How To Set Up A Store For The Holidays

As the holidays approach, many of our customers will consider adding special items to their menu or creating entirely new menus altogether to accommodate holiday catering. Given Bottle’s flexibility, there are several ways to create special menus during the holiday season. Here are a few tips as you think about creating a holiday menu. 

In this article we are going to go over:

1. How to create a holiday menu with a specific ordering deadline
2. How to offer holiday menu items each week in your plans
3. How to take time off over the holidays

1. Create A Holiday Menu With A Specific Ordering Deadline

Let’s say you’re allowing customers to order meals for Thanksgiving and the last day to order is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. In scenarios like this one, we suggest creating a new plan with a specific cutoff date. This allows you to take orders consistently up until the order cutoff. 

Here are a few steps for setting up a holiday menu:

1. Create a new category and add products
You are going to want to create a new store here. Before doing that, we would recommend creating a new category on your menu page and adding the special products to that category. Make sure all of these products are available. For example, you may want to create a category called “Thanksgiving Menu” and add Turkey to that category.

2. Create a new store & add category to the store
Next, create that new store. Make sure to add that new category to this subscription in the “Customer Choices” section. 

3. Add cutoff times 
Now, you'll want to add your cutoff times. You can do this by following the instructions in this article. If you only want one cutoff say (say for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving), you could go in and cancel the others leading up to that week to ensure there is only one.

4. Create a scheduled message 
If you’d like to send customers a notification reminding them to order for the special menu, we suggest doing that via a scheduled message and linking to the view menu link (you can find that in the 'Settings' portion of your store) to that message. You will need to send any reminders for this store in this way since the customers signing up are not technically "active" because they have never placed an order for this store before.

5. Setup the delivery option(s) 
Lastly, we would recommend setting up a separate delivery option that is only eligible for this specific plan.

2. Offer Holiday Items Each Week

Of course, you may want to add items to your weekly menu. If this is the case, you'll want to create a new category, add the special items to the category, and then add that category to your current stores. 

You can read more about  how to add categories to plans here.

3. Taking Time Off For The Holidays?

After a year of hard work, you're probably planning to take a week or two off as you prepare for the New Year rush. The easiest way to do this is to cancel your cutoff times. You can read about how to do that here.

We love the holiday season at Bottle. It offers time to reflect, recharge, and prepare for the busyness of the New Year! As always, don't hesitate to email team@sendbottles.com or let us know on Instagram how you're planning to spend your holidays.