How to manage your peak times so that your staff maintains an efficient, safe, and high-quality pace of work.
However, you want to make sure that your business can manage that success. It's very possible that your customers flood your business with orders at the same time which can overwhelm your staff, leading to reduced efficiency, longer customer wait times, and a generally stressful and unhappy situation.
Maybe you even temporarily close your store, meaning you miss out on orders and your customers see a 'closed' message, leading to confusion and frustration.
With order capacity management in your Flipdish Portal, you don't need to worry about any of that. You can specify how many orders the Flipdish system allows customers to place over a given time frame, meaning that your business stays efficient, with happy staff and happier customers.
How to set up order capacity management/throttling in Flipdish Portal
Note: You'll need to have preorders enabled, as the system will 'close' certain times off as they become 'full', and offer your customers alternative times to order for.
In your Flipdish Portal, navigate to the Properties page for your store, and select the store you want to work on
Click on preorder settings
Select the type of order you'd like to set up limits for (Pickup or delivery)
Scroll down to the 'set capacity limits' section
Note the 'interval' you currently have set in your preorder configuration
You'll see a weekly calendar view
Select the day of the week and time of day to set up a limit. You can specify the number of orders per interval of minutes to allow through
Click the 'Create' button
Scroll down the page, click 'save'
Your limit is set up!
Why did I receive more orders than I should have for a given time slot?
It's possible that when one of your slots has one space left, and two of your customers are placing an order at the same time, that both are submitted.
The reason this can happen is because the slot is not filled until the first order to go through has passed payment authorization. This process can take up to roughly 1 second. So, during peak busy times, this can lead to an extra order for a given time slot.
This situation is extremely rare, so if you're experiencing regular issues with your order throttling please get in touch.
FAQ
What happens if my customer loads up the checkout screen, selects a time slot, but takes a long time to order, and in the intervening time, that slot becomes full of other orders.
Answer: In this case, when the customer tries to place their order, they will receive an error explaining that the slot is now full and that they need to select another time slot.
Is it possible to limit the number of menu items that can be ordered in a specific window?
Answer: Capacity is currently managed at the order level, not at the individual item level. It is not currently possible to limit the count of a specific item in a given time window.
To learn more about Flipdish's products or how to grow your online business enroll for FREE in the Flipdish Academy here: http://academy.flipdish.com/