Hi! I run a bakery/cafe, and we’re looking for an efficient solution to our local pre-orders. I’m hopeful Shopify has a combination of apps to get there, but I haven’t quite found what I’m looking for yet.
In an ideal world: you go to our order page and first select what date you’re looking for, after which you would get a curated menu based on that date. We have a menu that changes monthly, and we need to have the ability to have customers select from one menu if they’re ordering for this month, but a different menu for next month. We also have many products that don’t change month to month.
I’ve found bits of apps that can assign an availability range on a per product basis, but most of the ones I’ve seen has this selection happen after you add the item to the cart. I want to avoid customers browsing a long list of products, thinking they’re all available all the time, and only afterwards realizing it’s not available for the date they’re looking for (or worse, ordering it for the wrong date and not realizing it).
This would primarily be for local pre-order pickups. While I am less concerned with the shipping aspect, we do have a (smaller) list of items that are shippable, and I would want those easily identifiable from the start as well.
Are there any bakeries with these same needs? What have you found to be the best option from both a functional, tech standpoint, as well as ease of use for the customer?
To be honest I don’t think I understand this very well. But from what I do, you can create a metafield for different products with a month string and then when displaying products on the frontend check the current month and only the products that match the metafield month are shown or can be added to cart and those that don’t match, we can either choose to hide them or show them but disable the add to cart button.
I am extremely sorry if I got this entirely wrong from what you are actually looking for.
You can simply create collections for each week and add only products you’d be baking this week to each of these collections and make them reachable via menu or links on the homepage. That would probably be the simplest way to start
You can set a metafield on each product and set this metafield to the value of the week the product would be available. Then you should be able to add this metafield to the collection filters and your visitors would be able to filter your collections based on this value.
And of course, then you should be able to semi-automate these collections/metafields and show warnings on cart page agains delivery/pickup date based on this.
Yes, there are apps which change product availability based on a schedule, but probably not the best option for you if you want people to pre-order things for next week today – they would not be able to do it if product is not buyable now.
Finally, Flow (a free Shopify app) can do a lot to automate your routines in back-end.
Thanks for the reply. The one caveat to that is I would like to have all of the products order-able, just only for specific pickup date ranges. The month you’re on the page doesn’t matter (aside from order cut-offs), it’s the specific products that are tied to specific fulfillment months.
So for instance, if I’m selling products A, B, C, & D, I want you to be able to see, clearly, that products A, B, & C are available to pickup this month, products A, B, & D are available to pickup next month, and products A, C, & D are available in two months. You can see all products, they’re all order-able, but only for specific date ranges.
Thanks for the reply! I will dig into collections and look into that. Does it complicate things if I have some products available every month? I wouldn’t want to duplicate items, ideally it’s the same item that appears in all of the collections, alongside the seasonal items available in specific collections.
Yes, so with metafields we can specify different date ranges to a product and depending on that show that info to the user or make any other adjustments to it with liquid.
It can get a bit confusing because as per the example you are giving one product has different date ranges, but it’s doable that way and this is what comes to mind from what little knowledge I have of Shopify.
Tag products that should be displayed every month as “month-all” and a tag “meal”
Tag other products according to their respective months “month-10” or “month-11” and some products can have multiple month tags and a tag “meal”.
(optional) Create smart ie automated collection with tag “meal” that will list all your products for easy management, tagging, untagging. Not published.
Create monthly smart collections for next few following months with url - menu-month-10, menu-month-11, menu-month-12. Once user opens it it will see only products that are relevant to that month.
Create relatively simple script that has date picker once it selected it redirects to according month menu. Alternatively list collections by months.
P.S.: Similar way you can organize weekly menus.