Set up items for online preordering
About online preordering
Customers can preorder items online with specific availability dates, such as holiday specials, for pickup or local delivery via your Square Online site. Once preordering is configured, a badge will appear on the item page, indicating its preorder status and fulfillment window. At checkout, customers can view and modify the pickup date, time, and location details for items added to their cart.
Preordering and scheduling serve different purposes. The primary differences between these two ordering techniques are the item availability and the length of time the item can be ordered ahead of the fulfillment date.
Preordering: Preordering is for items that are not currently available for purchase, and need to be ordered in advance to be picked up or delivered at some point after the items become available. Preorders are often used to create preliminary excitement about an item pending release.
Scheduling: Scheduling is for items that are already available for purchase, but the customer wants to order and pay now, and schedule the pickup or delivery for a specific time in the future (as long as it’s within your pickup and delivery hours). Scheduling is often used by restaurants, and other food and beverage businesses.
Before you begin
You can set up online preordering in Square Dashboard.
Assign pickup and delivery fulfillment methods to the items you want to set up for preordering. Learn how to set up items for your website.
Be sure to set up pickup and delivery, and ensure you have the toggles for Calculate & assign pickup/delivery times automatically enabled. The preorder feature will not work correctly when pickup/delivery times are manually assigned.
If a customer’s order contains a standard item along with a preorder item, the pickup date will be adjusted to the preorder fulfillment date. The customer will see a notification about this change and can adjust their order, or order the items separately if they need to pick up the standard item immediately.
Set up online preordering
Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Items & services (or Items & menus or Items & inventory) > Items > Item library.
Select an existing item or create a new one.
Under Ordering, toggle on Sell as preorder.
Select Edit preorder settings to choose the date or date range when the item will be available for pickup or delivery. You can choose any date and time from 24 hours up to 365 days in advance.
Optionally check Customize fulfillment hours to choose the specific fulfillment hours within the selected date range. For example, if you set the time range as 10am - 2pm, buyers can choose only these hours for pickup or delivery on the specified pickup or delivery dates. If you leave this option unchecked, your location’s standard pickup and delivery hours will apply.
Enter a Preorder cutoff date. This is a date and time after which you’d like to stop taking preorders for the item. The item won’t be available for preorder online after the specified date and time. Click Done.
Click Save.
You can make changes to your item’s preorder status, edit dates and preorder availability, or turn off preordering at any time.