Cutoff time and more customizable hours for online orders?

RealTimeBreads · ‎03-22-2020

The title of this post has been edited from the original: I want to customize my hours so that we have a cutoff for placing orders and a delay for pickup

As the title suggests, we need custom hours like this:

Saturday through Monday accepting orders for pickup Wednesday 12:00 to 6:00 (Tuesday all day is for preparation and Wednesday morning is for baking, slicing, and packaging)

Tuesday through Thursday accepting orders for Saturday 12:00 to 6:00

This is for a sourdough bakery so the preparation, cooking, and packaging takes a day and half

Thanks so much for your help!

Doug Tomison

RealTimeBreads.square.site

mttoms · ‎04-13-2020

Also trying to solve this!

If you change the pickup/delivery hours to give you longer 'business hours' to allow for enough prep time (e.g. schedule order for next day if window is too short), will the system try to schedule the pickup for earlier than your 'location hours'? E.g. Location hours = 4-6pm. prep time = 5 hours. desired cutoff = 1pm. --- solution: set pickup/delivery to 11-6pm, but only want customer to be able to pickup/delivery 4-6pm like location says. SO If an order comes in at 3pm today, will it automatically schedule it for 4pm (location hours) tomorrow, or will it say 1pm tomorrow? 4pm good, 1pm bad..

Valentina · ‎04-15-2020

@RealTimeBreads @ZilkeKitchen @Barceloneta @mttoms - wanted to jump in to grab a bit more clarifying info here about what you're all looking for.

Based on what you've described here, it sounds like many of you are currently using Prep Time as a workaround. As there isn't currently a feature that will allow an "order cutoff time" to be set for orders, outside of your business hours restricting order capabilities, you've been using Prep Time to replicate that. You're looking for an "order cutoff time" setting that would take into account your prep time, as well as the cutoff time associated with your ability to fulfill orders - does that sound right?

It may also be helpful to know whether you're looking to stop orders from being placed altogether at a certain time on a given day, or if you'd like people to be able place orders and schedule pickup for the next available day?

Thanks in advance!

RealTimeBreads · ‎04-16-2020

Valentina,

Thank you for your response. I don't know about your other customers, but for us it takes a little more than 24 hours to prepare our sourdough bread and we only have takeout/delivery on Wednesday and Saturday Noon to 6. What we are doing is taking orders before we start prep on Tuesday and Friday at about 6:00 AM. Since we only have delivery/takeout during those two, four hour windows, we don't want to show that we are open at other times. For us an order cutoff time would be great as long as it is not tied to open hours.

Valentina · ‎04-16-2020

Thank you for getting back to me here, @RealTimeBreads! Good to know we're on the same page about what is being asked here in this thread. I went ahead and edited the title of this thread to better reflect what is being asked here, so that others are easily able to add their interest.

Although the Delivery & Pickup settings won't allow for this kind of customization at this time, I can assure you that our eCommerce team is hard at work developing and implementing features and tools to help with these aspects of your businesses.

We'll be sure to update this thread if we hear any news about more customization options being added to your Square Online Store order settings.

MillerFarms · ‎04-22-2020

Hey everyone! I am so happy this is being addressed. We are a farm market, offering curbside pickup once a week, and we want at least a couple hours of prep time to package all the items the customer orders on our store. As it stands now, we have curbside pickup available on Fridays, from 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM.

We want to have at least one day prep time, so we are not getting orders the morning of the pick up. As we have already figured out, Square assumes we are only open one day a week (Friday from 2-5,) so the one day of prep time forces customers to place an order for the following week. To combat this in the short term, we turned off all the prep times, and are crossing our fingers we can fill orders, if we get ant day of, but obviously, that is not a business plan we want to implement forever.

Our store itself is open every day, but our online pick up is only open for select times. Maybe the fix is to have two separate operating hours; one for the venue, so prep times can be implemented, and one for the online pickups, so guests cant select a date not offered.

Whatever the fix is, I will be looking out for it, and will be implementing it! Stay safe everyone!

GMcCollum · ‎04-26-2020

I am in the same boat. Need an order cut off option. Prep time would work if everyday was considered a work day. Order cut off times should just be a seperate parameter. The prep time is very restaurant friendly, but not farm friendly. Thanks.

mttoms · ‎05-01-2020

For us, an order coming in after the cutoff time would be scheduled for the next day if they still choose to place it. Thanks for considering this!

MarigoldCafe · ‎05-04-2020

Hello, we launched an online store several weeks ago and have been getting a lot of orders. Firstly, thank you Square for enabling us to make the move online quickly and efficiently. One of the main complaints we get from customers is they cannot schedule their delivery time. We are also not able to set a cutoff time for orders. For instance, we would like to set a cutoff time of 8PM for next day pickup/delivery. And we would like customers to be able to select their delivery time from a selection of delivery windows (i.e. 1pm-2pm, 2pm-3pm, etc.). We are selling bulk food boxes and kits so the current set up makes it difficult. We need more than a 5 hour notice so we've currently set our "prep time" to the next available option, which is 1 business day. But this means delivery and pickup times are determined by the time a customer places an order (+24 hours). We have customers wanting to place orders for picnic baskets for lunch the next day but when they order in the late afternoon or evening, they're only option for pickup/delivery is late afternoon or evening the next day (giving them no option for lunch time). And then orders placed after we close are automatically set for two days later. Is there a way to "rig" this so customers have more options or are there plans to expand pickup and delivery options to accommodate these needs?

L_bmore · ‎05-04-2020

We solved this problem by simply toggling the 'accepting online orders' button to off. What we would love would to have pickup time slots, with a cap for how many people can sign up for each one. We are a takeout only operation with grocery options. People order online starting Wednesday with pickup on Sunday 12-7. So default pickup if people don't choose a pickup time (which we'd like to be able to require people to do) is 12:15. Obviously, in order to maintain social distancing, we don't want everyone to show up at 12:15, so we have been texting every customer on Sunday morning to manually give them pickup time slots. This is a ton of work! It's almost like we need a reservation-style system for pick-ups and we need to be able to set the number of people for each time slot.

isabelle · ‎05-05-2020

Hey @L_bmore!

Thanks for sharing your workaround here. While it does sound tedious, it may be useful to other sellers temporarily.

I reached out to our Online Store team to see where we're at with this feature. They said it is definitely in the works, and a top priority when it comes to the development of feature requests. I cannot provide a launch date publicly, but please know that this is in the works and we'll post an update on this feature in this thread when we have one available.

Thanks for your time and patience.