Hi. Hope everyone is doing well in these upside down times. I
'm relatively new to Square & its integration to Weebly. But have spent a good amount of time architecting solutions (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ptlopez/) for different industries and am volunteering my time to help local shops transform to curbside or retail-to-go. You can reach me via email at pedro@thefieldhousecanaan.com.
About 4 weeks ago, we started CurbsideWithLove.com/SoMa.
This local caterer (good friends) had NEVER done on-line orders before. They had used Square POS before for their retail operations.
During this crisis, they are open for pickup 4-7PM on Thur (BBQ), Fri (Pizza/Fish), and Sat (Food Truck). We set up all their items, locations and such in Square. We have a fairly simple Weebly on-line store that has separate pages for each of the days - and uses Square Synch.
This is a summary of our past 3 weeks. All in all, very positive!
One takeaway is that the idea of pre-orders - where customers order at least 1 hour prior to opening and often on earlier days - is here to stay.
This second chart is really where I need help. We allow pre-ordering and we allow customers to select their desired pickup time.
Each set of bars represents a 15 minute prep time slot. 1600 is 4PM. The green bar represents where our pickup times are landing from a prep standpoint over past 3 weeks. The black bar is specifically on Saturdays with our Food Truck menu. And the red is this past Saturday.
You can see that 1800 (or 6PM) is normally our peak for pickups - but this past Saturday was an even higher spike - where that 31% was actually on a large volume of orders. We just didn't see it coming and we didn't have the kitchen capacity to keep up with it. The result was that we had customers wait much longer than expected for their meals. We communicated our best and they were very understanding and appreciative of all of our efforts.
But clearly, this is something we want to better manage going forward. Here is where I am looking for help ... How do other Square/Weebly on-line stores manage these demand spikes for customer success?
While I would love for a technical solution that can either have early warnings or (better yet) not allow customers select pickup times that are already over-subscribed, it probably will take some time. Are there non-technical solutions that others have used to manage these spikes?
Other issues we'd love to hear ways in which folks have overcome:
1) Customers who were minimally aware of the pickup time they selected - where we need to adjust it after the order has been placed.
2) Stressing the importance of a texting phone number in addition to email for coordinating curbside pickup.
Lastly, to do the data analysis above, it took me several hours to pull Square transaction data and to marry it with Weebly on-line store orders. I needed to do this in order to understand when orders were placed (Square) and compare to the desired pickup date/time (Weebly).
Many thanks for all your support to this point. As I said in starting, I feel like we are in pretty good shape. We are just really concerned about disappointing customers during these order spikes. That is our priority.
Thanks,
Pete
