thread Re: Help with time based categories in Orders, Menu Items, Catalog & Fulfilment

Help with time based categories

gaurangbhatt — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 14:45:25 GMT

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.

Re: Help with time based categories

gaurangbhatt — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 17:08:27 GMT

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

Re: Help with time based categories

AdamB — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 21:53:49 GMT

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?

Re: Help with time based categories

gaurangbhatt — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 14:56:40 GMT

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.

Re: Help with time based categories

gaurangbhatt — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 15:04:50 GMT

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.