Prevent online orders being placed during non-business hours

[Amanda_Bierock]

I would like to prevent online orders from being placed during non-business hours. We have our online store set-up for pick-up and curbside pick-up of food. I have our business hours entered. Someone can go to our online store during non-business hours and place an order, but won't receive a pick-up time until we reopen. However, I would like to prevent people from even placing an order during non-business hours. I can do that by manually toggling the "Accept online orders" button under Checkout on and off, but I would prefer not to do that twice a day, since it is easy to forget to do and people could be prevented from placing orders if we forget to toggle it back on.

[pessosices · Accepted solution]

@Amanda_Bierock 

Good point!

Maybe that's 2 feature requests as potential solutions this problem:

1. Having the option to only allow orders during Open times

2. When making an order past Open times, have something big & red & un-missable telling the customer that the shop is closed & when the pickup time is

Great perspective! Thank you!

[Joe]

Thanks for also adding your voice here, @Peixoto - we will update everyone here once we have a shareable timeline for bringing this feature to fruition.

Thanks for your patience!

[pgeremia]

Joe,

How about you bring all of this feedback to Management.  This is a SERIOUS issue and is causing people problems with customer experience.  This thread was started a LONG time ago and there is NO movement at all.  You guys are supposed to be responsive to customers and this is NOT happening.  While. I do understand development and test takes time, you guys have not even entered that PHASE.  

I have suggested before that you should DEFAULT functionality to the way it works today.  Then add a USER preference to LIMIT online purchases to BUSINESS HOURS or CONFIGURABLE ONLINE ORDER HOURS.  If you do it this way NOTHING changes for ANYONE unless they alter that setting.

I really would like this escalated to your Product Management team and have a response from them as to when it will be sent to dev. 

In this age of Agile software development with Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing and Continuous Delivery I would expect this feature to be turned around QUITE FAST.

Please give us an update directly from your Product Marketing team.  I will raise this directly to Management outside of this thread if we do not hear something soon.

Thank You,

Peter Geremia

[greenecanteen]

Also, another scenario....say we close early for the day. We want to pause online ordering for this day only, but we want ordering to be available for folks who want to place an order for the future. Almost like being able to set a pause on orders for a specific amount of time and once that time has passed, ordering automatically resumes. Is this option do-able?

This would be a very helpful feature especially during this period of uncertain times.

[agillis87]

We could also really use this feature. If I’m not mistaken in the previous square store orders could not be made after hours. Once we migrated to the new online store we ran into this issue. 

A simple toggle in setting some where: Do you allow after hours orders? YES/NO

Would love this feature. 

[Crackskulls]

We turn off online ordering from my laptop at home AND on the shop ipad, and already today, 5 orders have come through that I had to refund and call the customer.  This is both so unprofessional and so frustrating for customers, I fear I am losing business because of this problem.  Please please help.

[AdamB]

Thanks for posting about that, @Crackskulls. 

I checked with our engineers and it looks like they're working on the checkout process to best handle situations like this. Hopefully it won't be too long before they push out an update for this. Thank you for your patience, everyone!

[pgeremia]

Do you have a status on this?

[BlendCoffeeBar]

Yea it's frustrating to have unhappy customers that put an order in (in our case for food or a drink) and drive by for pickup to find out that we are closed.  Then we have to refund the order - which by the way screws up the Square reporting.  The Square sales report doesn't match the deposit so when booking our sales I have to adjust the accounting for the two days to accommodate.  We need the feature to turn off the ability to put in an online order when we are closed.  

[Suttle]

Yes! This would be very helpful.

[Joe]

Thanks for adding your voice here in support of this feature, @Suttle - we will continue to update this thread with up to date information on progress as we have it. Should anything come down the pipeline, we will update everyone here.

Cheers!

[schindoggies]

Any updates yet on a fix for customers being able to order when we are closed????

[TCSeattle]

Checking in to see if there are any updates. We continue to have this issue on a regular basis.

[Crackskulls]

This is still happening, and the complete lack of interest or support by SQUARE is completely ridiculous.  I am a small business owner, and work the counter 50 hours a week, and I don't have time to keep calling people and apologizing that you guys can't seem to fix this.  Toast is looking pretty good right about now.

[pgeremia]

Many people have asked this over and over and over and over for MONTHS.  But Square has NO answers.

This is actually VERY easy:

1.  Add a new setting that will DEFAULT to work the way it does today.  This setting would be called:  

  # Disable Online Ordering After Business Hours:  OFF

After adding this feature nothing changes for anyone.  For those that WANT this feature they navigate to SETTINGS and change the option to ON.  From that point forward online orders will be DISABLED outside of business hours.

3.  You can also add some other tweaks to this function.

a.  Allow the end user to specify a WINDOW of time before business CLOSE to stop online ordering.  The setting would be tied to above setting.  If above settings is ON then this is enabled:

  # Minutes before close to disable online ordering:  0, 10, 30, 60, 120

c. Allow the end user to specify online ordering business hour override.

  # Override Business Open:  Specify time of day

  # Override Business Close:  Specify time of day

Why is Square not serious about this?  Can you please provide us with your design specification for this FEATURE???  How will it work?  Have you even started the design process?

[Valentina]

While I don't have a timeline to share at this moment, I wanted to be sure to move your feedback over to this thread where others have also expressed interest in this capability. Thank you for taking the time to provide your thorough thoughts with us, @pgeremia. I've moved your post here so we can keep all interest in this feature in one place.

When we have an update to share in regards to this feature, we'll be sure to let this thread know. We appreciate your patience - be sure to stay subscribed to receive notifications about new posts added to this thread.

[TCSeattle]

I would just like to add that there appears to be several other related threads regarding this same issue that are not linked here.  I don't know how to link here, and frankly it doesn't really seem like business owners should be the ones having to gather all the different threads for Square to show how big of a problem this is. There has got to be a better way. 

[schindoggies]

They shopuld be able to order at anytime but have to sepcify the pick up time which should be a drop down that the restaurant creates (i.e. when they are open).  I agree it's crazy and we are looking at Toast as well. 

[poapdx]

Has this feature  ever been applied and I just missed it?

My customers are still ordering past close. Thanks 

[Alex_]

@poapdx

We are still working on implementing new features. We definitely see how it could benefit your business model, and we will be sure to let you know if anything ever changes or if new updates are released. 

[fonuts · Accepted solution]

Well, I'm very sorry to report that my "solution" actually does not work the way I thought it did. After further testing, I discovered that "only certain days and times" only works DURING your actual open hours (like if you have a brunch menu, and a lunch menu, and a dinner menu that each have time limitations during your total open hours). It does not work how I need, to turn of/on my menu outside of my open hours. Sorry to anyone who got as excited as I did about this "solution", but hopefully this still works for some of you. I'm back to waiting for this feature request to be provided...*sigh*

I think I have found a SOLUTION for all of us.

I too have wanted the store to obey my business hours.

THE SOLUTION IS:

Go to your online store dashboard menu

> Items

> Categories

> select category (do the following for each category you need to limit the times customers can buy from your store)

> Availability

> select "Only certain days and times"

> select days and enter times you only want to sell items in  this category. In my case, after selecting this option, it showed defaults to my actual pickup hours and I just changed the start times to 12:00am so customers can order early in the morning before we open if they want, but after I have had time to upload my new inventory amounts

VIOLA!! The store will show items but mark them "Available Later" until the day/time you have entered as available for sale.

Hope this works for you all as it did for me!

[pgeremia]

Thank you..  You. now have done MUCH MORE than Square.  In these times over Covid-19 they NEED to support the ONLINE community MUCH BETTER.  They are ignoring us all!!