Restaurant hours

[capsicum]

Using Square for Restaurants Free, Weebly Online Store for online orders

Our hours are 11:30am to 7:00pm. The order processing time is set to 15 minutes. We take online orders up until closing. But, if I have the hours set to 7:00pm, any orders placed in the last fifteen minutes are told that pickup will be the next day.  If i set the hours to 7:30 (as i have them now) it allows orders up until we turn off system (another seemingly unnecessary hassle), but the website says "Pickup until 7:30" which makes our customers, who normally dont search the entire site for our actual hours, think we are open until 7:30.

Here is what I would like to see...

My hours listed as 11:30 to 7:00.

Customers able to order until 7:00.

The system to automatically switch from "Accepting Online Orders" to not at a specified time, say, the hours we are open.

Is that too much to ask? Is this something that is fixable on my end? Am I just missing something? I can understand if that is the fact, as options for many features are spread amongst the settings in different ways.

[ryanwanner]

Hello @capsicum !

The way the Online system is set up is to stop allowing same-day sales when your closing time is closer than whatever the processing set time is. In your example, the last same-day order would be at 6:45. The only way around that is to change your processing time to be immediate.

I understand why it's set this way, although I don't necessarily agree with it. The dev team's rationale is that you want to be heading out the door at 7:00, not still making orders. Being in the restaurant industry for wayyyyy too long, I know that never happens regardless of when the last order hits. I'm hoping we can convince @AdamB and the Online team to seriously consider allowing same-day orders up until closing time regardless of processing time.

As for the Accepting Orders changing at the close of business, that would definitely be a feature request. I can tell you that when we first launched the online store, we had a few orders after hours where the customer was grumbly about having to wait until the next day, but once people actually took the time to read the instructions on the webpage (and a bunch of new back end coding from the developers that brought the pickup time to the front of the page!), our complaints stopped. Now, people actually pre-plan their orders for pickup first thing in the morning. We usually walk into the day with 2-3 orders sitting on our printer for am pickup. I think this is wonderful--any way people want to give me money is a good thing!

[AdamB]

Thanks for highlighting accepting orders right up to closing regardless of prep time, @ryanwanner, and hello, @capsicum!

I've shown your comments to the Square Online team; I know automating accepting orders is something that comes up a lot. You can do this using time-based categories, but it's not quite the same as a broader option that would make setting hours a single global setting.

[ryanwanner]

@AdamBNot to hijack the thread or anything, but the challenge I see with time-based categories is that the customers can't preorder items from those categories when the category is deactivated. Perhaps a little code snippet could be thrown in saying if a customer has scheduled an order for a time where the category is available then they can order those items?

[AdamB]

That's one possible solution! I brought your feedback to the Square Online team so they can consider it for any future updates to store hours, prep times, and time-based categories.