Schedule a 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. You build it in Drops → New drop, save it as a draft for as long as you like, and publish it when it is ready.

Before you start

Three things live outside the drop and have to exist first.

• Products in your Catalog. A drop’s menu is built from products you already have; you cannot invent a line inside the wizard.
• A pickup location, under Settings → Pickup locations. It is where buyers collect, and a drop cannot publish without one.
• An allergen review on every product you put on the menu. In the product editor that is the I’ve checked this product’s allergens and the list above is correct box; a product that has never been reviewed wears an amber Allergens not reviewed badge in Catalog.

Build it: Menu, Pickup, Review

Open Drops in the sidebar and press New drop. The wizard has three steps, named in the stepper card at the top, and a finished step can be jumped back to. Save draft in the footer keeps whatever you have so far — a draft is meant to be half-built, and 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, and, where the product has them, its variant and add-on chips. Snoozed products stay visible in the catalog list but cannot be added. The menu closes on a tally of lines, units and what the drop is worth if it sells out.

Pickup

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

How many orders one pickup time can take is not a number you set — a pickup time holds units, the same units on your menu, split evenly across every pickup time the window generates. There is no switch and no stepper for it on this step; the seller side of that number is always derived, never typed.

The grid beside those answers is generated from them: back-to-back pickup times across the window, each carrying 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 — and, when the window does not divide, says what it dropped: The last 20 min don’t fit a 45-min pickup time, so the day ends at 15:40. 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 puts the reconciled total in one line: 61 units · 12 pickup times · 5 and 6 units each (once there are more than a handful of pickup times this becomes a range instead of a list: 61 units · 12 pickup times · 5–6 each).

Under the pickup card it also says plainly what the drop does on its own, so you do not go looking for switches that are not there: when ordering closes, that the drop completes after the last pickup, that it sells out by itself when the menu is gone, and that it reopens if a cancelled order frees units before it closes.

Review can warn you — it never blocks you — and at most two times:

• A trailing part-time was dropped, the same sentence the Pickup step showed.
• Ordering closes after the last pickup time. Buyers could still order after the last pickup has ended. Review lets you carry on; publishing does not — see Orders close 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. Pull the close back and publish again.

Publish

The footer’s last button is Publish now, or Schedule drop when you chose a time. A saved draft can also be published from its own page, where the Overview lists what is still missing:

• Menu has products
• Pickup window set
• Slot grid
• Pickup location chosen

A cover photo is checked too, but it never blocks publishing. Until all four of the others are done, the Publish now button stays visible and says what it is waiting for rather than vanishing.

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

After it is published

The drop’s own page serves the rest of its life through four tabs — Overview, Menu, Slots and Orders — with the state pill and the day’s verbs in the header. Copy link and View storefront are how you share it.

Back on Drops, the shelf groups everything under Selling now, Up next, Drafts and Done, in that order. Those groups never move; the sort and the chips reorder within them.

The Calendar

Calendar in the sidebar is the planning lens over the same drops, beside your accepted custom orders. Month, Week and Agenda are three readings of one period, and the chips scope them to All, Drops or Custom orders.

It is a reading surface: nothing there creates, moves or cancels anything, and every event opens onto the drop or the request that owns it. When two commitments land on top of each other, an amber Clash band names them both, which is the cheapest place to catch a double-booked baking day.