Is there a way to limit item or category availability depending on time of day? ex. Breakfast

[mksavage]

For online ordering, there needs to be a feature that allows restaurants to limit the availability of certain items depending on the time of day. For example, if your breakfast menu is only available until 3pm, there needs to be an option to make these items unavailable after 3pm.

[sunbirdcapecod]

We are in the exact same predicament. Square Online currently offers only one meal period: Open until Closed. Candidly, this is a serious oversight that desperately needs to be addressed. It is detrimental to the majority of food service businesses who otherwise love Square, us included.

For example, do you eat one meal per day? No. Do you eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner each day? I hope not! Then why would we be selling you (and getting our restaurants set up for) dinner during breakfast service? We wouldn't. Or breakfast during dinner service? We wouldn't!

It's a fundamental problem in the current workflow of your user experience, both front and backend. But it is fixable...

SOLUTIONS:

A) Disable products when they aren't available so customers can't order them.

B) Fade them down and disable link-throughs, but keep them visible so customers know they exist. This way they can come back at the right times to order what they saw and wanted.

C) Make it easy for customers to see when certain products have limited availability, and what those times are.

Visual:
"Flag" or "label" items with limited windows of availability, site-wide.

Visual:
Small colored text band with availability display, perhaps located under Item Title text. Or as a "ribbon" over the image itself (similar to "sold out" etc) so it doesn't throw off the tidy grid layout vertically.

Possible labels...
"Available from 7am-2pm", "from 7am-2pm", "7am—2pm only", or even just "7am—2pm"

* the colored background calls customer's attention to the issue so they don't miss it.

Feature Request:
Add a checkbox: "Always Available" (checked off by default - aka "active")

When un-checked, below that, 2 time-based dropdown menus "From" and "Until" are enabled.

Store owner can set item availability window there.

Bonus: Might want to add some conditions that confirm it's a viable window and throw an error message if it's not.

Adding this feature allows food service businesses to disable certain products and menu items during different meal periods. In other words, it accurately reflects their menus, and how they run their businesses.

It also gives customers the ability to see all of what the business offers—even though some things might be unavailable (aka "disabled"). They otherwise won't know what they don't know exists.

Until this problem is resolved, food service businesses are being forced to sell morning stuff at night, night stuff during the morning, and everything in between which makes no sense at all.

As a  co-owner of one, I truly feel for ALL small businesses right now, and I hope this helps us all out in some small way. Chins up!

[Alex_]

@casadyc, @LordPies, @sunbirdcapecod,

Thank you for providing each perspective and insight on this request. Times are especially tough right now, so we definitely understand the importance of providing you with the best tools needed to succeed. 

We appreciate the patience and we will be sure to let you know if anything changes.

[nika]

Hello @Cibo-

Regrettably there's not a way to have two separate menus with items available during specific times. This is a feature request.

As a workaround, you could make a "lunch" category and a "dinner" category, displaying their respected items in each. That way when customers click on the "lunch" category, only the options available during lunch will show. You can even write up a little disclaimer on your home page about lunch and dinner items being available only during a certain time for an additional layer of info.

If any other questions come up please let us know!

[mksavage]

Hi @Alex_! Is there any update on this? Or a way to know if this feature is even in the queue for development? This really is an essential feature especially during COVID when 100% of our sales are online for takeout. Without this feature, we are having to consider switching online ordering and POS systems. Before I do that, it would be helpful to know if this feature might be coming soon. Thank you!

[LordPies]

Last weekend's sales, I still had people confused with their orders and this is for not letting us being able to restrict items to a specific date and time window for pickups.

I cannot change the date and time of orders to update them to their correct pickup dates and times. I'm okay with doing the extra work. I want my customers to get an updated email with a correct date and time after i set them on the correct path. I use modifiers theyre required to fill in and they still get incorrect dates and times all due to  turnaround time settings.

This problem makes the "orders" feature of your ipad app inaccurate to use and causes a host of other micro-issues.

[LordPies]

Square created the best POS system I've used and I really loathe that this derails my train. Be nice to be able to change order's pickup date and times at least to keep things going nicely and resolve errors. 

[Alex_]

Hey @LordPies & @mksavage,

Once we have more information. We will be sure to include it in this post. Thank you for hanging on. 

[LordPies]

Following, looking forward to seeing what happens.

[hratchad]

Hi folks.  I have a breakfast, lunch and dinner restaurant. How can I cut off/stop customers from being able to order breakfast after 10:30 and lunch after 2:30pm?

[eight]

I know how to apply business hour to the store but is there any way to add cutoff time on certain items?  Like 11AM for breakfasts, 3PM for lunch specials, and such.  I looked everywhere but couldn't find such options.