Feature request: Pause Online Orders if Certain Number of Orders is Reached Within a Set Timeframe

[phillynook]

Square allows the ability to temporarily pause online orders, and also allows staggering of orders, but customers seem to ignore the assigned pick up time and show up right away anyway-- and then have to wait, while staff has to rush to try to get a blitz of online orders done-- along with fulfilling orders placed by customers in person.

Another solution that Square offers is to allow online pickups within preassigned time frames, but we need a smarter more proactive solution that pauses acceptance of online orders after a preassigned threshold is met. 

Again, staggering orders means nothing if the customers don't pay attention to the assigned time.

We need a smarter solution (as outlined above).

Thank you!

[Donnie-M]

@phillynook 

I’ve had this exact problem, and here’s what I’ve learned:

You don’t need a “smart auto-pause.”
You need a system—and you have to use it.

If customers are ignoring pickup times, you’ve got two real issues:

1. They’re being trained—by you—that it’s okay to show up early and still get served fast.

2. Your kitchen throughput isn’t matching your order pacing, meaning prep times and batch sizes need rebalancing.

What’s worked for us:

• Adjust prep times by dish. Some items need longer buffer.

• Set tighter windows: fewer orders per 15 min, but increase that number if you’ve got a crew that can handle it.

• During blitz periods, I do pause orders manually. It takes 5 seconds. You can also tap individual orders to delay fulfillment time.

You’re not wrong to want a smarter system—but don’t rely on automation to replace operator discipline. Square gives us solid controls; we just have to use them consistently.

We run four cafes with heavy online volume. I’ve never seen a single tech solution that replaces having a human with eyes on the flow.

Don't mistake customer service for lack of standards.  Be the best, not the best at accommodating a few.  And just for the record, I remember when we had NONE of the pacing that we have now with square online.  I personally have been in many of the betas rolling out these features and maybe soon we can skip to the AI enabled feature to have the machine monitor our order volume, product mix, and staffing to know dynamically and intelligently when an order will be done based on all those factors and the weather.

Donnie

Breaker of Things | Builder of Systems

[phillynook]

@Donnie-M 

Thanks so much for sharing your experience!  Great to hear from another problem solver in the trenches :-).

Our challenge is more the former... a customer places their order and then showing up right away.  Fortunately, nobody has complained about the wait-- it just adds to the pressure of our 8:30am peak rush, when we have the online ticket printer spitting out orders one after the other, and we're also taking in-person orders.  In the past, we've circled the pick-up time on the customer pick-up ticket, to draw their attention to the stated pick-up time.  Maybe we need to start doing that again during peak times.  We certainly don't want to rebuke customers for showing up early, so it will take some tact.

The pacing of orders (>90% espresso bar orders) as we have them set up in Square is fine, since we're fulfilling orders on-time or earlier than the designated (staggered) pick up time.  Good suggestion though!  

We'll try the manual pause if we get blitzed... it will take a few seconds to pause, and then we've got to remember to turn online ordering back on, so it's a couple more things to think about when we are already in maximum hustle mode.  Hence, the dream wish of Square automatically pausing orders (at a preset # of orders in a given time interval) rather than staggering.

Ultimately, the challenge is matching our perfectionist ideals with reality, and making sure our customers understand that peak times will require a longer wait.  Getting on a major urban highway at 8:30am and not expecting traffic is a recipe for frustration.

Reading your insights was helpful and much appreciated!  Open to any other thoughts you might have.

Thanks again!

[Donnie-M]

@phillynook The pause option now is not indefinite if you hit the stopwatch in the orders tab on the pos, you can basically hit a 30 minutes pause to catch up. and it will auto turn back on.  I don't use the automatically increase prep time 15 mins that often, but I think as a whole, the industry and customer base is used to pick up times, but people do try to show up as quick as possible sometime.  One thing that does help is marking the orders complete on the kds or in square where it will send your order is ready text.  That actually trains the customers too.  I just like to stick up for you as an owner that you are doing good enough and that it is ok to not be perfect.  The most important thing is to have a system.  You can manage a system, you can't manage people.

[phillynook]

@Donnie-M Ironically, after all this talk about systems, I think we are using 2 different POS systems.  We've been using Square Register ever since when we first started using Square, nearly 10 years ago, since as a bakery & coffee roastery, our needs are in between that of a full service restaurant and that of an online retailer-- since we're counter service only (no table service; and immediately prepared food kitchen orders are much less frequent than prepared drink orders) and we also ship coffee all over the country.  

Thus, I think some of the features you're talking about... stopwatch on the orders tab and the automatically increase prep time 15 minutes option... we don't have on our Square Register.

But we can turn off all online orders and turn it back on again, if we need to do so.  It just involves a few more steps, and it appears to be an indefinite pause, until we turn online orders back on again.  The other (more extreme) option we have entertained has been carving out a 1/2 hour window during our max peak time of 8:15am to 8:45 am Tues, Wed, Thurs (when everyone is in a rush to get to the office). 

We know of some local cafes that have gotten rid of online ordering altogether since the end of the pandemic.  But, we want to do our best to balance the online and in-person orders-- to serve our customers better, and stay competitive.

I am definitely all for establishing systems and managing them (people are way more challenging!) and appreciate your thoughts & shared experience!

Thank you for your praise; as quality-focused owner/operators, we certainly have our strengths & challenges, and we try to do our best-- realizing that perfect is impossible, but yet we do aim to be as close as possible-- at least under our current model, which is always subject to further evolution, after 20 years, and still going strong.

[Donnie-M]

@phillynook Oh, very interesting, let me look into this.  I am assuming that you use the Point of Sale version of the app and not the restaurants version?  is that correct?

I think this is a calf we won't have to lick all over again.

[phillynook]

@Donnie-M My bad!  Just realized the stopwatch icon is indeed on our mobile phone app and Square register POS.  We used it today, to pause orders at the peak of our 8:30am rush, and it brought some relief, and restored much needed control over our order volume.   

We do provide status updates for our roasted coffee shipments, but our order volume is too high to continuously update online order pick-ups for drinks and breakfast items-- we would be looking at our screens while orders need to be fulfilled or toggling through online orders at the register while customers are standing in front of us, waiting to place orders (it's already a delicate balancing act pulling tickets from the online ticket printer and placing those in the queue along with in-person orders!).  Hence, we did not readily notice the stopwatch icon.  It might be helpful if Square sent out customer tips intermittently, to help us all streamline our operations and operate more efficiently.

We're owner-operator, so that means we're a lean crew.  My wife and I are at the counter and we have one, sometimes two people in the kitchen (as you know, managing people is the hardest part!).  After 20 years of building a small business-- learning how to bake & roast coffee professionally along the way, making it through a recession, a pandemic, and navigating how to be a couple as well as business partners-- we've learned how to streamline our operation and extract as much as we can out of one central location in the heart of downtown Philly.  

Thanks to the tools that Square offered, we were able to pivot and add on-line ordering during the pandemic, which allowed us to stay open during the entire pandemic, serving customers at our door, and shipping bags of coffee all over the country.  We had a huge surge in online coffee shipments, as everyone was working from home all the time-- they needed good coffee, they wanted to support us, and we desperately needed orders!  Prior to the pandemic, we were hesitant to add online ordering, as we thought it would be too impersonal, and would run counter to our ethos of providing personable service.  However, coming out of the pandemic, we kept it going, as it adds another level of convenience for our customers, and allows us to offer a service that was previously only offered by much larger cafe chains.  So that's a bit of our history with Square, as well as the unique Nook that we've carved here in Philly.

Anyway, thank you again for your helpful insights and suggestions-- from one concerned biz owner to another.  It really helps to know there is another layer of reliable community support out there!

Cheers & continued success!

[JJ_]

Love the interaction here @phillynook and @Donnie-M. I have changed this idea to open so that other Sellers can jump in and share their use cases. This will help our product team get visibility and track other Sellers with similar interests in your request. 

[backyard]

I'll add some interest to this concept. It would be great if there was some sort of threshold that would automatically pause the online orders until that threshold is no longer met. I can only see this working if the business utilizes KDS screens as that would provide the data needed for the logic.

For example, we could set a threshold based on the number of open tickets on the KDS or the current longest ticket time. We could pause online ordering if there are 15 tickets open or if the longest ticket time exceeds 30 minutes (these could be user defined). Once the system drops below those thresholds, online ordering would resume.

As mentioned previously, this can't replace manual human interaction to pause online ordering but the catch 22 is that usually when we get so busy that those thresholds are hit, our team is also most likely too busy to either remember to manually pause online ordering or actually have the time to do it. Some sort of automation would be nice.