Pause online orders when you're slammed
Stop taking orders for half an hour, push your quoted times out, or close one channel without closing the other.
Every kitchen has a Friday that gets away from it. When that happens, pausing online orders for a while is far better than letting more tickets pile onto a kitchen that is already twenty minutes behind, because the orders you take in that state are the ones that arrive late and cold and lose you the customer.
Everything on this page is on the Home page, deliberately, so that you can reach it in one tap while your hands are full.
Pause ordering
- Tap the channel you want to stop: Online Orders, Collection Orders or Delivery Orders.
- Choose how long for: 30 minutes, 1 hour, Until tomorrow, or Until I resume it.
- Confirm with Stop accepting.
Unless you chose to pause indefinitely, ordering starts again by itself when the time is up, so nobody has to remember to turn it back on in the middle of service. While it is paused the card shows you when it ends, for example Paused until 20:30, and Resume brings it back early if the kitchen catches up sooner than you expected.
Pause one thing, not everything
Collection and delivery pause separately, and that separation is worth using. If the problem is that your driver has not turned up, pause delivery and keep taking collection orders, because the customers who are willing to come and collect their food can still be served. Closing everything in that situation means turning away money you could perfectly well have taken.
Push your times out instead
Quite often you do not actually need to stop taking orders — you need to stop promising them in twenty minutes. Use Estimated Time on the Home page to add time in five-minute steps, separately for collection and for delivery.
Do it before things get bad rather than afterwards. A customer who is told 45 minutes and gets their food in 40 is pleased with you, while a customer who is told 20 minutes and gets it in 40 feels let down, even though both of them waited exactly the same time for exactly the same food. What makes the difference is the promise, and that is the part you control.
Remember to turn it back on
The expensive mistake here is Until I resume it. If you pause indefinitely on a Saturday night, it is genuinely easy to open on Sunday with online ordering still switched off and spend the afternoon wondering why it is so quiet. When you are not sure how long you need, choose one of the fixed lengths instead, because those repair themselves.
Glance at the Home page at the start of every shift and check that the channels you want are accepting orders. It takes two seconds and it is what catches a pause somebody left on the night before.
Last updated 20 September 2026