Bakery Holiday Season Pre-Orders?

[Bakerbaker1]

I use Square Online to allow customers to pre-order bread for collection from my bakery. I'd like to set up a Christmas and NYE pre-ordering section soon. Ideally, this would be separate from my main, day to day store/collection section, and customers can purchase special holiday items for collection on specific days (22-24th December, for example). However, I cannot figure out a way of setting this up on the Online dashboard. The only alternative I can think about is shutting down the main store a few weeks before Holiday collections and re-doing it as a special pre-order section only, then going back to the main store after the holidays. I'd also have to ask customers to add a note specifying what day they'll collect their order, and won't have any control on inventory levels - risking too many orders being placed that I cannot fulfil. Does anyone have any idea how I can set up a special pre-order store for customers to be able to order items for collection on a specific day, and have inventory levels for each item on different days? Thanks! Matt

[Breffni · Accepted solution]

Hi @Bakerbaker1 - thanks for your post 🙂 

If your items are for sales for Pickup & Delivery, you should be able to set up pre-orders for specific items. 

1. From your Square Item Library, select an existing item or create a new one.
2. Under ‘Square Online settings’, toggle on Sell as preorder. Note: Your item must have pickup or delivery enabled.
3. Select Edit preorder settings to choose the date or date range when the item will be available for pickup or delivery. You can choose any date or time from 24 hours up to 365 days in advance.
4. Optionally tick Customise fulfilment hours to choose the specific fulfilment hours within the selected date range. For example, if you set the time range as 10:00–14:00, buyers can choose only these hours for pickup or delivery on the specified pickup or delivery dates. If you leave this option unticked, your location’s standard pickup or delivery hours will apply.
5. Enter a Preorder cutoff date. This is a date and time after which you’d like to stop taking orders for the item. The item won’t be available to order online after the specified date and time.

You can make changes to your item’s preorder status, edit dates or preorder availability, or turn off preordering at any time.

Would this work for you? If not we can look at another idea. 

[Bakerbaker1]

This should work great, thank you!