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

[sotexbbqco]

Yes, you're understanding is correct.  I am not sure what the behavior would have been because I had a completely different issue.

My issue was that NONE of the orders even printed!!  The scenario is that I am open one day a week and I collect pre-orders for Saturday all week long using my online store.  When Saturday rolled around not a single pre-order printed. To me this seems like a syncing issue, like the order queue is getting flushed everytime the applications close or something. NEW orders that I took on the fly during Saturday service printed as expected.  I am using Square POS app on an iphone, and printing using fresh kds to samsung tablet.

After reflection, I think it's probably for the best that the pre-orders did not print.  However it would be nice if we could view all pre-orders sorted by pick up times.  It would also be nice to send orders to the printer on demand.

I hope this makes sense.

[AshleyK]

Hey! Thanks so much for the detailed description. I hear you - this would be really confusing in the moment as you were expecting the pre orders to print. It sounds like this is tied to your business hours. Orders will not print if the Point of Sale app is not open, and also, pre orders, or any orders that are placed outside of your business hours, will not print either. 

I can completely see how having them print outside of your business hours would be useful and have shared your thoughts with our Development Team, but for now, you will need to pull up your orders within the app or Dashboard to manage them if they are made outside of your business hours.

[pessosices]

@AshleyK 

While the orders won't print outside of business hours, they should print as soon as they open on Saturday and it is X Prep Time before Y Order Time though, right?

[sotexbbqco]

@pessosices I'm thinking not.  I can run some tests to see if any orders placed in advance actually prints as expected, but I don't have time today.  It's kind of a double edged sword, and it may be better that they don't print.  HOWEVER, I think we need the ability to send ORDERS to printer on the fly (OTF).

The scenario is that a pre-order shows up aearly, we need to have the ability to send that order to a printer OTF.  This is particularly important with social distancing, we want to get people in and out ASAP!  

[AshleyK]

@sotexbbqco and @pessosices I apologize for the delay in response, but I've been doing some digging and we may need to reach out to engineering again for this. According to what I've found, any order that is placed outside of business hours will print the following business day according to it's prep time. So, say you are only open Saturdays 10am - 6pm and someone places an order for a hamburger with a 30 min prep time on a Friday, to be picked up at 11am on Saturday. The order for the hamburger will print at 10:30am Saturday for it's 30 min prep time. 

@sotexbbqco this did not seem to be the case for you, but please let me know if you tested it and the results were different for you at any time. Also, please let me know what your prep times are for your items! Thanks!

[sotexbbqco]

@AshleyK Your example is exactly what I've experienced.  I thought that was how it should work too, however orders placed in advance do not print   I don't know if this is by design or not.

BUT, honestly, as I mentioned before--this is probably for the best and may be by design. 

For example, we have found that customers don't show up exactly when they think they want it, after all pre-orders can be done 5 days in advance for us.  If the orders did print automatically, I think it would be much worse.  This past weekend we had around 7 orders not show up at their pick up time.  Their food would have sat for a long period of time, that is not acceptable.

I found that I can print the orders  on the fly when the customer shows up.  That works perfectly for us.

[sotexbbqco]

@AshleyK thank you for your response!  I think I understand what you are saying, allow me to verify. 

My current business hours are Saturday 11am - 4pm.  What is the expected behavior for a pre-order placed on a Wednesday at noon for pick up on Saturday at 11:30?  You can assume my prep time is set to 10 minutes.  I have automatic printing setup, and have tested that real time webstore orders print as expected.  

thank you!

[pessosices]

After a few weeks of using exclusively online pickup orders, I have a little bit more insight!

So if a person places an ASAP order while you're closed, the pickup time will be for Open Time + Prep Time -- but it will print immediately.

If a person places a scheduled order while you're closed, for the pickup time as the first available slot (or later) it will print at Pickup Time - Prep Time.

So if they schedule it for the same time as it would have been if they did ASAP, because it's scheduled, it will print at Opening (Pickup Time - Prep Time)

Hope this helps!

Pesso

[sotexbbqco]

@pessosices Thanks for the follow up, I appreciate it.

In my case I have never experienced an order that was pre-ordered on days that I am not open (which are almost all my orders) print automatically.   I am only open on Saturdays and I have received many orders during the week for various Saturday pick up times.  NONE of them have printed on Saturday. Are you saying yours will print in this scenario?

If I place orders on the fly during Saturday service, for walk up customers, those DO print automatically which is very nice.  I think I I prefer it this way, because many times customers choose the default pick up time on accident, or are running late, etc.  I can just print their orders on the fly from the orders list.  Additionally, there is no way to prevent 50 customers for placing orders at the same time, could you imagine if those orders printed automatically, and you had to figure out which customers were there?

Have you figured out how to sort your pre-orders by PICK UP time?  I think that is the next thing I can complain about. LOL  I am manually tracking orders by pick up at the moment, which does not scale well...

[pessosices]

@sotexbbqco 

Is your iPad and printer on all week with the POS app open, or do you just turn them on when you get in on Saturday?

I keep all of mine open always, so mine print automatically according to what I was explaining - as they should.
Never had any issues of printing.

We do get a ton of orders & tickets at a time, and since they only print according to the Pickup Time, we just go through it in the order they came in, and scroll/search to find the right the order (there's a new search bar up top), mark them as ready, and then they come up to the window and tell us their name, and we're done!

There is still no way to organize the orders, but hopefully that will come soon!

[sotexbbqco]

@pessosices No my printer (tablet) is usually off and my devices are on but not connected.  I'm thinking this could be the issue, but I have not bothered to test it because in my situation, I prefer to print the order on the fly when the customer arrives.  Pre-orders are done to protect the customers from us selling out.

Thanks for your input!

[sotexbbqco]

@pessosices

Hey guess, what happened yesterday.  Saturday morning, I powered on my tablet "printer" and all my devices.....BAM, 20 tickets printed at the same time! for 9:05 pick up.   I don't know how to make this application behave consistently!  It was not ideal!

[isabelle]

Hey @sotexbbqco-

Thanks for posting in the Seller Community.

Really sorry to hear about these issues you've been experiencing with our app. Have you already tried to delete and reinstall the app (when you have no payments pending in offline mode)?

Usually that will fix any lingering bugs or issues. Let me know. 

[ZDeli]

We've run into an issue with online orders not printing right away. They often print about an hour before pick-up. Is this because our default prep time is 1hour? 

This becomes an issue as we are doing online and in-person sales. We don't always set inventory for an item, so if a customer orders something online for pickup at a future time, and then we sell out before their order ticket prints, we sometimes don't have their pre-paid order.

I know one solution is to look at a daily report for 'new' transactions, but I am wondering if there is a way for us to set up when remote orders get printed.

Thanks!

[JustinC]

@ZDeli - 

Ah, I see your problem. You're absolutely right that your orders printing is delayed  because your prep time is set for an hour prior to being done. This ensures the quality of the food being prepped is up to par with your customer. 

The only way to work around this is to set prep time to immediately available and add the true prep time of an hour in the pick-up instructions. When the order is finished being prepped,  mark the order ready for pickup in the POS app so your customer gets the notification. 

I hope this helps!

[KingstonBread]

Hi Justin,

I have a similar question, but I don't know that your suggestion for making thing "immediately available" will work when people schedule orders for pickup late in the day. Won't that make the ticket print even LATER, like at the moment they scheduled their pickup?  What we are asking for is the ability for scheduled tickets to print immediately when they come through the system, and NOT wait hours later until 1 hour (or 15 minutes or whatever the prep time selected is) before pickup time.  Is THIS possible?  We are also running into the problem of selling inventory in person throughout the day (because Square allows us to sell past the zero inventory count) and running out before those online orders are printed and fulfilled.  Thank you! 

[JustinC]

Hello!! Thanks for posting @KingstonBread  🙂

I understanding exactly what you're looking for, but as this thread explains, it's not possible. Sorry about that. We're still working on improving Order Management with the Online Store. 

We'll update the thread once there's good news to share

[mksavage]

Is there a way to adjust the timing when an order is sent to the printer? We are using the Online Store, which allows customers to place orders several hours/days in advance. The order is then sent to the printer 30 minutes before the pick-up time, but we would prefer it to be sent 1-hour before the pick-up time. Is that possible? Thank you!

[nika]

Hey @mksavage- I moved your post to this thread so you can see some sellers who had a similar issue/question. The way you can get around this and change your print time would to be also change your prep time. Check out what other sellers have said here and feel free to ask some follow up questions of you have any!

[raphsbakery]

Pete, I have a question for you. What set up did you use? Is it the Square for restaurant terminal with a printer added to the kitchen? We are a small bakery but starting to take online orders and need to set this up for our chef. Thank you!