Getting everyday bakery ordering set up online has been a challenge for me. This past year I’ve played around with quite a few different options. None of them were satisfactory, so I never got it up and running. For the holiday ordering, I’ve been individually setting up each bakery item, and then the date/time slots for customers to select for pick up. Although it was time consuming, that worked fine for specific holiday dates a few times a year. But to work for everyday orders, every single day I would have to change the dates that were available. So that wasn’t going to work. I admit to not being the best at coding, but I knew there had to be a better way. And then I figured out how to set up pick up appointments (this is starting to sound infomercial-ly!).
Anyway, I think this system will work pretty well for us. In every bakery item, there is a drop down box to select your pick up time. I’ll still set up time slots for our big baking holidays so that we know which orders to bake first on those days. But for everyday orders, you just select “Non-Holiday.” When you get to Checkout, your shipping on bakery items will be set to Local Pick Up (sorry, we still can’t ship bakery), and you will be asked to select a date for your “pickup appointment.” You can select anywhere from 2 days away to 6 weeks out. Then you complete the rest of checkout. That’s it!
I also added our Baker’s Dozen Cookies online. You can order mixed dozens or specify a particular cookie. That’s one thing that’s been previously missing from our online ordering.
Here’s the link to the bakery options in our online store: https://rittmanorchards.com/product-category/bakery-ordering/ . Hopefully this will be really convenient for you to use, but if you have any questions or problems, please let me know.
