Easier way to switch out menus on Square Online?

[livelycafe]

Our cafe operates almost like an old-fashioned cafeteria and we have 4 different weekly menus. At present, each Friday afternoon, I take off every single menu item and replace them with the next week's menu items.

Is there an easier way to do this?

I saw that the Square for Restaurants allows you to make different menus for your POS. Can you make those menus in Square for Restaurants and then upload them onto your Online Store?

Basically, there has to be an easier way to change the online store items en masse as opposed to one by one!

[ryanwanner]

Hello @livelycafe !

I think I have a solution, but I'm basing this on you having the same menu items week over week. If you are making new items for each menu, there will definitely be more legwork involved.

I recommend setting up timed categories on the online store for either option.

For each online category (Online Dashboard -> Items -> Site Categories), scroll down to the Availability section. You can then choose when during the week the category appears on your online store. Set the category to match the time that menu is available, and that's it! As long as you assign the items to the correct category, you won't have to do anything else!

That's one great thing about the Online Store having independent categories from Square: you can put items in multiple categories here so if you have an item that is available on multiple menus it'll still be available, and it won't screw up your reporting on the back end.

Now if you're making different items for the menus, things will get a little tougher. I still recommend setting up the categories as above, you'll just need to add the new items to the categories as you create them. A little more work but completely doable.

The help file has more info on Setting Up Time Based Categories

Hope this helps!

[livelycafe]

Thank you! This doesn't quite solve my problem? They're weekly menus. I'd need to be able to schedule them during specific dates, not times during the day.

Also, I noticed that there's still the option to see All Items on the website, even if you only have a few available. This would really confuse our customers to see everything but not be able to order it.

Thank you anyway!

[ryanwanner]

Aahhh, gotcha. I was thinking you were talking different menus throughout the week. I need more coffee. 😕

I still think you could do the extra categories as I said above, if only to stop you from having to go through and recreate the category and populate the items each week.

The hack would be the visibility part. What I do to hide one of my categories is this:

-Make it visible on certain days

-Set only one day for it to be visible, and put the availability for usually closed hours (i.e. Sunday available 12:01 am - 12:05 am). If you don't designate any hours on this screen, the store will default to always available. Your operating hours override whatever you have here, so there is no worry about someone sneaking in an order.

Then, when you're ready to show that category, you can either change it to always available for the week or designate the hours. It looks like the online store will remember the hours you inputted even if you make the category always available then go back and designate the hours after the week ends.

As for the All Items tag on the store, yeah, that's one that a few of us have been asking for changes on. The good thing is that the item will have the "Available Later" tag on it and nobody can order that item. Hopefully the dev team are working on some type of fix on that one.