Limit Collection and Local Delivery Orders on Square Online
If you automatically assign collection and local delivery times with Square Online, you can mitigate receiving a high number of simultaneous orders by limiting how many you can take every 15 minutes. When the system hits the maximum number of orders you’ve entered, we’ll extend your prep time in 5-minute increments to sequence out those orders.
Enable Order Limiting
To limit collection and local delivery orders:
From your Account & Settings page, go to Fulfilment > Collection & Delivery.
Select Edit by the location you want to limit orders for.
Go to either the Collection or Delivery tab.
In the Timing section, select the toggle to limit the number of orders that can be collected or delivered at the same time.
Select Save when finished.
Limiting for Non-scheduled Orders
Based on your criteria, the promised time for non-scheduled orders (i.e. orders that’ll be ready as soon as possible) 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 non-scheduled order placed at 18:56 would be promised for 19:15 (not 19:11).
Limiting for Scheduled Orders
Say you offer order scheduling and have an online ordering limit of 5 orders every 15 minutes. Throughout the day, your customers have been planning orders for collection.
Your 19:00 time slot has 4 scheduled orders and the 19:05 time slot has 1 scheduled order.
At 17:00, a customer wants to place an order for collection at 19:00. The customer doesn’t see 19:00 as an option when scheduling the order, and can only pick 19:10 or later. Since you have a maximum of 5 orders every 15 minutes, between the 4 orders scheduled for 19:00 and 1 order scheduled for 19:05, the soonest available scheduled order time is 19:10 to honour the order limiting settings.
At 18:47, another customer tries to place an order. By this time, you’ve received even more orders:
19:00: 4 scheduled orders
19:05: 1 scheduled order
19:10: 4 non-scheduled orders
This customer would see the earliest collection time of 19:25, as the sliding window of 15 minutes would have hit its maximum orders between 19:05 and 19:20.