Order limiting allows you to throttle the volume of orders you're able to accept. Spread out your customer orders by setting limits that match your kitchen capacity.
Once set, a storefront which has reached the limit for one time slot will then hide that time slot. Adding this feature will allow you to more easily control your flow of orders in MOBI.
How order limits work
Kitchen Limits
Here you can set a total dollar value limit for the hour. However, this amount is actually prorated, breaking the hour into timeslots (5 minutes by default, or other if your store has your timeslots configured differently) with the value spread evenly over those slots.
Kitchen Limits apply to both pickup AND delivery orders. Both will need to be throttled in order that the kitchen does not get overwhelmed.
Please note that in-store orders (like MOBI table and kiosk orders) are never limited, but their values do count towards the limits, as do orders from aggregators (Uber Eats, DoorDash, Skip The Dishes).
Delivery Limits
Here you set a total number of orders per hour that you believe your drivers have capacity for, and this is also prorated per timeslot.
As with kitchen limits, this is also broken down into 5 minute slots (rather than the whole hour). The minimum number of delivery orders is 1 per time slot. So if you had 5 minute time slots, the minimum number of delivery orders you could do per hour would be 12.
Please note: this feature was built with a target of helping restaurants who have their own delivery drivers who might only be able to complete a certain number of deliveries per hour. We recommend that stores using last-mile delivery (Uber Direct, DoorDash Drive) do not use this setting as it may unnecessarily throttle delivery orders that these providers would have had capacity to deliver.
Turning on order limits
Limits are set on a store level. You'll need to get the MOBI team to activate this feature for you.
- Submit a support ticket and we'll activate this feature
- Go to your Store Dashboard
- Settings > Order limiting
- Edit your Order Limits
Working out a sensible limit
Kitchen Limits
The best method for working out your order limits is to work out your average order value. This is frequently higher online than in store. Here's a suggested method to start working things out.
- Go to your Store Sales page
- Look at a months worth of orders (or more)
- Divide the total revenue by the number of orders you received.
This will give you an accurate Average Order Value.
Now multiply your Average Order Value by the number of orders you'd like to get in an hour.
This will give you a sensible revenue order limit. You'll be able to see the breakdown of how we spread out that number over your storefront time slots.
Then you'll want to tweak from there.
Delivery Limits
This is something you can set depending on your maximum delivery capacity.
Expectations & Caveats
We cannot strictly enforce throttling of orders without causing failed orders, so there may be scenarios where you notice a greater number of orders come through for a certain timeslot. See below for explanations on why.
- If a timeslot is “full”, then a new person arriving on the storefront will not see that timeslot as an option.
- For example, if the 7:00pm slot is full, the next customer will see 7:05pm as the earliest available timeslot
- A customer can place an order valued higher than the timeslot limit.
- For the example at the top, a customer could place an order for $60 in an available timeslot e.g. 7:40pm. We will not prevent an order just because it has a value higher than the limit. 7:40pm will become “full”, and the next customer will see 7:45pm as the next available slot.
- If an order is placed in a timeslot that doesn’t reach the limit, another order may be placed for that timeslot regardless of the value. We will keep accepting orders until the limit has been reached.
- If the 7:10pm timeslot currently has orders totaling less than the limit, i.e. $40, then another order(s) can be placed until the $50 limit has been reached. The subsequent order(s) could then pass the $50 limit. For example, order 1 for 7:10pm is worth $40, order 2 for 7:10pm is worth $8, order 3 for 7:10pm can be worth any amount e.g. $30.
- We do not carry the order values over to the next timeslot.
- If an order is placed for 7:30pm worth $120, then the 7:30pm slot is full, but a subsequent order can still be placed for 7:35pm. We will not say that 7:30pm is full ($50), 7:35pm is full ($100), and $20 has been used up for 7:40pm.
- We do not support limits for the whole hour, they are always pro-rated by the timeslots.
- In above example, if someone were to place a $600 order for 8pm (meaning the total of $600 per hour is reached), we do not block off all remaining times within the hour making the next available slot 9pm. The next available time will still be 8:05pm.
- We don't believe this kind of activity would happen too often to cause problems. However, if you are concerned about the impact this kind of order can have, please reach out to MOBI support to request information about using large order tags.
- This limit is not enforced strictly due to customer behaviour (several people starting orders around the same time, people staying on final screen for a while)
- If a customer A stays on the final checkout screen for some time, they have essentially “claimed” that timeslot (but their order value doesn’t contribute to the limit until the order is placed). In the meantime, Customer B may have grabbed that timeslot and placed an order, and it may have caused that timeslot limit to be reached. Customer A could still place their order, meaning the total order value for that timeslot could be well above the limit.
- Delivery orders take drive time into account
- This will explain why it looks like you can place a delivery order for a “full” time slot. If fact, after taking the drive time into account, we'll actually be assessing the availability for an earlier slot.