Adding a calendar for customers to choose pick up date

Hi,

I am helping a friend build a site for her small bakery. She only bakes a set amount of cakes and bread and bakes them on different days. Manually noting orders is becoming too much, as her stuff is quite popular. 

When looking into Commerce I can tell that I can limit the amount of e.g. cakes per day, and as a result make sure that she is not getting more order than she can handle per day.

But I cannot figure out how I let the customers order for certain day. Let's say they want a bread on Friday but they place the order on Tuesday. The order then needs to be counted in the available amount of breads for Friday and not Tuesday. I have been looking for plugins that might help me manage this, but didn't find any. If I use a form to make the select a date, I'm thinking that the order wouldn't get deducted from the availability of the correct date but on the date it was placed on instead. (In the example above using a form would mean that the order would be pulled from availability of bread on Tuesday and not on Friday like it should.) 

I've also wondered whether I need to use scheduling instead of Commerce but I am not sure that costumers will get why their online bread order looks like they are booking a massage. 

Am I missing a trick? I am thinking that there must be thousands of small fresh product shops out there with this need for their online stores?

Any input would be much appreciated! 

Hey Everyone,

I am a cake business based in Brisbane Australia.  I currently only use my website for gallery purposes to display my work and also when I want to sell for special events such as Christmas, Easter etc I will set up a shop.  I am wanting to move to having products for sale all the time so customers can hop on, order a dozen cupcakes check out and pay.  However my issue is that I need to be able to add a calendar somewhere,  on the checkout page, or on the shop page under individual products for customers to choose a pick up date and time.  I also need to be able to block out dates for when I am not available or fully booked.  I have looked into scheduling however this doesn't suit as it's more for appointment style which is not what I need.  Is there anyway of adding a calendar for this purpose?  Essentially I'd love it to be like Shopify where you can go into the product select how many and it pops up with your cart in a smaller window with a calendar to choose your dates.  I want to make it as simple and seamless as possible for my customer.  Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.   Thanks so much 

On 1/27/2023 at 11:05 PM, Cupcakes said:

I need to be able to add a calendar somewhere, on the checkout page, or on the shop page under individual products for customers to choose a pick up date and time.  I also need to be able to block out dates for when I am not available or fully booked.

I'd love to give you better news, but Squarespace doesn't currently have this feature. Worse still, it isn't possible for developers like me to add an interactive calendar to the checkout because Squarespace have don't allow third party developers to edit the checkout page. A datepicker can be added to individual products, but the unavailable dates would need to be predetermined - they would not change in response to changes in demand.

I've been advocating for improvements to Squarespace Commerce for a number of years (you can read my post here), including options for local delivery and developer access to the checkout page, but sadly these issues have not been prioritised. 

As you mentioned, unfortunately Shopify is streets ahead with features for local delivery, if it isn’t too complex.

Did this help? Please give feedback by clicking an icon below  ⬇️

On 1/27/2023 at 11:22 AM, Loariis said:

But I cannot figure out how I let the customers order for certain day. Am I missing a trick? I am thinking that there must be thousands of small fresh product shops out there with this need for their online stores?

Sadly, there isn't a perfect solution for this on Squarespace yet (see my post above), despite the number of requests for this. The only workaround for the inventory for each day is to add a "Collection/delivery date" variant for each product and constantly update the options for the different dates, but this will become an admin nightmare.

Did this help? Please give feedback by clicking an icon below  ⬇️

15 hours ago, paul2009 said:

I'd love to give you better news, but Squarespace doesn't currently have this feature. Worse still, it isn't possible for developers like me to add an interactive calendar to the checkout because Squarespace have don't allow third party developers to edit the checkout page. A datepicker can be added to individual products, but the unavailable dates would need to be predetermined - they would not change in response to changes in demand.

I've been advocating for improvements to Squarespace Commerce for a number of years (you can read my post here), including options for local delivery and developer access to the checkout page, but sadly these issues have not been prioritised. 

As you mentioned, unfortunately Shopify is streets ahead with features for local delivery.

Did this help? Please give feedback by clicking an icon below  ⬇️

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply.  Whilst I love SquareSpace I'm feeling more and more it's not suiting my needs in how I'd like to grow the business which is disappointing and frustrating. Thanks again for your advice.  

Thank you so much for a fast reply Paul! For some reason I wasn’t notified of them and couldn’t refind my thread when searching for it so thought I must have never posted it. Hence the reply in another thread. 
 

I never played with Shopify but worry that it is too complex for her to manage once setup. I’m sure I can make it work but I need her to be able to take over afterwards. (I am doing the site as a favor and don’t want to be her web manager forever.) Do you know if it comes with a simple manager app that doesn’t require skills to manage inventory? 

20 minutes ago, Loaworm said:

Thank you so much for a fast reply Paul! For some reason I wasn’t notified of them and couldn’t refind my thread when searching for it

Sometimes notifications fail. If you are looking for an answer, it doesn't hurt to track the thread in some way, other than notifications. You can of course bookmark a thread you are in via your browser.

This is Chrome your browser may vary.

You can also hit the forum site and use the content I posted in feed link.

There are other ways but those two are probably the most convient.

I use the SF Digital Date Picker app for a florist client of mine, it works great as customers can select a date from the calendar before checking out rather than putting the date in TEXT (which was a huge problem for their business prior to having this solution as people would put the wrong date all the time).

The only limitation we have with the date picker solution is we cannot enforce a cut-off time (e.g. same day delivery/pickup if order is placed before 12:00pm). The way we handle this is to simply put a "T&C" in text on the checkout form saying "same day delivery/pickup for orders before 12:00pm" (along with other information) and a radio button stating that they agree to the delivery/pickup terms and conditions. We haven't really had any issues with this to be honest, and it's "the customers fault" for not reading if they have (it's happened once or twice from what I remember).

From what I have understand from @paul2009's numerous comments/posts and the SF Digtial website, it's not possible to set a cutoff time even with their solution due to Squarespace limitaitons. I do wonder if if is possible for the date picker solution to read the internet time and set the times like we do for setting "minimum date that can be selected", though I'd assume they would have done it by now if it were possible.

Squarespace has released some great updates over the years, sadly this isn't one of them yet - it would be nice to see something like this get rolled out sooner rather than later. I guess the only solution as of now if the solution we use (stated above) is to setup a Shopify buy button and let Shopify handle this part of your checkout process.

**EDIT**

I found a date picker which has the ability to set cut-off times, it's from another provider and it does look like it functions in a similar way to SF Digitals, though I am not 100% certain as I have not paid for it. Beyondspace Squarespace Datepicker Plugin - Paul, do you think SF Digital could update thier plugin to have this feature?

@DanielGlazenburg Thank you for your interest! Florists and bakers are actually among our favorite clients, and we recently installed the Beyondspace Datepicker plugin on this page: Le Bouquet Floral Shop, configured with the exact settings you mentioned. Our datepicker can block the current date if the time has passed 11:00 AM, making the current date unavailable for selection.

While it’s true that due to Squarespace's limitations, the datepicker cannot be used on the Checkout form and Donation blocks, it can be set up for Form blocks and Product forms, including in the Quick View modal and on the /cart page. 

Quote

though I am not 100% certain as I have not paid for it.

Feel free to reach out if you have any more questions or need further assistance!

Hi @Beyondspace is your plugin a one of or monthly payment?

21 hours ago, AbrahamH said:

Hi @Beyondspace is your plugin a one of or monthly payment?

It's one-off payment, would you mind to send us an email for more details? Thanks

On 5/22/2024 at 5:29 PM, Beyondspace said:

@DanielGlazenburg Thank you for your interest! Florists and bakers are actually among our favorite clients, and we recently installed the Beyondspace Datepicker plugin on this page: Le Bouquet Floral Shop, configured with the exact settings you mentioned. Our datepicker can block the current date if the time has passed 11:00 AM, making the current date unavailable for selection.

While it’s true that due to Squarespace's limitations, the datepicker cannot be used on the Checkout form and Donation blocks, it can be set up for Form blocks and Product forms, including in the Quick View modal and on the /cart page. 

Feel free to reach out if you have any more questions or need further assistance!

@Beyondspace We are using your plugin successfully on our site, (florist). I am wondering about what you say here about the cart page. we have had a few thoughts regarding the multiple products and how it's frustrating that they need to pick a date twice say if they buy flowers and then add a candle to the order - is there a workaround for this?

23 minutes ago, kellicox90 said:

@Beyondspace We are using your plugin successfully on our site, (florist). I am wondering about what you say here about the cart page. we have had a few thoughts regarding the multiple products and how it's frustrating that they need to pick a date twice say if they buy flowers and then add a candle to the order - is there a workaround for this?

Hi Kelli, 

Yes, I am working on the proposal, it is not ready just yet, but I shared the current problem & my rough ideas

Proposal: Syncing Datepickers in Squarespace product forms

Quote

I am wondering about what you say here about the cart page

What do you want to know about /cart page? What I meant is Shopping Cart has a Edit Details button that allow user to review and edit the Custom product forms there, and it is crucial to show the datepicker there or else it is likely to be messed up (imagine your input dateformat is DD-MM-YYYY while your visitor uses MM-DD-YYYY

Btw, I got your email and will reply there

On 5/23/2024 at 4:06 PM, Beyondspace said:

It's one-off payment, would you mind to send us an email for more details? Thanks

Thank you @Beyondspace just to confirm I will be able to block out certain days I am not available to deliver?

36 minutes ago, AbrahamH said:

Thank you @Beyondspace just to confirm I will be able to block out certain days I am not available to deliver?

Yes, we have visual tool so you can do it yourself