

[pessosices]

@sotexbbqco 

As of now there are no settings to restrict Pickup Times to individual slots. An unlimited number of people can choose a slot.

It is a feature request that I believe has been noted.

In practice, you can look at your history of orders/transactions, and see if it would be an actual issue. Typically it's not, and people don't show up exactly on time, and even if they do, it takes about 3 seconds to hand off an order, so it shouldn't be a problem - but I don't know your exact setup & all that

[sotexbbqco]

@pessosices Thank you so much for your response.  So, if 10 people choose the same time slot, all 10 tickets would print X number of minutes before chosen time slot.  Where X is the prep time? Even if prep-time is low (3-4 min), that is 30 min of prep time for those 10 orders.  Seems easy to get put in the weeds, just trying to play out different scenarios in my head.

Is there away to test this with our printers/orders, without creating real online orders?

[pessosices]

@sotexbbqco 

That's correct.

You have a couple of options:

1. Put a longer prep time.

2. Remember that the customer gets a notification that it's ready only when you mark each individual order as ready for pickup. If it takes longer than the 30 minutes, it's theoretically not the end of the world, and you mark it as ready when it's ready, in the rare case you get 10 orders all set for the same time.

For testing, I set up a Coupon code for 100% off on the Online Store Dashboard, and I use that to put in test orders - just let your staff know that it's not real

[sotexbbqco]

Thank you again!  This is all pretty new to me, sorry if my questions are a little dumb 🙂  

[pessosices]

Not at all! Happy to help!

[sotexbbqco]

@pessosices do I need to configure anything differently if I'm using fresh kds (as my printer) with the square app POS on phone/tablet?  Fresh KDS works as a print when doing POS, I will try testing it for online store next.

[pessosices]

@sotexbbqco 

Good question. You shouldn't? Theoretically?

But I don't use Fresh KDS so I'm not really sure.

There is a setting on your POS for Online Orders - Automatically Print Receipts.

I think that's all you'd have to do

[sotexbbqco]

@pessosices With Samsung s8+ as POS, and NEXUS 10 tablet, integration with FRESH KDS worked as it should.  All orders, prep/times, tickets, text messaging, and emails worked as expected when placing orders via web store.  Print Orders was turned on, and alerts worked well.

I do have a question, I have an Iphone that I would also like to test with this as POS.  I noticed that there is not an orders tab in my app, it's an Iphone 11.  For the life of me I can't figure out how to make the orders tab visible.  This would obviously be useful for checking order status.  any ideas?

[pessosices]

Awesome @sotexbbqco ! So glad it all worked. 

I don’t believe there’s a way to make the orders tab show up on smartphones as of now. 

if you just want to check the order status, you can download the Weebly App - you’ll get the notifications if you want, and you can check on them as needed, but it’s not as smooth or quick as the order tab on a tablet 

[SoMa-BBQ]

Hi @sotexbbqco. From my testing, you are correct that "orders view" is not available on phone app. Only available on iPad for us (or I suppose tablet), and is available via web browser. I use the Orders view within Squareup.com rather than in our Weebly store - just because I think it is a step closer to the data that drives the POS app.

[sotexbbqco]

@SoMa-BBQ @pessosices Orders view is available on my Samsung s8+ phone, operating as a POS.  Perhaps, it's a limitation of IOS at this time?

[SoMa-BBQ]

Interesting. Thanks. Could be even if a little weird :-). Still getting to know this platform. Has lots of potential.

[sotexbbqco]

@SoMa-BBQ @pessosices 

I ran into the issue where i have many pre-orders scheduled to be picked at the same time.  I adjusted the prep time to 1 hr to prevent this from happening.

My question is which prep time value is used to print tickets? Is my original prep time saved with the first orders (5min), or should I adjust my prep time value back to what I actually think I need.   It is currently set to 1 hour, but I don't actually need 1 hr prep time.

I hope this makes sense.  Ty!

[pessosices]

@sotexbbqco 

Sorry you've been running into the overload of orders.

Glad you have a good way to deal with it!

How do you mean?

If I understand correctly, you have some pending orders with a 5 minute prep time, and new orders with a 1 hour prep time.

I think the old orders will print 5 minutes before, and any orders after the new prep time will print 1 hour before. 
But I'm not exactly sure, honestly.