Blocking Pre-Order Timeslots

Prevent customers from placing pre-orders during periods when you can’t fulfil them by adjusting the days, times, and capacity available in your pre-order settings.

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When to Restrict Timeslots

Restricting pre-order availability is useful for:

• Fully-booked periods — no capacity for additional orders
• Special events — private functions or catered events
• Holidays — partial closures or reduced service
• Operational constraints — planned maintenance or staffing gaps

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Where Pre-Order Settings Live

All of the options below are on the Pre-Orders page (“Slots, capacity & scheduling”): go to Stores → your store → Settings → Pre-Orders. There is no separate timeslot management section. Pickup and delivery are configured separately using the Pickup and Delivery tabs, and every change must be applied with the Save button at the bottom of the page.

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What You Can Do

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Remove a recurring time window from a weekday

Under Pickup times (or Delivery times on the Delivery tab), each weekday has one or more time windows, and slots are only generated inside those windows.

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Limit orders to specific dates only

The Specific pre-order days section lets you choose exact dates on which pre-orders are accepted. This is an allow-list: once any dates are selected, customers can only pre-order for those dates, and all other days become unavailable — it is not a way to block individual dates while keeping the normal weekly schedule. This works well if you only take pre-orders for a handful of known dates (for example, event days or seasonal openings).

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Limit capacity per slot

The slot settings at the top of each tab (Pickup details / Delivery details) include Capacity per slot controls such as the number of orders per slot. These limits apply to every day — they can’t be changed for a single date. See Order Limits for details.

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What You Can’t Do

Blocking one timeslot on a single date while keeping your normal schedule is not currently possible in the dashboard. The closest workarounds are:

• To close a whole date, add a dated row under Special Opening Hours with Open Time and Close Time both set to 00:00. Every pre-order for that date is then rejected — but the date’s slots still appear in the customer’s scheduling view, and the order only fails at checkout, so remove that weekday’s windows as well if the date is close enough that customers are already booking it. (If Also accept pre-orders outside of opening hours is on, the override still rejects dated pre-orders but no longer blocks same-day ordering on that date — see the Special Opening Hours caveats.)
• For a short one-off closure, snooze your store from the dashboard for the affected period — this pauses new orders while snoozed. Note that if Allow pre-orders when store is snoozed is turned on at the top of the Pre-orders page, customers can still place pre-orders during a snooze — turn it off first if you want the snooze to block pre-orders too. See Disable Ordering.
• For a recurring quiet period, split or shorten the weekday’s window under Pickup times / Delivery times as described above, and restore it after the date has passed.
• If you only fulfil pre-orders on certain dates, use Specific pre-order days to allow only those dates.

If none of these fit your situation, contact support and we’ll help you find the best option.

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What Customers See

Times outside your configured windows, dates excluded by Specific pre-order days, and slots that have reached their capacity all appear as unavailable in the customer’s scheduling view — customers cannot select them when placing a pre-order.

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Related

• Pre-orders — full guide to pre-order settings, slots, and troubleshooting
• Order Limits — capacity and value limits per slot
• Disable Ordering — temporarily pause all new orders
• Orders Overview — learn about order types and fulfillment