How do I apply a cut-off time for next-day service (but allow them to choose any time the next day)?

To do this, you will need version 1.5.18 or later of the plugin (October 2015). This adds a new capability to make the “minimum order fulfilment time” vary, depending upon what the time is now, and adds the ability to make that clock not start ticking until the shop first opens. This opens up all kinds of possibilities – some of which would make little sense, but others do!

In this example, we have a shop that customers can collect orders from at any time from 10.00am to 6.30pm (i.e. 10:00 until 18:30, on the 24-hour clock). The shop owner wants people to be able to pick up from the next day onwards, at any time, but only if they order before 18:30. If you order after 18:30, then you can’t pick up the next day, and will need to wait until the day after that.

To do that, you need a minimum order fulfilment time that:

  • Does not allow any times to be chosen from ‘today’ in any case
  • Does allow you to choose a time from tomorrow, as long as it’s not yet 18:30.

To do that, you:

  1. Enter a minimum order fulfilment time that equals the length of time that the shop is open during the day – which is 8 hours and 30 minutes = 8*60 + 30 = 510 minutes. (This will mean that the first criteria above is partially fulfilled – it’ll hold as long as the time today has reached opening time).
  2. Choose the option to “Count the minimum fulfilment time beginning from the time that the customer is ordering”. This now causes the first criteria above to be fully fulfilled.
  3. Enter 18:30 in the “if the time has gone past” box, and enter the number of minutes from 18:30 until 10:00 the next day as the number of minutes to then add on – which is 15 hours and 30 minutes = 15*60 + 30 = 930. This fulfils the second criteria – if the time today is after 6:30pm, then the minimum order time will now take them beyond 6:30pm the next day, meaning that their possible times aren’t until the day after the next day.

All this will look like this:

Cut-off time for next-day delivery

Posted in: WooCommerce Opening Hours and Delivery Times