Made to order products timing

[delightfulbaker]

Hi all! Just a business question here. I'm trying to start a home bakery that's made to order but I am stumped with a problem. Because we have limited manpower we can only make so many baked goods per day. To curb this problem we are going to try a 72hr notice on our orders. Is there a way to set up the checkout system so we have a limit of orders we can accept per day, based on the products in the order?

[SBD_]

Hey @delightfulbaker 

One approach would be to store the daily total orders in a shop metafield, and display a banner/hide add to cart buttons when the maximum orders are reached. You could probably use something like Flow to increment total orders and schedule a timer to reset to 0 each day.

This would require some theme modifications to read the metafield value and adjust the layout.

Let me know if you get stuck and good luck with the bakery! 🍩

[delightfulbaker]

That sounds pretty good, I'll look into that, thanks!

[delightfulbaker]

Another question if you wouldn't mind. Is there a way when customers checkout, the website give them sort of like a calendar to pick which day they would need the order for?

I'm thinking this way, we can have it so if certain days already has X number of cookies or X number of cakes, it will be unavailable.

[SBD_]

Hey @delightfulbaker 

This could be achieved with a theme customization or an app like this one.

[delightfulbaker]

I was talking with their support for the app, and they informed me that real-time viewing of the number of products being bought is not possible due to Shopify's API. So if multiple people were to order the same products that all went above a certain days cap, there would be no way of knowing that until after they've finished the order. Is that true?

[SBD_]

Hey @delightfulbaker 

If you were to hide the add-to-cart and checkout buttons once you hit a certain number of orders, it's possible additional customers might already be in the checkout flow when the limit is reached, or order more than the reming limit.

A more robust solution would be to use the Cart and Checkout Validation Function API, which would limit customers in 'real-time', but this can only be used by public apps or Plus stores.