At checkout, the Dots app offers three ways to receive an order: as soon as possible, at an exact time the customer picks, or within a time slot you define. It sounds like a small checkout detail. Operationally, it changes when your revenue arrives and how predictable your kitchen's day is.
Scheduled orders are revenue you'd otherwise never see
An ASAP-only app sells nothing while you're closed. With scheduled ordering, the office manager booking Friday's team lunch at 9:15, or the customer craving your pizza at midnight, places the order now — and your first hour of opening starts with a full queue instead of zero. Timing also drives retention directly: an order that arrives when promised is the single strongest predictor of a second order. We unpacked that relationship in how delivery time drives customer retention — late orders quietly kill repeat rates before anyone complains.
Slots turn your peak from a cliff into a staircase
The exact-time option serves customers with a hard deadline: lunch at 13:00, a birthday table at 19:30. Time slots serve you. You define slot length and capacity per location — say, 30-minute windows with a maximum of 12 orders each — and the app stops selling a window once it's full. Demand that would have piled into 13:00–13:30 spreads across the adjacent slots instead of turning into 50-minute waits and refunds. The kitchen sees the scheduled queue in advance in the monitoring panel, fires each order at the right moment, and couriers get assigned against a plan instead of a panic.
How you configure it in Dots
Everything is set per location in the admin panel: which of the three options are available, minimum lead time for scheduled orders, slot duration and per-slot capacity, and how far ahead customers may book. ASAP orders quote an honest estimate based on current load and your delivery zones, not a flat number that's wrong twice a day.
Who gets the most out of it
- Lunch-trade operations — offices order at 9:00 for 13:00; slots keep noon survivable.
- Bakeries and caterers — cakes and platters are pre-order businesses by nature.
- Anyone with a sharp evening peak — capacity caps convert overload into booked slots, not lost orders.
