Restricting online orders to business hours only

[Brewman1]

We have been struggling with customer that apparently can not read when making an online take out order.  We have customers that place an take out order online after we are closed or on days that we are closed and then can not understand why their order is not ready, even though the app clearly tells them when it will be ready.

Up until today we have the "Allow customers to schedule pickup orders" turned on as this is a nice feature.  We have also had as part of our closing procedures to turn "Accept online orders" off manually and then turn in back on when we open again.

Recently we started accepting online orders for a second location.  This location has different hours, thus, when we turn off "Accept online orders", neither location can accept orders.  Additionally, this manual work around has been problematic.  We have requested this to be addressed through Square Support several times but we just get lip service and we usually end up wasting out time trying to explain why this is an issue.

Adding a simple "Only accept Online Orders during Business Hours" option on the Order Timing screen would be a huge help.  The hours are already in Square and when we turn off "Allow Customers to Schedule Pickup Orders" business hours are taken into account, but we lose the ability for customers to schedule their orders for pickup when we are open.  We have many customers that will place an order early in the day and pick it up on the way home that evening so we need to get this on the Roadmap if it is not already.

Regards,

Gary - Founder

www.boondocksbrew.com

[faheem]

Hi Gary, thanks for the feedback. A few thoughts and a question on this:

-We definitely hear the request loud and clear, and are actively exploring how to address this with better features.

- For sellers who have 'Allow customers to schedule pickup orders' enabled, we recently launched a flow that requires customers to select a date and time for pickup at the very beginning of their purchase experience. The purpose of this is to make customers much more aware of the date/time of their order. Have you seen this feature live by any chance, and has it helped address any of the issue?

-As an alternative to the 'Accept online orders' setting, you can go to Fulfillment -> Pickup and Delivery, and toggle pickup off for each of your locations individually at any time. We also have a feature called Time-Based Categories, in which you can restrict the hours during which orders can be placed for any category of items (or all categories of items). This isn't location-specific, though, so it may not be the right fit for you.