Enable lead time
Step 2 of the Set up Local Pickup Plus series.
Imagine yourself ordering food online, only to be stuck waiting once you arrive to pick it up. Order pickup services are meant to reduce customer wait times. By enabling lead time, you can increase the amount of time before a customer can pick up their order, preventing unexpected delays for the customer.
Based on the use case for your business, you'll need to make sure you're using the lead time that works best for your products. Overall, we recommend setting up Lead time in hours, not days. Here's why:
Day Is considered a 24 hour period, not including "Closed or Not Open Hours" for your business.
- Example: If a company was open 8 hours a day, and they had a customer purchase an item and choose pickup on a Monday. If the pickup was 1 day (24 hours) lead time, then they wouldn't be able to pick up their items until Thursday (or) Friday morning (depending on time of purchase) because 8 hours goes into a 24 hour time frame 3 times, which means they couldn't pick it up for that many days.
Hours Is considered a normal hour.
- Example: If a company bakes cookies, and needs 10 minutes to process an online order, 30 minutes to bake the order, they might want to set 1 hour lead time so that they have some extra time before the customer arrives. This means if a customer makes an order at 3pm, the system will let the customer know that they can pick up their order at 4pm (same day).
If you would like to set this up, please follow the instructions below:
- Sign in to WordPress.
- On the left-side menu, select WooCommerce, and then select Settings.
- Go to the Shipping tab and click on Local Pickup Plus.
- Make sure you have Pickup Appointments Mode set to allow or require appointments.
- Scroll down to Default Lead Time and set your preferred buffer.
- Click on Save changes.
- Test the lead time on the website to make sure its working as intended.
