Is there a way to add special hours for holidays?

Sirensseaffodnj · ‎12-01-2023

Ok - I’ve spent weeks setting up the website, ordering the POS system and I’m INCREDIBLY disappointed to be seeing at this stage in the game that I can’t add special hours for holidays - is this a joke???!!! Can someone please walk me through the thought process from square? I obviously need to start advertising for holiday orders however I can’t figure out how to change the times for pickups for those days - and I can’t change the hours for ALL days because I’m not open during regular business for that - please help!!!

TheRealChipA · ‎12-01-2023

Hi @Sirensseaffodnj Currently, that is not possible with Square. I’d recommend that you head over to the Ideate Board and submit a feature request, but I know that at least one of those already exists. None of us here in the seller community can walk you through the thought process from Square, and we would not even attempt something so futile. At this point, the fact is you can’t do exactly what you want to do.

I’m assuming that you plan to use online ordering. If so, you only have one option. As orders come in, from your POS you can edit the pickup date/time. You will have to check each order after it comes in and adjust that date/time as needed. As long as customers stayed opted in to order status text alerts, and as long as you configured your online store to allow those alerts, any changes made to pickup date/time will be sent to them via SMS message.

You can be sure that your site is configured to send those alerts by going to your online dashboard > Online > Communications > Email & Text Alerts and toggling “Send order status text messages to customers” on. Also, FYI, here’s a link to the full Square Help Document on Square Online email and text alerts.

I’m going to tag another Super Seller who I think does a lot of this sort of thing, and might have some insights on how they work around this current issue with not being able to specify “special pickup hours.” @Twiggy

Chip A.
Square Expert & Innovator and member of the Square Champions group. (But NOT a Square employee, just a seller like you)

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TheRealChipA · ‎12-01-2023

@Candlestore forget my earlier tag on this post. I forgot you don’t use Square Online. Duh

Chip A.
Square Expert & Innovator and member of the Square Champions group. (But NOT a Square employee, just a seller like you)

Was my post helpful? Take a moment to mark it as a solution. Marked solutions help other sellers find possible resolutions to similar problems. Also, if you find your solution elsewhere (say, through Support), it is helpful to come back to your post and tell us about it, then mark that as a Solution. Solutions are what this Community is all about!

faheem · ‎12-01-2023

@Sirensseaffodnj you might be looking for the holiday preorder feature, which can be configured using the instructions here: https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7982-manage-square-online-item-settings-from-your-item-libra....

TheRealChipA · ‎12-01-2023

@faheem I did not know that existed. Thank you for posting that! I’ve added it to my toolbox for the future.

Chip A.
Square Expert & Innovator and member of the Square Champions group. (But NOT a Square employee, just a seller like you)

Was my post helpful? Take a moment to mark it as a solution. Marked solutions help other sellers find possible resolutions to similar problems. Also, if you find your solution elsewhere (say, through Support), it is helpful to come back to your post and tell us about it, then mark that as a Solution. Solutions are what this Community is all about!

Twiggy · ‎12-05-2023

Hi @TheRealChipA thanks for the tag.

You definitely need to create your items as a pre order - you can select what hours, dates and date ranges when you create the pre order. Depending on your settings for prep time and fulfilment. There is an option to only allow the business hours you have set up in your location or you can apply your own hours. You can only apply a pre p order to “delivery and pick up” you can’t do this for Shipping.

It might be easier to create a category and apply all the items you wish to add to your catalogue in this category, then schedule this category to appear in your “shop all” area of your online store for a specific date range.

If you are wanting to show that your store is closed / open over the holiday period you have to go to the location and add each date you are closed individually - you can select to have this date blacked out of your calendar every year - unfortunately there is no option to block out a whole period in one click. The dates will then be blocked out of your calendar.

PREP TIME and CUT OFF is really important here as you block out whole periods if you haev these settings entered incorrectly - you need to play around with the fulfilment calculator unless you have immediate pick up. If things go a bit pear shaped set the last cut off time to 11:55pm

When setting up your pre order the cut off date must be at least how many days prep time and fulfilment time ahead of your date range or pick up date so if for example you have a 2 day prep time and 3 hour fulfilment you need to make sure that your cut off time is 3 days ahead. If you are going to trade on a Sunday and you dont normally set your opening house to include Sunday and block out the future Sundays in January and set your scheduled order settings (if you have them set up to) to include your last day.

E.g. you last order day is January 4th and you set it up today make it 4 weeks schedule. If you use appointments too then block out the calendar in the appointments area of the Square dashboard and then people can’t pick up in those times. I hope this has been of some help - we beta’d this last year and it’s something that needs planning. Keep it simple - Good luck

TheRealChipA · ‎12-05-2023

@Twiggy Thank you for the detailed reply. I knew you’d have great ideas! Hopefully @Sirensseaffodnj can use those!

Chip A.
Square Expert & Innovator and member of the Square Champions group. (But NOT a Square employee, just a seller like you)

Was my post helpful? Take a moment to mark it as a solution. Marked solutions help other sellers find possible resolutions to similar problems. Also, if you find your solution elsewhere (say, through Support), it is helpful to come back to your post and tell us about it, then mark that as a Solution. Solutions are what this Community is all about!