In GG any bespoke Christmas settings need to be tied to a week number, this throws up a technical headache if you want to fulfil more than one delivery to a customer in a particular week. It’s almost impossible for us to build something that works perfectly for every user, for every possible eventuality over the festive period. Our Christmas specific functionality gives you the tools you need to manage deliveries as easily as possible with the complexities that arise with Christmas orders and order processing that’s tied to a week number.
Adjust Delivery Rounds: Go to Delivery Round Settings, click ‘Edit,’ and activate Christmas adjustments. Choose the week for Christmas.
Set Christmas Delivery Days: Customise delivery, packing, and process days. Enable deferred fulfilment if needed but revert it after Christmas.
Disable Products for Christmas: In the product’s availability settings, choose ‘Disabled on Christmas’ to prevent subscriptions that week.
Christmas-Only Products: Set a specific start and end week for items available only during Christmas.
Disabled on Christmas Products: Disabled products won’t be available to customers in Christmas week.
Early Box Contents: Publish Christmas veg box contents early to boost pre-orders.
Delivery breaks: Make sure to check your delivery break weeks set over the Christmas period
Christmas week adjustment settings.
In our platform you can set different settings for a delivery round that is only active for your Christmas delivery week. This can be different for each individual delivery round. Navigate to your delivery round settings page and click ‘edit’ on the delivery round you want to activate Christmas week adjustments to. Click ‘Activate Christmas week adjustments’.
The following information details how these different settings can be used over the Christmas period.
Order processing and multiple deliveries.
One scenario that may happen over the Christmas period is doing a double delivery week which includes 2 separate deliveries to customers in one week of the year. It’s not currently possible to process more than one order for a customer for delivery in the same week. You can only have one order processed for a customer on a delivery round in any given week. For example if you wanted to fulfil your non-Christmas orders on the normal delivery day eg Wednesday, but also have a separate Christmas delivery on the Sunday. These orders would have to process together at the same time. Read more about how to fulfil these deliveries here link
Defining a Christmas week.
In our Christmas week adjustment settings you can define what week you want Christmas to be linked to for a particular delivery round. To define your Christmas delivery week navigate to your delivery round settings. In the field ‘Christmas delivery week’ you can select the specific week number for that delivery round that you want Christmas to be linked to. If no week number is set manually, the default week for Christmas will be week 51. Make sure you are happy with your selection before updating the delivery round settings.
The setting of this week number is linked to ‘Disabling products on Christmas’ detailed below. If a product is set to ‘Disabled on Christmas’ the product will not process normal subscriptions on the week number set in the Christmas Delivery Week field.
Christmas delivery round settings.
As part of the Christmas week adjustment settings, you can also have alternative delivery and process settings for Christmas deliveries. Update the fields ‘Christmas delivery day’, Christmas Packing day’ and ‘Christmas process day’ to the setting you want to be active for your Christmas delivery week. Click ‘update delivery round’ to confirm the changes.
Christmas deferred fulfilment.
You may consider delivering on a day much earlier in the week than your normal deliveries over Christmas. For example you may want to deliver on a Monday in your defined Christmas week when your normal delivery for those rounds would take place on a Thursday.
For this you may not normally have deferred fulfilment toggled on. Deferred fulfilment is where orders are processed in the week prior to when the deliveries take place. This additional ‘delivery round’ setting enables you to set ‘deferred fulfilment’ separately in your ‘Activate Christmas Week Adjustments’ delivery settings. Previously it was not possible to set a process day in a week prior to Christmas if you do not normally have ‘deferred fulfilment’ applied without last minute manual updating of the settings.
Now you can set this up ahead of time, ensuring that dates the customer is provided with in their basket are accurate.
Viewing your Christmas adjustments.
In your delivery settings page click ‘Display Christmas Week Adjustments’ to show the alternative settings that have been entered.
Disabling products on Christmas week.
In a given Christmas week you may want to only deliver your Christmas product range and not process normal subscriptions. In the ‘availability’ tab on a product you can choose to disable a product from processing in your defined Christmas week.
A common scenario may be that you want to disable your normal veg box range and just have your Christmas veg boxes process in your Christmas week. This enables you to handle this through this setting on the product.
Under ‘Christmas availability’ select ‘Disabled on Christmas’. This will prevent the product from processing in your defined Christmas week, with subscriptions returning to the customers normal schedule after the order processing has been completed.
You can also see an overview and change the settings of the products in your system product settings. Under the ‘Christmas’ drop down you can toggle on ‘Disabled on Christmas’ and see the full list of your products and update the settings accordingly.
Make sure to double check these settings so no product is prevented from being processed that should be.
Disabling on Christmas and the storefront.
If the product is disabled on Christmas week this will prevent the product from being ordered in that week in the storefront. The Christmas week delivery date for the customer will be removed from the date picker when adding the product to their basket.
Product availability only for Christmas.
Our product availability settings mean you can set products to be available just for specific weeks around Christmas or just on your Christmas delivery week. This replaces our ‘Christmas only’ option on products which limited the product as one off for week 51. You can set a start and end week that the item is available for. For example if your Christmas deliveries are taking place in week 52 you can set the ‘Start’ and ‘End’ week to Week 52, restricting the availability of the product to just available on your Christmas delivery week.
Storefront and customer communication
Customer communication around the festive period will be key to maximising your sales and to make sure customers understand how the system will behave on a non typical ordering week. Below are a few bits of info that are linked to your storefront and automated emails from the system that you can communicate to customers if required.
Publishing box contents for your Christmas veg box range
If you are planning on selling a separate Christmas veg box range - showing current and potential customers what their box contents will be for their Christmas deliveries will help customers add orders earlier and pre plan their Christmas food shopping.
Normally you would publish your box contents the week before the orders take place. However you can advertise the box contents much earlier than the week before your Christmas deliveries for items that have their availability restricted to your Christmas delivery week.
When your Christmas veg box range is available and active in your store, you can enter box contents for all the weeks prior to Christmas and publish along with your normal box contents pre advertising the contents.
Publishing Christmas box contents and swaps - In this instance of publishing box contents further in advance. If swaps are available on the product, they won’t be available for customers to make changes until the product lands in the ‘next delivery’ section in their basket. This will be the week before their delivery when the previous week has processed.
Christmas orders and customer baskets
When customers are pre ordering ahead of Christmas the items they have in their basket, won’t appear in the ‘next delivery’ part of the basket as it is scheduled further in the future. The order will appear in the ‘Future and pre-orders’ part of the basket with the day and date of delivery clearly labelled. If you have made changes to your Christmas delivery settings the correct day will be reflected in the basket. For example if the normal delivery day is Thursday, but you are delivering on a Monday in your Christmas week, the Monday delivery day will be shown in the ‘Future and pre-orders’ part of the basket. When the order is then scheduled for the next delivery it will moved to the ‘next delivery’ part of the basket.
Order processing and customer emails
If you have made adjustments to your delivery round settings for Christmas, this will impact the behaviour of when orders are processed and when automated emails are sent to the customer. Email communication from the system is linked to the ‘process day’ that is set on a delivery round. If your process day for Christmas is different to the normal schedule the customer will receive the normal ‘basket reminder’ and ‘order confirmation’ emails on the day that is set in your ‘Christmas week adjustment’ settings. The process day is also most importantly when the customer will be charged for their order. If this day is adjusted for Christmas week, the customer will be charged at 11pm of the process day that’s set against the delivery round. This could mean that the customer is charged twice in one week if you are processing orders in the week prior to delivery for Christmas using ‘deferred fulfilment’.
Product availability over more than one week
If you are delivering Christmas orders over two weeks and a product is available for week 51 and 52. It is important that the customer adds the product to the correct delivery. For example one of your delivery rounds may be taking place in week 52 but you are also doing deliveries in week 51. This requires you to have a product available for both week 51 and 52. But some delivery rounds you will only want to deliver the product in week 52, your Christmas delivery week. The product will be available for the customer to add for both weeks.
On the product the first delivery date the product is available will be shown in the date picker. If their Christmas delivery is on the Monday, it is important to communicate to the customer that they should choose the correct delivery day when adding the product to their basket. In this example they need to click ‘next week’ and select Monday 23rd December.
Delivery breaks
Our delivery break functionality enables you to prevent orders processing in any given week of the year. Further guidance on this can be found here Delivery breaks.
Any delivery breaks that were set in a previous year will remain in the system for the current year. Make sure to double check your delivery break weeks and make sure you are happy with the selection. This could potentially prevent orders from processing if the week that is set is incorrect. For example: If you had week 52 set as a delivery break last year, this will still be active in your system unless you have already removed this.
Christmas delivery scenarios and how to fulfil them
Delivering Christmas only products in week 52
One scenario you may be considering is delivering certain delivery rounds in week 52 eg Monday 23rd December, with Christmas only products. This would require you to have ‘Christmas delivery week adjustments’ active on that round. For this you would need to apply the following settings:
Christmas delivery week = 52
Christmas Delivery day = Monday
Christmas Process day = Before Monday and after the normal process day of the delivery round eg Sunday
Christmas Packing day = The day you want to pack the order
Deferred fulfilment - For this to process in the week prior, you will need to toggle on ‘deferred fulfilment’. However if this isn’t already enabled this must be set ‘after’ that round has processed for week 51. You can then manage what products are processed for these deliveries by disabling products on the Christmas week. For example you may want to disable all of your normal veg box range from processing and just allow Christmas veg boxes to process.
How to fulfil a double delivery week
Option 1 - process orders as week 52, but fulfil in week 51.
The best way to fulfil a double delivery week in the Christmas delivery period is to process orders for week 52 in week 51 after your usual orders have processed and fulfil the deliveries in week 51 on your chosen delivery days. This means that admin tasks such as printing labels and using the packing screens can still be used without any major work around.
The only potential drawback with this option is your delivery day will be set on a day that will fall in week 52, for example Monday 23rd December. This means that basket reminder, delivery confirmation and basket messaging will be inaccurate. It will be important to be clear with any messaging to customers that you will be delivering on the day you specify in week 51 that may not be reflected in any system related communication.
To make this work you will need to apply various settings carefully in a way to not impact normal deliveries.
- On all delivery rounds set Christmas delivery week = 52
- Christmas Delivery day = Monday
- Christmas Process day = Before Monday and after the normal process day of the delivery round
- Christmas Packing day = The day you want to pack the order
- Deferred fulfilment - For this to process in the week prior, you will need to toggle on ‘deferred fulfilment’. However if this isn’t already enabled this must be set ‘after’ that round has processed for week 51.
- Make sure there is no delivery break set for week 52.
You will have the option to either process normal subscriptions and Christmas items together or just specific Christmas items. Processing both normal subscriptions and Christmas products.
If you are planning on processing normal deliveries alongside Christmas products, customers may want to cancel their regular subscription and just receive a Christmas veg box.
To pause their regular subscription product for just one week, the customer can move their next delivery date along on the product.
It is important that customers do not ‘remove’ it from their basket as this will effect their normal subscription resulting in an empty basket when deliveries return to normal.
Processing just specific items and not normal subscriptions. If you want to just deliver specific items, for example your range of Christmas veg boxes, you will need to make sure any product you do not want to process is ‘disabled on christmas’. Disabling products on Christmas week. This will make sure those products don’t process in week 52 and you will just be fulfilling the Christmas specific products.
Option 2.
If you wanted to fulfil your non-Christmas orders on the normal delivery day eg Wednesday, but also have a separate Christmas delivery on the Sunday. These orders would have to process together at the same time.
Using our ‘export packing sheets’ available in your packing page you will be able to apply a combination of filters to view what orders need packing for the Christmas deliveries. Products should be clearly labelled/can be easily identified using the filters. For example if you are just delivering Christmas Veg Boxes in the second delivery run. Having the phrase ‘Christmas’ in a product will enable you to easily search for all of the Christmas veg box products with that name in order to separate them from the full list of orders processed on a delivery round. In this scenario it would not be possible to use the driver app for that week as both sets of deliveries will be included. Our driver app would include both sets of deliveries in this instance and the ‘export packing sheets’ can be used to separate the orders into two separate delivery runs.
Delivering orders without the driver app.
For both of the above options deliveries would need be completed without our driver app. This requires you to use our packing data exported from either ‘Export packing labels’ or data from the ‘Export packing sheets’.
Creating driver data without filtering
To create a driver sheet without any filtering of products required you can use ‘Export packing labels’ which places each delivery on one line with products split between the ‘veg boxes’ and ‘add ons’ columns. This can easily be exported as it is, but you can hide any columns you don’t wish to use. Download as a csv and then format in your spreadsheet software such as google sheets or excel for printing.
Filtering driver data by products
If you need to split your delivery rounds up by different products you can use ‘export packing sheets’ and then apply filters to the products you want to find.
On the delivery round you want to deliver and gather the data for click ’export packing sheets’ to view the data.
To filter the data by products select ‘filters’ and then select ‘product’.
You can either filter by the operator ‘contains’ and add the value ‘Christmas’ to search for all products containing that phrase. Or you can use ‘is any of’ and enter the exact name of each product you want to show in the list.
You can also alter what data shows by hiding any columns you don’t want in the export. When you are happy with the data hit ‘export’ and then you can format in your spreadsheet software such as google sheets or excel.
Double portion veg boxes
One option you may consider is increasing the size of your last delivery before Christmas in week 51 with a delivery break lined up for Christmas week. For example, you may want to offer a double portion box/bag option and charge double the amount for the product for one week only. This can be handled through changing the name and price of the veg box product in between when week 50 has processed but before when week 51 processes. Once the order has processed for week 51 you can then change it back to the normal name and price so that when your next orders process they are back to the correct product and price.