Order Limiting Broken

[Basilisk]

Our order limiting at our restaurant has not been working for over 3 weeks now and we can't get a response from Square or Weebly on when it might be fixed.  We also just found out that our neighbors are having the same issue; tickets just roll in whenever, no throttling of any kind.  We've tried reseting default settings on the website and also creating a brand new site from scratch.  Anybody else having these issues or have any suggestions on how to fix?

Thanks!

[AshleyK]

Hi @Basilisk! I have a pretty lengthy description below for what could be going on, but I think it would help to try and lower your pickup limits and seeing if that helps. 

The time frame for pickup order blocking is actually a rolling time block that iterates every 5 minutes. For example, if I have a pickup order limit of 4, place an order, and the pickup time is supposed to be 2:00, the system checks to see if there’s 4 orders in the time block of 1:45-2:00pm or not. If there are 4 orders in that time block it iterates once and now looks at 1:50-2:05pm.

If there are 4 orders in the block of 1:50-2:05pm it’s going to iterate once and then look in 1:55-2:10pm. If there’s only 3 orders in that period, then it’ll schedule for 2:10pm. If at any point during the iteration, you mark an order as complete TECHNICALLY it frees up a time slot in that period for another order. This can cause instances where we see things, for example, like 5 orders ready at once.

There’s also a ton of factors that play into this-like if you have 3 people who have completely placed an order and their pickup time is 1:20pm and a 4th person has started an order, is in checkout and has gotten the scheduled time of 1:20 but hasn’t finished their order it’s within the iteration and will allow them to have an order time of 1:20 as well, which leads to instances where there’s 5-6 orders places in one time slot.

What our developer suggested, if you are getting overwhelmed, is trying to balance your prep time and orders per 15 minutes till you get a good flow. For example lowering to 3 orders per 15 minutes and then increasing prep time to 30 minutes. If that makes it too low volume, try keeping the prep time but going back to 4 orders per 15 minutes or staying 3 per 15 minutes and decreasing prep time back to 15 minutes.

[Basilisk]

Hi Ashley,

I've gotten this same answer from multiple sources that have all reached out to the same dev for answers.  I hate to just flat out say it but it's a broken system and the developer that is providing the answer isn't even in the ballpark with how it's supposed to work or how it was working.  Increasing and decreasing the prep time is only going to affect the first few orders until the flow kicks in and it just starts stacking as normal once the ticket buildup extends past the longest prep time...Also, as the dev described the system that would make it 4 orders per 5 minutes, which is just silly from a restaurant perspective.  It was working for us the whole month of July perfectly, spacing orders just as they should have been.  Something changed around the 5th of August and it's been chaos ticketing ever since. 

If possible could you reach out to a different developer and see what they say?

[AshleyK]

@Basilisk I can push your feedback forward for sure, because I can see just how frustrating this would be to deal with. I believe the issue is lying in the fact that customers can have orders sitting in their carts and essentially skip the checkout flow limits if they don't place the order right away. Right now there is no way to fix this, but we are tracking feedback on it daily. 

[Basilisk]

I don't even think that that is what's happening, i can't imagine that multiple unrelated customers are leaving items in their carts and then completing the orders 30 minutes later at the exact same time causing the tickets to time travel backward in front of other tickets.  It feels like the If/Then code in the system is broke.