Cutoff time and more customizable hours for online orders?

[RealTimeBreads]

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

[lemondogs]

Let's say you:

1. Configure a store to be open Thu,Fri,Sat,Sun.

2. Configure the preparation time for an item to 2 days

3. Place an order for that item on Monday.

Square Online Store will show the soonest available pickup time as Saturday -- only taking into account the days in which you are *open* as preparation times. (ie: 2 days from Thursday)

There are two issues with this:

A) At bare minimum this is not described anywhere that I could see. It would be nice if there were a tooltip describing that preparation time for items only counts days in which you have hours set.

B) Why *should* it only apply to days in which the store is open? Perhaps this should be configurable as either "Applies to all days" or "Applies only to days in which your store is open".  (Is it even useful to anyone to only count prep days as days you're open? I suppose for preparing packaged/shipped items?)

Why do I want this option to apply to *all* days and not just days in which we are open? Because we'd like to be able to accept orders for pickup 2 days later, no matter what day they place the order.

Here's some examples using the hours and conditions described above:

- Place an order for a 2 day prep item on Monday and first available pickup slot would be Thursday (the first day the store is open that is beyond 2 days from the order date).

- Place an order for a 2 day prep item on Wednesday and first available pickup timeslots would be Friday

- Place an order for a 2 day prep item on Saturday and first available pickup slot would be the following Thursday because the store isn't open 2 days later (Monday).

[twowhales]

The same issue arises although on a much narrower time frame in our coffee shop. We open (our doors) at 11am but the earliest someone can pick up a food order is 11.15am as we have a 15min prep time. We are able to prepare the order for 11am as we have to be in the kitchen preparing for orders anyway.

This is a general issue where adding prep time to earliest opening time does not work for everyone. Having the option to allow:

if (time_of_order + prep_time) < earliest_opening_time

     pickup_time = earliest_opening_time

would probably do it. To make it really flexible I would add this option alongside  weebly>Pickup & delivery prep time for each item. A check box would do.

I hope that helps.

[AshleyK]

Hi @lemondogs and @twowhales thank you for posting! I've merged your post with an existing thread so we can keep all these feature requests and feedback in one place. You will find that some sellers have been able to find decent workarounds here as well. 

[JustinC]

Hey @elajeanbee - I merged you to a relevant thread where the convo about pickup and delivery is happening. Read up on workarounds and configurations implemented by various Sellers that you can hopefully adopt for your biz. Feel free to @ any Seller to learn more about their set up and to bounce ideas off each other. 

I hope this helps. 

[lemondogs]

@twowhales  Wanna know what's even more ridiculous about the existing pickup time system?

That formula that you provided *is exactly* what it appears to allow for any days *after* your first day open in the week. Here's some examples to illustrate:

1. Store is configured to be open 12pm-6pm Thursday - Sunday. Closed Mon-Wed.

2. Prep time is configured to be 30 minutes

When a customer orders an item that's configured to use that global 30 minute prep time, they're provided these times for pickup (provided nobody has already taken an available slot):

• Thursday: 12pm - 6pm
• Friday: 12pm - 6pm
• Saturday: 12pm - 6pm
• Sunday: 12pm - 6pm

So in this case our preparation time isn't being taken into account until an order is placed *during* our hours.

I think there should be a checkbox that says "Item preparation time begins counting within store hours" which then changes the available pickup time slots to start at 12pm + prep time. Granted it would also be nice to not allow pickups at exactly our closing time as well, as people are frequently late for their pickups.

[KnightKettle]

I want to close my store at a certain time on a certain day. Could that be done automatically or do i have do physically do it? Thanks!

[Joe]

Hi there, @KnightKettle 👋 Thanks for reaching out to us here on the Seller Community! Happy to have you join us! We hope this space proves to be a helpful resource as you grow your business with Square.

Limiting your Online Store open hours available to place is orders is definitely doable! I've gone ahead and merged your post into an existing thread of Sellers who were also looking for this information. Take a look at this Best Answer from Adam - it should give you all the resources needed to help set your hours.

Let us know if you have any clarifying questions! We are here to help.

[Zahir]

Unfortunately that doesn't work .. our pickup hours are set to 11:30a to 7p   everyday of the week.   Tonight for the 4th time this month we had an order come through at 7:57p.   Kitchen has been closed for almost an hour and the worst part about it... required information for the order is not all there.

Required info:   Name, email, phone number,   Credit card Number, exp, cvvc and zip.  Order came through without an email, phone number, cvvc and zip

[bols17mke]

We are reopening as a prepared meal service.  We want to do the following:

Accept orders until 3 pm on Friday for either pickup on Monday or delivery on Tuesday.  

Orders received after 3 pm on Friday would be for one week from Monday pickup or one week from Tuesday delivery.

How do we set the order cutoff for following week and then allow subsequent orders to be fulfilled the week after?

[AdamB]

Thanks for asking about that, @bols17mke.

To do that you'll need to set your prep time to something like 3 days. As soon as the time goes past 3PM on Friday, 3 days will fall after 3PM on Monday and push the next pickup time to the Monday of the following week. You might have to use a longer prep time to make sure that the delivery date is different.