Is it possible to limit the amount of orders placed online within a certain time frame?

[CoatCheckCoffee]

This reply was created from merging an existing thread: Is it possible to limit the amount of orders placed online within a certain time frame?

Our coffee shop was bombarded with online orders all at once and everyone coming to pick them up all at once. It overloaded our staff and became extremely hard to keep up and get our guests served in a timely manner. Is it possible to limit the amount of orders that come in within 15min, 30min or an hour?

[dp1]

I have the same question.  We are going to pickup orders at my restaurant and need to limit

sales.

thanks

[Valentina]

Really sorry to hear about the flood of incoming orders, @CoatCheckCoffee!

It looks like another seller asking this question in the Seller Community here in this thread. Although this isn't currently something you're able to do with the Square Online Store, I've moved your posts here so that we can keep interest in this feature all together.

Our eCommerce team has been hard at work developing and improving helpful features for your Online Store, especially those related to pickup and delivery. Stay subscribed to this thread to be notified, as we'll be sure to update this thread if we hear any news about this feature becoming available, @CoatCheckCoffee and @dp1.

[Woodironeatery]

We have a small restaurant and are now down to only one employee because of covid.  Because of this, we cannot handle a large amount of orders at one time...Is there a way to limit online ordering to so many orders per hour?  Or, for example, allowing 2 online orders every 15 minutes?? 

[Jlrisner]

I need to figure out a way to limit the number of customers who can order through the online store during anytime period.  We are a restaurant that is doing takeout only right now and over the dinner rush get bombarded with tickets (a good problem I know). Even with adjusting prep time windows, you could essentially get a infinite number of orders for a certain pickup time. Plus it’s a pain to adjust prep time constantly. Typically prep takes 15-20 mins, but when you have tickets stacking it changes obviously. I don’t have the time to get on weebly when we are slammed to adjust it to 30 mins or hour prep time. 

Is there a way to do this? Accept only 10 orders for pickup at 5. 10 orders for pickup at 5:15. 10 orders for pickup at 530. And so on...

[AshleyK]

Hey! Thanks for reaching out and welcome to the Seller Community. As of right now, this is still a popular feature request that we are tracking, but it is on our road map for future updates. While I don't have a release date or a timeline, I can keep an eye on this thread and make any announcements once the feature is available. 

[Sourdoughnuts]

We are a new small donut business and doing delivery only at the moment. Is there a way to set a maximum amount of orders that can be placed on a specific business day and have the system automatically start scheduling the next orders on the next available business day? We are getting swamped and cannot stay awake 24/7 to manage the store hours and prep time to catch orders that are over our max prep and deliveries in a day. 

[ashc]

Hey @Sourdoughnuts,

I moved your post to an existing thread that goes over how to stagger your online orders per hour where you can set how many you take within that time.

Full pausing and setting a maximum for the day isn't yet available but there's some other existing threads if you search "Limit Online Orders" within the Community that other sellers have posted about. 

[dp1]

We would also like a way to limit orders.  I need to limit the number of orders per day to a manageable level so we can handle the volume and make pick up safe.

thanks

[JustinC]

@dp1

I moved you to a thread more relevant to your post so we can track the need for an order limit feature. We'll let you know here if anything changes.

[mattd]

Hi @Woodironeatery,

This is a current feature request and on Square's roadmap. There isn't a way to currently limit the number of orders placed within a given time frame. Here is a thread with more detail and discussion on this.

[Woodironeatery]

Thank you for adding me to the existing thread! 

[dsaxena_pdx]

I have my online store up and running (https://desipdx.square.site) and we got totally crushed today with 3 $100+ orders all coming in within 10 minutes. We're a small food cart and definitely not setup to handle that kind of a crush. I swear that when I was first setting up the site, there was an option somewhere in the setting to limit the maximum online sale but I cannot for the life of me find it again. Am I imagining that I saw this? If not, can someone tell me exactly under settings I'll find it???

Thanks!

[isabelle]

Hey @dsaxena_pdx-

Do you mean limiting the number of orders per hour? 

If so, take a look at this best answer. Let me know if you have any questions about this! 💡

[Hangspacerva]

Hi all - I cannot seem to find this feature - but we were inundated with orders, couldn’t keep up, and last week I figured out how to control the amount of orders that come in within a designated time - but I can’t seem to find it anywhere now?  Can anyone point me in the right direction?  Thanks so much for any help. 

[JustinC]

@Isbabelle gotcha covered on this thread. Check out the best answer 🙂

[Jennyb915]

Hi,

We own a Pie Shop with two locations. We are currently using our Online Store to sell Pies and cookies one day a week for curbside pickup. We want to now start offering Curbside Pickup two days a week. I need to be able to limit the number of pies and cookies we can sell each day. I'm wondering if there is a way to do that. We currently use the Inventory, but how does that work at limiting sales by day of the week? For example, we can only produce 20 Apple Pies per day. If I set my Apple Pie Inventory at 40 pies (for the 2 days a week) how do I make sure we don't sell 35 Apple Pies on Wed. and only 5 on Friday? I need it to be limited by day of the week.

Thanks for the help!

[JustinC]

This is not doable with Square's Online Store, but we're tracking interest on this thread I moved you to. 

We'll update you here with news around this feature request. 

@Jennyb915

[isabelle · Accepted solution]

Hey @CoatCheckCoffee and others! I've got an update on this feature 💥

We've just launched Order Staggering for Square Online Store, which lets sellers set the number of orders they can take every 15 minutes (so that they don't get flooded with too many orders at once that they can't fulfill).

This can be found in our dashboard > Settings > Pickup & Delivery > select a location > edit Hours.

Let me know if you have any questions about this, or any additional feedback regarding this update 💡

[porqueno]

While we're glad this feature exists, it doesn't work correctly. It often lets through more orders than we've set it to allow (allows 9 when we've set it for 6, etc). Additionally, when it you turn on scheduled pickups, it totally breaks the limiting functionality. Support has confirmed this is broken, I'm just trying to figure out a fix. Right now our store is almost unusable due to this.

[nika]

Sounds like something is off @porqueno. It shouldn't be allowing for more than what you've selected. Could you please get a hold of our Support Team when you have a moment so they can check this out for you?