Feature Request: Set up specific date and time selection for Square Online orders (Pre-orders)

[gelatofiasco]

The title of this post has been edited from the original: How to set up date and time selection for Square Online orders

Hi,

We quickly built a Square/Weebly Online Store this week so that people could place contactless/curbside orders for our gelato shop. It's working great and I love that the tickets print out when it's time to make the order.

We are also implementing a local delivery service where people can preorder with us and we'll deliver it on Friday night. Right now we're doing it by email to take their item order and we respond back with a Square Invoice to capture payment. Has anyone successfully found a way to do local delivery with the Online Store platform?

It would be awesome if besides Pickup or Shipping, merchants could toggle on a Local Delivery button and the merchant could set a few options, such as "Delivery on Friday night, 4-7pm," "Delivery on Saturday afternoon, 12-6pm." Maybe with an option to assign a fee, but that's less important during this emergency response.

Thank you and be safe.

[#2]

@lonestar31 @MCTMN 

We are currently testing Batch Processing in our Beta Community, which may help you out. This is another update to allowing pre-orders on your online store.  We'd love for you to join in the test and provide feedback.

To get started:

Please join our Square Online testing group.
Once accepted there are instructions in the group of how to get started in the test.

[#3]

Hi all! Thank you for jumping into. your thread for pre-orders and more customizable delivery/pick up options. We're excited that this feature is now moving into Beta testing, and we'd love to have you check it out.

Please take a few minutes to ready our Beta Recruiting post- and make sure you're a fit. We're looking to get his launched in the next few days. Also if you've replied to this thread, we will be sending you information on this test via DM as well.

[#4]

The title of this post has been edited from the original: How to set up date and time selection for Square Online orders

Hi,

We quickly built a Square/Weebly Online Store this week so that people could place contactless/curbside orders for our gelato shop. It's working great and I love that the tickets print out when it's time to make the order.

We are also implementing a local delivery service where people can preorder with us and we'll deliver it on Friday night. Right now we're doing it by email to take their item order and we respond back with a Square Invoice to capture payment. Has anyone successfully found a way to do local delivery with the Online Store platform?

It would be awesome if besides Pickup or Shipping, merchants could toggle on a Local Delivery button and the merchant could set a few options, such as "Delivery on Friday night, 4-7pm," "Delivery on Saturday afternoon, 12-6pm." Maybe with an option to assign a fee, but that's less important during this emergency response.

Thank you and be safe.

[ashc]

Hey @pomellaoakland,

I've merged your post into an existing feature request thread for this feature where it's being tracked for our Product Team.

I don't have a timeline on when this will be available but I would encourage you to check out our Beta Community to join and potentially get access to new features first when we test them out.
 

[leqholidays]

@pomellaoakland, you know customers won't read an item description lol!

Our bakery's solution outlined in this post might work for you:

https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/General-Discussion/How-to-set-up-date-and-time-selection-for-Squa...

We made 2 separate Square sites – one for normal online orders and one that gets updated for the current holiday.

http://leqholidayorders.square.site/

Look into using Shipping as a fulfillment method for date-restricted items. This will turn off pickup location and date selection as it appears now. You then replace 'em with your own on each item by use Options to create a matrix of pickup days specific to each product. Separate your holiday menus by giving them each their own category if they're all on the same site and shown at the same time. Or implement subcategories. You can apply cutoff times to all items in the Thanksgiving PreOrders category by doing bulk inventory updates with importing/exporting a .xls spreadsheet and changing stock for that category to zeros.

However, if you have Pickup/Delivery enabled for other items on the site, it will still prompt a customer to select pickup/delivery upon entering your site, and show them an inaccurate fulfillment day. A popup, like we have on this page kind of intercepts that user flow. A banner wouldn't hurt at the top too.

https://orderlequartier.square.site/s/order

You could also try creating a new location called "Thanksgiving PreOrders All Locations" and only have your holiday menu items visible at that location. Probably still need to incorporate popups and banners to make people see that location option if you have a list of storefronts to choose from. You will lose the ability to filter orders by location natively in Square's Reporting and Order dashboards if you *actually* have multiple storefronts, though. Easy to do via Google with order receipts and automatic labels.

Send me a message if you have other questions or find your own wacky solution. This is my favorite topic!!

[Patchwork]

Thank you for this work around! I'm really glad you shared this so at least something will work to get rid of that preset date on the emails customers receive. We do a really big 2 day bedding plant sale and the amount of emails with questions about the double dates was too much. 

Square this is still not a fix. Please still fix this issue so we don't have to waste time redoing everything with work arounds 🙂

[elmobakingco]

Yes, PLEASE have a feature where pick-up/delivery can be scheduled by the merchant on a specific date(s)!  I.e. not scheduled by the customer based on business days but for the upcoming holidays I would like to be able for customers to pre-order items for December 24th as early as December 1st (and not allowing customers for them to be able to preorder for a day earlier than the 24th)

[mtnoven]

Fully agreed - so many businesses, ours included, need an integrated system that allows for pre-ordering and selection of pick up days.

[Proper]

Chiming in to say YES!!! This is a desperately needed feature!

[Proper]

Hear hear!!

[jimmyvzqz]

You can do it on the checkout settings. 

[pomellaoakland]

@leqholidays I appreciate your thorough response!!  Grateful that you reached out to help.  

A few questions:

"We made 2 separate Square sites – one for normal online orders and one that gets updated for the current holiday."

Can you walk me through how you did this?  Do you mean 2 separate "locations" and then a store site for each one?  Or one "location" just two separate pages? 

And also do you find that having two sites impacts your store traffic (do customers get confused?) or data analytics?  

"You can apply cutoff times to all items in the Thanksgiving PreOrders category by doing bulk inventory updates with importing/exporting a .xls spreadsheet and changing stock for that category to zeros."

Also I don't quite understand what you mean here - how would bulk updating item inventory impact cutoff times?

I really appreciate you reaching out with suggestions!  

[spoonline]

I am wondering if it is possible to set a fixed pick-up time (a certain date) for select items in our online ordering menu.  I see options of minutes/hours/weeks.  I have two family-style meal options that are only available for pick up on a set day, while the rest of the menu can be picked up 30 mins after ordering.  Is this even possible>