What's the best way to pause order fulfilment?

[OhRamona]

I would like to pause the fulfilling of orders while I take a break over the holidays. For example, all orders received between 25 Dec – 6 Jan will be fulfilled on 7 Jan.

I know I can toggle online ordering off, but I would prefer to continue to accept orders, and just fulfil them when I'm back from break. And obviously make sure this is super clear to the customer at every stage (including if they purchase via Meta), as I understand they may not want to wait that long.

Is the best way just to update the General Shipping Profile? I was thinking of adding a pop-up as well to make sure.

Please let me know best practices for temporarily pausing order fulfilment – thank you!

[MrBagz]

hi @OhRamona 

I think a simple way of doing this is within Accounts & Settings, go to "Fulfilment" then from the drop down click on Pickup & Delivery.

Click edit on the locations you want to toggle, scroll down on the delivery tab down to restricted Dates and add the dates you need to take off. 

Now I don't have any pickup or shipping with my business as I do my own delivering, So I'm unsure if these will affect shipping/ pickup orders. But this is what I use for delivery orders.

Hope this helps

[OhRamona]

Thank you! This worked for pickup – I have added the restricted dates for pickup. Unfortunately for shipping it seems the only option is to add some wording into the shipping profile so have done that. Would love a more elegant solution to this! I'm sure I'm not the only small business who needs to pause shipping from time to time.

[Lou8]

Thanks for posting on the Seller Community @MrBagz 🙂 - and apologies for the delay. @MrBagz, thanks for jumping in and suggesting a solution for the pickup and delivery fulfillment options.

We currently don't have a feature that lets you pause your shipping option for a specific period of time, while still accepting orders. This would be a feature request, which you can file on our Ideate Board. 

There are a couple of workarounds I can think of, which could hopefully work for you:

• Manually disable online ordering and re-enable it once you're ready to accept orders again - the limitation is that you're not able to accept any orders during the period it's off.
• Create a banner or a pop-up window on your website to alert your customers.

I know my response comes a bit late, but I hope this will be helpful for next time or for other sellers with a similar query. Let me know if you have any other questions !