Help with time based categories

[gaurangbhatt]

Hello,

We sell daily meals and would like to offer our customers a chance to buy meals one day in advance. Customers can choose to pick-up or get their meal delivered between 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM.

For example: If a customer wants pick-up or delivery of the meal on Monday between 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM, then they will have to place the order on Sunday before 6:00 PM.

This is a huge blocker for me and I tried different combinations of time-based categories (with item prep time to be 1 business day) but it doesn't seem to work.

Please help me.

[gaurangbhatt]

Any ideas or suggestions? - really need this feature else I will have to switch to some other provider.

[AdamB]

Welcome to Seller Community, @gaurangbhatt.

Time-based categories only control when items in the category are shown on the website as available for ordering. It doesn't actually affect when those items can be picked up. Choosing a prep time of a day should let a customer purchase on Sunday for example so that the first available time for pickup or delivery is the next day, though.  You have your pickup & delivery time set to 530PM to 830PM, right?

[gaurangbhatt]

Thank you @AdamB 

Following are my settings. 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM is pick-up/delivery of brunch menu items with 30 minutes lead time (works perfectly fine).

Using the below settings, Tuesday meal (with 1 business day prep time) is visible on Monday but it is marked as "Available Later". I would like the customer to purchase a Tuesday meal on Monday anytime between 9:00 AM - 8:30 PM.

1) Pick-up and delivery hours

2) Item with 1 business day

3) Tuesday pre-order meal category with the above item

 4) In the available item list on the site, this item is shown as available for later (On Monday @ 9:55 AM)

I think the time based category is not just impacting the visibility of an item on that day but also its availability for ordering.

[gaurangbhatt]

If I don't set time-based on the Tuesday Pre-order meal category, then

a) the item is visible on Monday under available items and is available for ordering

b) it shows delivery time after 24 hours (in the example below it is 10:30 AM tomorrow).

This setting works as intended, however, I believe this item will show up on Tuesday as well for ordering to be delivered on Wednesday. Maybe I will have to control this manually but this seems to be a basic feature that should be provided out of the box.