"When will it be ready?" is the entire customer experience of pickup and delivery. Without time slots, every order is 'ASAP' — which means the dinner rush gets twelve simultaneous tickets, the kitchen falls behind, and the 6:15 customer's food sits cooling next to the 6:45 customer's order that hasn't started. Time slots turn that chaos into a schedule. Here's how to add them to WooCommerce checkout.
The three settings that make slots work
- Lead time — the minimum gap between ordering and the first available slot. A kitchen needs 20–30 minutes; offering a 5-minute slot just creates a broken promise.
- Slot interval — how granular the choices are. 15-minute slots suit pickup; 30–60 minutes suit delivery routes.
- Booking horizon — how many days ahead customers can order. Same-day-only keeps things simple; a 2–3 day horizon captures office lunch pre-orders.
Get these three right and slots smooth your kitchen load automatically: instead of demand spikes, you get a pre-scheduled queue the kitchen can pace itself against.
Your options in WooCommerce
- Dedicated delivery-slot plugins: mature options exist with calendars, per-slot capacity caps, and courier integrations — typically $50–$150/yr and one more plugin to maintain.
- Built into CloverWoo: if you're a Clover merchant, Pickup & Delivery Time Slots ships in the restaurant feature pack, with the chosen slot flowing through to the Clover order and the kitchen ticket.
Setting up time slots in CloverWoo
- WordPress admin → Clover → Settings → Restaurant Features.
- Toggle on Pickup & Delivery Time Slots.
- Set lead time (e.g. 30 minutes), slot interval (e.g. 15 minutes), and how many days ahead are bookable.
- Save. Checkout now shows a time picker scoped to your business hours — closed periods simply don't offer slots.
The slot the customer picks isn't decorative: it's attached to the Clover order and printed on the kitchen ticket, so staff see '6:30 PM pickup — Hammad' on the physical ticket, not just in a web dashboard someone has to check. Slots also respect Business Hours automatically — no 9am slots on a day you open at 11.
Frequently asked questions
Does WooCommerce support pickup time slots natively?
No — core checkout has no scheduling. You add slots with a dedicated delivery/pickup plugin, or use CloverWoo's built-in Time Slots feature if you're a Clover merchant, which also pushes the chosen time onto the Clover kitchen ticket.
Where does the kitchen see the chosen time?
On the printed Clover ticket and in the Clover Orders app — the slot is attached to the order itself, not just stored in WooCommerce. That's the practical difference an integrated feature makes: the schedule lives where the cooking happens.
Do slots respect my opening hours?
Yes. Time Slots reads the Business Hours feature: slots are only offered inside open windows, lead time is honoured from the moment of ordering, and closed days offer no slots at all.
Can customers order for tomorrow or next week?
That's the booking-horizon setting. Allow 1 day for same-day-only operations, or extend to 2–7 days if you want pre-orders — catering and office lunches usually justify at least a 2-day horizon.