Will there ever be a way to automatically set specific times for your store to accept online orders?

[flavorcupcakery]

I manage a bakery, and we've been using the Square online store for a while now. It's been extremely helpful for business in many ways, though the biggest qualm I have with it is that there's no feature that allows you to set times when your store will automatically switch from accepting orders to not accepting orders. 

In a bakery atmosphere, we only have a limited supply of each item daily, and we have customers coming in and out of our actual storefront constantly, so it's really difficult for us to keep our online store activated during all business hours, since our inventory is constantly changing and we run the risk of selling out of an item in the shop while someone also orders that same item through the online store (and then we're stuck disappointing customers). Of course we utilize the inventory tracking function, but again - since a bakery's goal is to sell out of items daily and restock with different product the next day, we end up just constantly having to mark items as "unavailable," only to manually reset everything again the next day.  

So for now, we have our employees in the habit of manually toggling the "Accept Online Orders" function off every day a couple hours before closing, and then manually toggling it back on for the next morning. But it's very easy to forget or overlook this sometimes, especially with how busy we are most of the time, and given that you have to go to the Weebly dashboard on an actual computer to do so (which is not always readily accessible for my front staff). 

TLDR: my question is, why can't they make it so you can set specific times for your store to accept online orders, rather than having to manually toggle the feature on and off? Or at least make it so you can do so on the Weebly app, so it can be done on the Square POS tablets instead of going to an actual computer? I find it hard to believe that I'm the only one with this issue! Square, please correct these features!

[BernadetteA]

Hi @flavorcupcakery Thanks for the detailed post. 🙂

If you are tracking inventory, it should update for your online store as well. For example, if you have 10 cupcakes for both in-person and online orders, and someone comes into the store and orders all 10, the online store should then show that the cupcakes are sold out if someone tries to place an order. Is this functioning properly for you? I may be misunderstanding your first example, so please let us know if you are describing something else. 

Have you tried using the Time Based Categories feature for your online store? Items placed in a time-based category can only be purchased during the timeframes you specify combined with any applicable prep times and delivery estimate settings.

[flavorcupcakery]

I’m aware of how the tracking works, but for us it simply isn’t feasible. We offer over 200 different specific cupcake flavors, and we make 17 different ones for our shop each day that rotate. We also have several different flavors of cookies, macarons, etc., and so we have entered each individual product and flavor into our system as separate items, since each one needs its own description, sometimes different pricing, etc. If we wanted to keep our online store and in-person sales through the POS in sync, we would need to have our employees manually select each individual flavor of everything the customer is purchasing, which would be extremely tedious and hold up our lines tremendously. To get around this, we’ve created all-encompassing items (simply “Cupcakes,” “Macarons,” “Brownies,” and so forth) that we use for our in-person sales in the interest of efficiency, and then we simply don’t enter the full quantity of each individual item in the online store, but we still run into problems sometimes. I know it sounds confusing in writing, but it really it’s the only way we’ve been able to make sense of it with a business that doesn’t make things to order like normal restaurants do, and that has such a vast array of product offerings. 

But this is all besides the point - the main point is, I just find it really silly that Square has not made it possible to simply make set hours for your online store to start and stop accepting orders. It’s very inconvenient both for our particular logistical reasons, but also just in general for the sole fact that it relies on a person manually going to toggle the feature on and off every single day (and requires them to do it on a desktop computer rather than on an iPad or mobile device, which is what their entire software is modeled to be used on).