Best Way to represent Online Ordering for Food Truck with 2 locations?

[colotti]

I am surprised there is nothing straight forward for this.

I am looking to have ONE food truck in two locations like this for example

Location 1:  M/T/W

Location 2: Thurs/FRI/SAT

I am trying to figure out the best way to ensure that customer see/understand the locations BEFORE they order.  For example having someone order on Thursday thinking they can get it at Location 1 would be bad!

I have not seemed to find a clean way to represent this to the buyer "up front".  You'd think they first select the day (Thursday) and it ONLY would show them location 2 as an option or something.  Has anyone else actually solved this in a clean way?

[ryanwanner]

Hello @colotti !

I think your best bet would be to set up two distinct locations inside Square. (Dashboard -> Account & Settings -> Business Information -> Locations) Label each location as the physical spot your truck is parked, set the hours accordingly, and import the same menu to both. Once you've set that up, you can enable locations under Dashboard -> Online -> Fulfillment -> Pickup & Delivery.

When your customer first pulls up your online ordering page, they will be presented with your two locations, and they have to choose one in order to continue. Pickup times and dates will then correspond to your open location, and if someone tries to order from the wrong location, their pickup time will default to the next time that location is open.

Bonus: If you move one of the locations you only have to update the location title, and if your move takes you into a new sales tax jurisdiction, then you don't have to do much to get it up to snuff.

A couple of things:

-Inventory is not done on a global level: each location has its own inventory. If you keep up on inventory to prevent overselling you'll have to make sure it's all correct each day, especially at the start of the three day span.

-This does assume that people can actually read and will order at the right spot. And that's just something that no amount of AI will ever get right. You will more than likely have someone show up miffed that their order wasn't ready and it turns out they ordered it from the wrong location. Just put on that customer service smile while mentally ripping them a new one! 🙂

Hope this helps!

[colotti]

@ryanwanner thanks!

So I am playing with that but the "issue" is you are not shown readily which is the "open" location for "today" and I think it's becuase online orders can be placed anytime of the day regardless of the location's hours.  Maybe I am missing something how it is supposed to show the "open" location for that day becuase it always presents all locations (well really the one closest to them) by distance, does not seem to show by open time, but I have only done limited testing with the available settings.

Thoughts?

[ryanwanner]

@colotti  You're right that is a problem. Unless the customer opens a location then takes the time to look at the footer for the hours there isn't a way to really see it.

What I recommend is that in your location name you say something like

"Location 1: Mon-Wed Service"

"Location 2: Thu-Sat Service"

Hopefully that'll grab some people's attention, then as they become regulars they'll automatically start associating what location with what time. The whole Pavlov's Dog Experiment thing... 😉

[colotti]

@ryanwanner I was thinking that OR even putting the location hours at the top of the page, adding a section to really stress the hours but yeah I mean the Online with locations otherwise works It's just making sure the expectation is at least presented so I could deal with the 100% eventual customer that doesn't pay attention 🙂

[colotti]

I am also not seeing how to clearly show/separate the locations in the weebly online page...maybe I am just not digging in enough yet this is just purely testing right now, but yeah Ideally I'd like the home page to show both locations first, show the hours, click into one THEN order from that location.

[ryanwanner]

@colotti  Especially when you're in testing mode the web browser has a tendency to just show you a cached version of your site. Try clearing the cache and cookies, closing the browser, and trying again. The site selector should come up on first load of the site. There should also be a way to add a Select Location link to your top level menu, I'll have to figure that one out and get back to you.

Also, please post your website here and we can take a look too.

[colotti]

@ryanwanner 

Yeah it's just a hacked together test site, but also what is driving me nuts is the location hours are differnet that shows, but BOTH locations always say "online ordering resumes tomorrow at 12:15" even though one location is CLOSED tomorrow...see that seems buggy...

https://test-107888.square.site/s/order?location=11ee097a3d7ddf57879dac1f6bbbd01e

It's driving me mad that the location hours are not even reflected to the buyer 

SO I got a TOAST demo and their online ordering only works on the "current" day and which location is open at the time of ordering.  This is making me lose my mind LOL