Bakery Pre-orders

[sugarlab]

Hey fellow bakery friends or anyone that does pre-orders for specific days! 

I just tried something new that I wanted to share. I know we've all been wanting to have the ability to offer specific items on only specific days for the online store. While we still wait for that, I tried something for my Mother's Day orders this year. I created a second location called Holiday Sales that was the same address as my shop. I made my Mother's Day specific items available only at the Holiday Sales location. Then I blocked off the days leading up to my 3 available days so the system automatically defaulted to the first available pick-up date. 

Pros: I didn't have to add modifiers to have customers select their specific dates and then get confused when their receipt said a different date

All contained in one location so it didn't get confusing with my regular orders for those days in terms of tickets and order management in square

Cons: Because of the locations, we did have to switch back and forth between locations to manage the pick-ups day of. I did solve this by using a cell phone with Square for the mother's day items and then our ipad for our usual orders. 

A customer couldn't order both our Mother's Day items and regular items at the same time. I don't know if anyone tried since we didn't get any phone calls asking about it. But that's something to consider. 

What other work arounds have you found for your pre-sales? Or other items that are only available on specific dates? 

[tmtegt]

I use ecwid app attached to square, i was able to set it up so our customer can pre order my posted menu [as soon as i post it]  for pickup on a specific day. sales track on square pos.  the only thing i have yet to figure is to let cutomer known there order is ready, and then to mark it as picked up, i do so on the the ecwid app. not the pos. and i clear the square pos orders separately, doing so on square does not correspond with the customer.

this is what our menu looks like supperclub pre order menu 

[JoyceTang]

I actually do all of my presales on hotplate.com as they're built for this sort of set up. We do all our in store sales on square as square is superior for this portion. It makes prepping and packing a lot easier for us rather than using an option that doesn't really fit at all. We are finding that pre-sales are drying up for us a lot though as folks are going back to more regular consumption patterns.  

[RuckusDonuts]

Hello fellow vampire hour keepers! LOL Nice to see a thread about our unique niche & concerns as far as availablity, preordering & dates thereof.

I started a thread about this specific topic & have replied to same. I believe Square is now "aware" and its on their radar, which is great!

How we do preorder:

- I will go to Online > Fulfillment> Pickup & Delivery > Edit > Pickup Dates and manually set dates that preorders cannot be placed for/on. Typically I go about 30 days.

- In the same menu we have set both calendar days out & time that day as a cutoff. In our case we cutoff online preorders 24 hours in advance of the next day's opening time.

- Same menu we have a limit of 30 days out for preorders. 

By default now any preorders placed at this moment in time (Wed 5/11 9:20ish AM) would be available at the earliest on Fri 5/13 7:30AM. Any online orders places after 7:30AM Fri would be available at the earliest 7:30AM Sunday, and so on.

RE date centric items - We actually create the item as a dated item (name of donut - date) and make sure to let people know its only available that date & that they should select said date at checkout. Of course many don't & the order defaults to the next available date 😕 so I have to just be very diligent, monitor all preorders when we're running a date centric special & manually alter their pickup date in Orders.

Invariably I'll get messages that someone ordered a special item for Sunday but Square said it would be ready Friday what should I do etc etc. Or someone will just come in on a Friday & wonder where there multi-mentioned Sunday only item is *sigh*

And to liven up this thread some pics of some of our date specific donuts & what our case looks like when we open 🙂

[sugarlab]

Welcome!! We have our normal pre-orders similar, with different prep times depending on the item. Our biggest wish is to have the ability to set items only available on certain days. Like with our Mother's Day items, they were only available Friday Saturday and Sunday of Mother's Day weekend. We also launched it a couple weeks prior so I didn't have the flexibility of changing the prep time each day since it's only two week, one week, then 5 days and so on. 

This feature has been something us bakery folks have been asking about for some time now so I'm hoping we make enough noise to get it someday! 😄

[gemcityjunction]

We don't do much in pre-sales as a coffee shop, but offering something on a specific day, it works well to just create a category and isolate that category to a special day or time.  It would only work for a week in advance

Category Availability

[RuckusDonuts]

@gemcityjunction - Cool idea. Question - if a customer orders one item from the select category but another(s) from those without restriction does the preorder date of the select category override the default Availability date for everything else preordered?

[gemcityjunction]

@RuckusDonuts I think what you'd have to do is make a category of like "Monday Pre-Orders".  You would have notes some where that those items would be available for pick up on whatever day later (e.g. "Tuesday PICKUP").  That category would only be available if there were items in it that had >0 stock and visible.  So then I would create a menu or group on the POS that had just those items so you could mark them out of stock at the end of that day.  So this could work for special days like, if you wanted to allow people to pickup the Sat before Mother's day.  But it would only work well for up to 1 week prior to the day of pickup.  The category I took a picture of was our breakfast items, so they are only available from open to 11am.  After that the category disappears so that the items can't be ordered.  You don't have to specify a time, or you could specify 12a-11:59p.

[RuckusDonuts]

Thanks for the reply. The stock option doesn’t work for us in that every item we make starts the same - a raised donut - and how we finish them determines how many (and how much we sell them for) on any given day. I could definitely see what you say working when you multiple unique items that are produced in batches yielding X per batch. 

[gemcityjunction]

@RuckusDonuts I realized I didn't actually answer your question when you asked if they could order both restricted and non-restricted items.  The answer is yes.  We have people place orders for coffee and breakfast items all the time.  The category date/time restrictions is just for visibility.  Here's my proposed structure

Category ("Monday Pre-orders"): 2 day notice

Only visible on Saturday during business hours

Item ("Mad Monday Donut"):

When you create the item and allow for pickup or local delivery, you can specify a "prep time" and then you set that to "2 business days".  This will mean if they go to select the Mad Monday Donut, it will override their order "ASAP" to the first available 2 days later.

I'm sure there will be a learning curve.  We've had a couple people order things like that and not realize their order time changed.  Square also lets you edit the Order Confirmation emails that get sent out so maybe you can update that to highlight the date and time.

[RuckusDonuts]

Thanks for the re-reply 🤪 it’s very appreciated! I can see how this would work but now I’m limiting when a time sensitive item could not just be preordered but also visible IE the prep date you cite. We had our Mother’s Day donuts posted 2 weeks in advance to get as many eyeballs & opportunities to sell. So I’d be constantly tweeking the prep days/etc to hit a due date.

We/I edit Order Confirmations quite a bit, especially when running a date specific special. The one upside to creating a date specific item as a stand alone item is that I can do a simple Sales Report search by date & see how many (donut-date) have been preordered to ensure I have enough for that day.

[Lovelee]

Thanks for sharing the location option @sugarlab! I tried it when they first offered it and had a few issues with my all my regular items being preloaded into the new location and I couldn't bulk edit to remove them, so I didn't continue since i didn't have time, but now I will definitely try again.  Did you find that the holiday location confused people when ordering?

I really wish square would just have a calendar option for us to choose what days items are available. Like i have cinnamon buns on Saturdays only and I have to have a modifier for them to choose the pick up date. No matter if I put it in capital letters to ignore the automated date, I get at least 10% of my orders calling with confusion about pick up date. Bakeries run so differently versus restaurants so hopefully they take the time soon to focus on us.

[sugarlab]

Oh I also learned how to bulk edit! You'll go into items and export the entire list. Then open in excel or pages and you'll see a ton of columns. Each location will have its own column and then next to it will have yes or no. You'll just select no for the items you don't want to have at a certain location. Takes a little bit of time but SO MUCH FASTER than going into each item individually in your dashboard or app. 

I only have one person confused so I'll call that a win. It was a guy whose wife usually does the ordering so he probably just wanted to make sure he was doing it right. In the past I would do the modifier and have the automatic date way after the actual pick-up date. I learned to do that after someone thought they could pick-up their valentine's day order way ahead and then got mad and cancelled their order. 

[Lovelee]

Oh nice! I'll try that. Thanks! I think I was attempting it before Valentines day and was already late getting my menu up so I just gave up. I'll let you know if I figure out any other tricks while I'm playing around with it.

One person is definitely a win! My customers just don't read so I need to make it as simple as possible. It's usually the new customers, my regulars are fine. I just don't want to turn anyone away from ordering because they get confused and then just don't order. We'll see! At least I have time to test before Father's day.

[sugarlab]

No one reads do they! HAHA. 

[weredoughcookie]

Ive been managing this by defaulting to changing the pick up times on the orders to the available dates. one the "orders" tab you can manually change the pickup date and time to whatever you need it to be. I post the date(s) the they are available in the description and the title. I've done with for several holidays thus far at my bakery and only had 2 or 3 complaints.

I really wish square would add a pre-order date option so that we could allow pickup of these items only on specific dates. I've asked several times with no success. Its a bit time consuming but i just do it at the end of every day during pre-order times and correct any issues with the pickup dates.

[cbstl]

A pre-order date option would be really helpful. For those who don't know, Square Online does have a pre-order setting by location now that essentially just removes the pickup date selection from customer checkout so that you can coordinate the date on your own, which may be useful for those who manually make a modifier for pickup dates on items. You would have to put those items in a separate location configured with the pre-order setting though.

I work for a custom bakery in which the vast majority of our business is pre-order and we have a certain capacity we can do for each item each week, so what Square makes available for stock management isn't fully sufficient for us, since we can't set stock-per-week on items.

We've been working around this limitation with some less-than-ideal approaches, but I've been developing a web app that uses the Square API which will hopefully give us a much more elegant solution that will also keep everything integrated between Square Online and our in-store Square POS. In a nutshell, the web app manages a pickup date modifier for each item in our library based on settings that the bakery manager will configure in the web app - you can kind of think of it as a parallel Items dashboard that extends the Square functionality for our per-week capacity operations. In the web app, the bakery manager can configure things like how many weeks out to accept orders, the lead time for each item, and the "stock" of an item for each calendar week within the pickup span. The web app then monitors orders as they come in and adds or removes pickup dates for each item accordingly. It's some pretty complicated software that I've been working on for several months but I'm in the final testing stages and we're planning to start using it in July. There are some Square limitations that are going to keep it from being as ideal as I'd like it to be, but I think it will make things much better than what we're dealing with currently. I realize a home-grown solution like this doesn't necessarily help any other bakeries out there, but I figured explaining it might at least spark ideas for others.

I'll try to remember to report back in this thread after we've been using that solution for awhile.

[mksavage]

This is so interesting! I actually didn't know that Square Online now offered a pre-order setting that removed the pickup date selection -- I need to check that out. It does seem like all of the options do involve some complication for the customer (which inevitably leads to confusion, phone calls, messages -- a lot of management for our teams!), but it's been helpful to read about everyone's workarounds.

The separate location is one we haven't considered before, and could definitely work well when we're doing a large amount of custom orders, like for our Thanksgiving & Christmas pre-order seasons. For times when we're doing just one or two items as pre-orders, we usually do one of two workarounds:

1) List the item in our normal Online Store menu with PRE-ORDER in the item title, for example "Cinnamon Rolls -- PRE-ORDER for pickup on 6/19 only!" We then put very detailed instructions in the item description to disregard the pickup date/time given during checkout and to put their desired pickup time in a modifier text box. We set the prep time intentionally long, so there isn't a possibility of them placing the order for today and thinking they can come pick it up. Usually we have 2-3 people call and say "why is my pickup date two weeks from now," but the more we do it, the more people are catching on. We also ask them in the instructions to not place an order for food/coffee at the same time, but to order those things as a separate order with the pickup date they want (either today, or to pick up with their Cinnamon Rolls, for example.)

2) Create an online order form linked from our website, where the fill out a Google Form with their order info. Then we manually email a confirmation and send an online invoice for payment. This work well for our more complicated pre-orders, like for Holiday Cakes, Thanksgiving Sides & Pies, etc. We have the Google Form populate a spreadsheet that we check daily to send out the confirmations and invoices. This system has worked well for us, although it does mean you have to direct people to your website instead of the Online Store, and adds some manual work on our end. The additional confirmation does help us to avoid any mistakes or miscommunications though.

Obviously, it would be super helpful if Square created an easier way to manage this! But helpful to brainstorm ways to work around it for now! Thanks everyone for sharing -- if our workarounds seem helpful to anyone, I'm happy to answer any questions! 

[cbstl]

@mksavage FYI the pre-order setting I was referring to that removes the date selection at checkout in Square Online is a little buried, but this is how you get to it:
Square Online dashboard -> Fulfillment -> Pickup & Delivery -> Edit (next to your location) -> then on the Pickup settings, set Calculate & assign pickup times automatically to No. Then there are some messages to configure for your customers below that.

[mksavage]

Oh, that's super helpful! Thank you @cbstl! I'm going to go check that out.

[cbstl]

Just to follow up on this post, we launched the web app solution I described above about a month ago and it's been working well for us so far. I call it "Capacity Manager" and at a high-level, it automatically maintains a unique Select Your Pickup Date modifier on each of our items, maintaining the available dates for each item based on the orders we receive. In our online store, the modifier looks like this (as shown, the customer also manually types the time they want to pick up on the selected date):

The Select Your Pickup Date modifier is also on the items on our Square POS, so when we take orders in-store it works the same way and is integrated with Capacity Manager so that orders both online and in-store are accounted for in the limits.

On the backend, the Capacity Manager web app provides an interface for our shop manager to define weekly limits for each item. Here's an example of what that looks like:

As you can see, you can set the lead time and have different limits for each week. When the limit is reached for a given week, the dates for that week are removed from the modifier for that item. There are many more complex details to it that aren't worth going into here, but I just thought I'd share that info with others in case it sparks ideas for businesses with a similar operating model (and perhaps have the resources to hire a developer 😊).