Scheduled orders and preorders

A customer can order for now, for a slot later today or this week, or for a date weeks out. You decide which of those your business offers, and how much you are willing to take in any one slot or on any one date. Nothing is booked that you have not said you can make.

The four modes

Pickup and delivery each carry their own settings, and you can run any mix of these:

• Now. The ordinary case. The customer orders and you make it. Switch it off and the ordering page stops offering it, which is how an order-ahead-only business works.
• Scheduled. The customer picks a time slot. You set how far ahead slots run, how long a slot is, and how many orders you will take in one.
• Preorder. The customer picks a date rather than a time, for the kind of order you make a day or a week in advance. You set the notice you need, the time of day after which the next date closes, and how many you will take on one date.
• Preorder with a window. A date plus a collection window on that date, for when "Friday" is not specific enough but a 15-minute slot is too tight.

Caps are making capacity, not a countdown

A per-slot cap and a per-day cap are the same idea at two scales: the most you are willing to make in that period. When a slot or a date fills, the ordering page shows it as full and the customer picks another. The cap itself is never shown to a customer, because how much capacity you have is your business and not theirs; what they see is whether the moment they want is available.

The count is enforced on the server, so two customers racing for the last slot cannot both get it. The one who arrives second is told plainly that it just went, with their card untouched, and the picker reopens with the fresh availability. That is a race, not a mistake, and the copy says so.

Cutoffs and notice

Preorders take two guards. Notice is the minimum time between an order being placed and the date it is for. The cutoff is a time of day after which the next available date moves on: set it to 2:00 pm and an order placed at 2:01 pm books the day after next, not tomorrow. Both are evaluated on the server, so a stale page cannot book past them.

What the customer sees

Only bookable moments. The picker is built from what your settings actually allow, not from a generic calendar with things greyed out: closed days do not appear, a gap between shifts is stated as a gap, and a full slot says it is full rather than vanishing. Slots render as a range where you have set one, so "6:00 to 6:30 pm" is what the customer books and what the confirmation, the status page and your Orders screen all restate.

Cancellation

A scheduled or preordered order can carry a free-cancellation deadline, and where it does, the customer sees the deadline itself on the confirmation and the status page: a date and a time, not a vague window. Cancelling before it refunds in full, automatically. After it, the customer contacts you, exactly as they would for anything else.

An order with no self-serve window says nothing about cancelling rather than showing a button that will not work.

On the Orders screen

Orders for later do not clutter today. A scheduled order arrives on its own rail, and joins the board when its time comes. Upcoming days show what is booked against what you capped, so you can see Friday filling on Tuesday.