Best way to sell special holiday food pickup items...

abrokenangel · ‎12-13-2020

I’ve just spent several hours wrestling with ONE new holiday pickup item. It was showing out of stock—and at one point $0—and I tried all the troubleshooting steps from this forum over and over. Finally, something clicked or synced, and it is currently working. This happened last month too, and I don't understand why it seems so inconsistent. It’s frustrating. 😞

The item was set to “pickup,” like our everyday menu at the food trailer. As mentioned by others, this doesn’t work for a one-off item, as customers need to pick up this item on a specific day during a specific time. At Thanksgiving, we had a special meal pickup and since I could not figure out an alternative, I ended up just selling it through the online store we use for everyday food trailer sales—of course, it confused some customers who did not read the text with the item and thought they were supposed to pick up the day or day after they ordered, rather than the designated pickup day. It also caused issues on the reporting end, as holiday sales were lumped into food trailer sales.

1. For now, I have changed this item to “shipping” because at least it will avoid the above issue. This is not a very elegant solution and it could still confuse customers as it is local pickup only. Is there an alternative?

2. With the above in mind, is there any functional or fee difference between using a new store that lists holiday pickup item(s), or just using an online checkout link?

Thank you!

Seamus · ‎12-14-2020

Hey @abrokenangel,

Thanks for your message.

At the moment pickup times are tied to your store opening hours for pickups - there is an active feature request for pickup/delivery times set to a specific calendar, though I don't have an ETA for when this will be available at the moment. Hopefully this is something we're able to integrate into the platform in the future, as you can see it's a very popular request and I can see the benefits this would provide!

You could definitely set up a secondary website for special items, and link it to your Square Online website home page to manage pickup and delivery times separately. The website would have a different square.site URL if you were using the free version, and if you're using a custom domain you wouldn't be able to point that domain at the secondary site - but you can still link to it. This may be a viable workaround for you as an alternative to setting these items to Shipping only - I'd encourage you to give it a go and see if it helps the order flow for special items!

Seamus
Square, Australia
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Best way to sell special holiday food pickup items?