Pickup Time Chaos

[MelvinMojo]

We have our Square Online site set to throttle at 4 orders per 15 minutes for our take out restaurant.  We find that it skips over available time slots, over loads others and shifts to 5 or 10 minute off times after a certain part of the day (i.e. instead of 4:00, 4:15, 4:30, 4:45, etc. we start getting 4:35, 4:40, 5:05, etc.)...

Anyone have an idea how this happens and how to control it? It definitely adds mayhem to our madness on busy nights!

[Donnie-M]

@MelvinMojo Couple questions to nail down what is changing the behavior..

1.  Do you allow customers to schedule the orders ahead of time?

2. Also, do you have a prep time associated with all of your items or a location default prep time?

There are about 4 ways to manipulate the the times to make the system behave differently.  If you can let me know these answers, we might be able to make it a little more manageable for you with incoming orders.  Order limiting will help you, but it is not a precise science as customers can confound the system a bit.  One customer can check out in 60 seconds, and another might take 2 minutes to find their card and get checked out.  Order ahead can also skew things sometimes.  Prep time may be your biggest friend here.