Throttling Strategy: Orders Per Window

Overview

To prevent too many orders from coming in at once, a store can set a maximum amount of orders that they can accept per 15-minute time slot. With this strategy, each store can set their own maximum number of orders to accept in a 15 minute period. We have an Introductory Overview video you can watch below explaining Orders Per Window. We also have further notes below our video explaining Orders Per Window.

What's the customer experience like? 

ASAP Orders: Let's say a store only accepts 10 orders every 15-minute time slot and the 1:00 - 1:15 pm time slot has 10 orders for pickup during that time. If a customer attempts to place an order at 12:48 pm with 16 minutes of make time for ASAP, which would normally result in a 1:04 pm pickup, a message would appear when the customer attempts to proceed to checkout saying "{StoreName} is experiencing high order volume and cannot immediately start your order." Once the customer sees the message, they can select a later time and attempt to checkout again. 

Later Orders: If a customer is placing an order for lunch tomorrow but their desired time slot of 1:00 pm is full, they will see a message saying "{StoreName} is experiencing high order volume and cannot prepare your order for {DesiredTimeSlot}."  Once the customer sees the message, they can then select a different time slot and attempt to proceed to checkout again. 

Both the messages outlined above are configurable. If you'd like to adjust the ASAP or Later message, please reach out to your CSM and we'll be happy to adjust. 

How do I enable this throttling strategy?

If you're ready to move forward with Orders Per Window, reach out to your CSM to enable it at the channel level. All throttling strategies need to be set at the brand/channel level, meaning that every store within a brand must share the same throttling strategy. They do not, however, all need to have throttling enabled as you may only want to throttle at some stores and not at others.

Once the channel level strategy is set, your CSM will ensure the throttling settings are visible in the Dashboard for a particular store (or for all stores). Once that is enabled, you will be able to access a store's Order Throttling settings by going to Settings --> Store Settings --> Select Store --> Order Throttling with Channel Management. 

Not sure if this is the right throttling strategy for your brand? Visit our Throttling Strategies Overview article to read about the other strategies we offer.