Schedule the drop

A drop is one round of selling: a menu, a pickup window buyers choose a slot in, and the two instants that open and close ordering. This chapter builds one.

Open Drops in the sidebar and press New drop. The wizard has three steps — named in the stepper card at the top — and Save draft in the footer keeps whatever you have so far. A draft is meant to be half-built; nothing is visible to buyers until you publish.

Menu

Name the drop, add the one-line summary buyers read on the storefront, and choose a cover photo if you have one.

Search your catalog on the left and add products. Each line on the right carries the units you are offering — what your oven can actually turn out, not a wish — and, where the product has them, its variant and add-on chips. Snoozed products stay visible in the catalog list but cannot be added.

A line starts at one batch when the product has a batch size, otherwise at whatever you offered for it last time, otherwise at 24 — change any of it.

Underneath the lines, No limit per buyer is the one optional limit on this step: press Set a limit if you want to stop one buyer taking a whole line.

The step closes on a tally: lines, units, and what the drop is worth if it sells out.

Pickup

This step is the shape of your day. You answer four questions:

• the pickup location — offered when you have more than one;
• the pickup date;
• the times the window Opens and Closes;
• how long one pickup time is — 15, 20, 30, 45 or 60 minutes.

There is no number to set here for how many orders a pickup time takes — the units on your menu are split evenly across the pickup times you generate, and that is the only number a pickup time ever carries.

The grid beside those answers is generated from them: back-to-back pickup times across the window, each showing its share of the menu’s units, and a trailing part-time dropped rather than sold. The line underneath tallies the day — 8 pickup times · 61 units. It is the same grid the drop is published with, so what you see here is what buyers are offered.

Review

Review reads the drop back to you — the menu with its merged allergen list, the pickup day as plain facts, and the two numbers in one line: 61 units · 8 pickup times · 7 and 8 units each (once there are more than a handful of pickup times, this becomes a range: 61 units · 8 pickup times · 7–8 each). Under it sits the short list of what the drop does on its own: when ordering closes, that it completes after the last pickup, that it sells out by itself, and that it reopens if a cancelled order frees units.

If something does not add up — ordering closing after your last pickup time, for instance — Review says so in amber. It warns; it never blocks — publishing is where one of them bites, below.

Then it asks the one question left, When it goes live:

• Go live now — buyers can order the moment you publish.
• Schedule — you pick the day and time ordering opens.

Orders close is optional and defaults to the moment pickup opens. Ordering can never outlive the schedule: a closing time later than the last pickup time is refused when you publish, and the refusal names the time ordering must close by.

Publish

The footer’s last button is Publish now, or Schedule drop when you chose a time.

If it will not go, the drop’s own Overview says what is missing — menu has products, pickup window set, slot grid, pickup location chosen. A cover photo is checked too but never blocks publishing. The button stays visible and states what it is waiting for rather than vanishing.

The other refusal is the allergen one from the last chapter: publishing is refused while any line on the menu carries a product whose allergens have never been reviewed. Review the product in Catalog, then open the drop and save it again.

A drop published with a future opening time lands on Scheduled and turns Live by itself at that instant, then closes itself when ordering closes. You do not have to be at the computer for either.

Where it lives now

Back on Drops, the shelf groups everything under Selling now, Up next, Drafts and Done, in that order. The drop’s own page serves the rest of its life through four tabs — Overview, Menu, Slots and Orders.

Schedule a drop is the reference version of this chapter, and it also covers the Calendar, which reads your drops and your accepted custom orders as one month.

Next: Share the link — the address buyers order from.