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Prevent online orders being placed during non-business hours

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.

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@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!

 

Pesso - he/him
Pesso's Ices & Ice Cream
Square Super Seller - I'm here to help!

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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!

 

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46 REPLIES 46

Hopefully this worked for you. If so, maybe mark it as "best answer" so more people will see it.

I actually have to give credit to the support tech who suggested this to me yesterday. I was calling support regarding the inventory sync issue which continues to occur, and is frankly a much bigger issue for us. But after he finished gathering my incident info for that, I asked if there had been any progress on the store hours feature request, and he said try this. It is very deceiving, because the language for the other default availability option makes you think it will do exactly this, but it doesn't. Go figure.

And I also discovered that you can add multiple times that the store is open for selling, which is helpful for us because we upload our new daily inventory the night before, and I was able to add an evening time frame 7pm-11:45pm (it only allows 15minute increments), and then 12am through normal closing time 2pm each day. This allows our customers to purchase early the night before and all morning before we are open, but stops selling when we close for the day and gives me time to adjust next day inventory before uploading and starting to "pre-sell" the next day.

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It does not give me the option.  I think someone else started the thread?  But that is the BEST answer so far!  Thank you!

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Do you know if this has been fixed?  This post is form 2 years ago and it seems to be same issue for us.  Thanks!  

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Just chiming in to say I still wish they would give us this feature, but I don't think they have, even after all these years. 

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I think it is pretty lousy of SQUARE to not even TRY to solve this issue.  Maybe I will talk to Jack and let him know that the Square product team is ignoring a pretty serious deficiency.  Maybe people should start moving over to TOAST that does support this feature.  

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