Limit Pickup and Local Delivery Orders on Square Online
Order limiting allows you to limit the total number of online orders for pickup or local delivery within a 15-minute window. If the maximum number of orders is met, the next incoming order is promised for the next available time slot. This helps stagger pickup and delivery times, prevents too many orders at any given time and limits the number of customers in a physical location waiting for their order.
Enable Order Limiting
To limit the number of pickup and local delivery orders you can accept every 15 minutes in Square Online:
From your Square Online Overview page, go to Fulfilment > Pickup & Delivery.
Add your location if you haven’t already, or select Set up location or Edit by the location in question.
Edit the ‘Order timing settings’.
Under Scheduling, select the toggle to automatically assign a pickup and/or delivery time at checkout.
Under ‘Order limiting’, select the toggle to limit the number of orders that can be picked up or delivered at the same time.
Select Continue to proceed and/or Save when finished.
Limiting for ASAP Orders
Based on your criteria, the promised time for ASAP orders will automatically stagger during peak ordering times.
By default, Square Online promises orders by rounding up to the next available five-minute increment. For example, an incoming ASAP order placed at 6:56 p.m. would be promised for 7:15 p.m. (not 7:11 p.m.).
Limiting for Scheduled Orders
Here is an example of how limiting works with scheduled orders enabled:
Peter decides to offer order scheduling for his business Peter’s Pizza. He continues to have an online ordering limit of 5 orders every 15 minutes. Throughout the day, customers have been planning dinners and scheduled orders for pickup. The 7 p.m. time slot has 4 scheduled orders. The 7:05 p.m. time slot has 1 scheduled order.
At 5 p.m., a customer wants to place an order for pickup at 7 p.m. The customer doesn’t see 7 p.m. as an option when scheduling the order, and can only pick 7:10 p.m. or later. Because Peter has a maximum of 5 orders every 15 minutes, between the 4 orders scheduled for 7 p.m. and 1 order scheduled for 7:05 p.m., the soonest available scheduled order time is 7:10 p.m. to honour the order limiting settings.
At 6:47 p.m., a customer attempts to place an order at Peter’s Pizza. By this time in the evening, Peter’s has received additional orders:
7:00 p.m.: 4 scheduled orders
7:05 p.m.: 1 scheduled order
7:10 p.m.: 4 ASAP orders
This customer would see the earliest pickup time of 7:25 p.m., as the sliding window of 15 minutes would have hit its maximum orders between 7:05 - 7:20 p.m..