This guide provides examples for the various setup scenarios you can configure with scheduled ordering. As a flexible system, there are various ways you can use the settings to suit your scenario. If you can’t see a way to meet your needs please contact us for advice and we’ll either be able to recommend an approach or collect your feedback for future scenarios.
Also, if you don’t have the perfect scenario you can still use the pickup and delivery messaging you can add to the checkout to provide additional instructions to the customer.
The settings for order scheduling mode are found in your store preferences. See our scheduled ordering setup guide.
Alpha St Kitchen - Restaurant - Pickup and Delivery
Alpha St Kitchen will operate their online ordering in a way that matches their kitchen hours. For example, they may operate Wed-Sun with lunch service just on certain days of the week. See www.alphast.co.nz to see their actual hours.
- Enable Pickup and Delivery with the tick boxes
- Enable the Date and Time selector and set the kitchen hours
- Lead time for their longest prep takeaway meal is 20 mins so they’ve set the lead time for pickup as 20 Mins. You’ll probably want to add a buffer of time too for the time it will take to ensure the kitchen gets the order. They’ve added 25 mins for delivery around Cambridge which includes a buffer to manage expectations of hungry mouths.
- Add a message for both your delivery and pickup instructions. Good business is about managing customer expectations so being clear on how pickup and delivery works and how close you will be to the order time frame will help set expectations
- A concern for Alpha St doing high-end food takeaway is that they could get a run on orders for a specific time or for a specific product. There are a couple of approaches Alpha St can take:
- Adjust the lead time for the orders so that people are pushed out to a later time
- Manually adjust your stock levels on the product page so that a product becomes sold out
Elspeth Bakery - Pickup and Delivery
Elspeth Bakery are a high-end bakery in Mt Maunganui NZ. They closed their bakery doors due to Covid 19 restrictions but are now offering pickup and delivery on Tuesday and Thursday to a local area. As their loaves of bread take days to prepare, especially with the sourdough bread, they take pre-orders 2 days before.
As the bread is baked in a batch they don’t have individual time slots for pickup and delivery as they head out and deliver once the batch is baked and packed. Elspeth will use the Date Only ordering option.
- Enable Pickup and Delivery with the tick boxes
- Enable the Date Only selector. No kitchen hours will be set.
- Set the lead time for both pick-up and delivery as 2 days. A customer wanting the Thursday delivery will need to order before 11:59pm on Tuesday night which is two days before 11:59pm on Thursday. The customer does not see the times but using a day-only selector means that the lead time is calculated off the final minute of Thursday. Elspeth then have time to collate their orders first thing on Wednesday morning to start preparing the dough for the Thursday bake.
- As the customer is only selecting the day of delivery Elspeth need to be clear about when the order is likely to be ready for pickup or be delivered. Elspeth will use the Pickup message option to explain that orders will be ready for collection from midday at 2A Terrace Avenue and might have a reminder to customers to keep a safe Covid-19 distance as all the hungry hordes turn up to collect their warm sourdough or perfectly croissant.
- Elspeth have been selling out their breads and pastries before every bake and they have a finite capacity for a single bake so they set their stock levels conservatively at just a little more than what they expect to sell in a single day with the view that some customers will choose to order for Tuesday and others for Thursday. Elspeth import a new stock list as the schedule rolls over to a new baking period.
- As their products are baked in batches Elspeth exports their sales for the current period and uses a spreadsheet to make an order list of the products sold. A pivot table is a good spreadsheet tool to consolidate your orders.
Absolute Coffee - Cafe - Pickup and Delivery
Absolute Coffee House is a cafe in Cambridge NZ. Their requirements are the same as Alpha St kitchen where people are ordering for a specific time period so will use the Date and Time selector option and they will set that they are open 7 days a week.
Absolute have variants on some products, such as an omelet which has different fillings so they use variants to enable customers to customise their order.
Beach Roundabout Takeaways - Pickup and delivery
Beach Roundabout Takeaways are a fish and chip takeaway shop in the lovely seaside town of Whangamata New Zealand. Demand for takeaways can vary significantly during the day and night and as a busy takeaway shop, it's not super practical to be regularly updating the lead time in their website dashboard.
It’s important to manage customer expectations so they’ll set their pickup time as 20 mins and their delivery as 45 minutes but in their delivery message that customers see at the checkout and on their order confirmation they state that “Delivery times may vary but we aim to deliver ASAP within a 60-minute timeframe”.
Butchers - Pickup and Delivery
The requirements for a butcher are similar to bakers as they have a lead time to both orders and prepare their stock and they are likely to deliver in batches. A butcher would follow the same type of setup as Elspeth and set their lead time to match their typical lead time for preparation.
As meat is perishable the butcher will want to provide specific instructions about when the meat will be delivered and what steps will be taken to ensure that the product is kept safe.
Florist - Pickup and Delivery
A florist will often receive their market delivery first thing in the morning which enables them to prepare flowers for delivery that same day when orders are received by a midday.
Similar to a baker the batches of orders will be prepared and then delivered or they may be dispatched individually via a courier as soon as the order is ready but are dependent on courier availability for the collection and delivery time.
- Enable Pickup and Delivery with the tick boxes
- Enable the Date Only selector. No store hours will be set.
- Set the lead time for both pickup and delivery as 12 hours. A customer wanting same-day delivery will be able to place an order up until 11:59 am which is 12 hours before the end of the day. Any orders that that are placed that day after 11:59 am will show the next available delivery days at the checkout. The customer does not see the times but using a day-only selector means that the lead time is calculated off the final minute of the available order days.
- As the customer is only selecting the day of delivery The Occasional Florist needs to be clear about when the order is likely to be ready for pickup or be delivered.
- The florist can mix and match their flower stock to make different bouquets and the flowers can last a few days so for most products they set their shop to allow to continue to sell if the stock reaches zero but for products like chocolate boxes they do have a set stock level.
- As the orders received can be highly varied they’ll tend to print their orders or manage them via their website dashboard rather than exporting their orders to a CSV as Elspeth do.