Sometimes orders can fail to show on POS and a customer may come in & show you their order. This order is valid and should be fulfilled.
Read on to understand why orders may not appear and how you can handle these situations.
What's In This Guide?
Why does this happen?
All Online Ordering providers process their order via Lightspeed's API. All orders are paid & confirmed in advance on the ordering partners side, so they are already paid & the customer has been notified, even if the order doesn't appear on your POS.
How does this happen?
When an ordering partner submits their order to Lightspeed to show on a merchant's POS, we will confirm that the venue's point of sale devices are showing online & attempt to receive that order and show it on your POS.
There are a few scenarios that can impact this and cause this to fail, these include;
Online Orders failing as POS is offline
- Your WIFI or Internet connection is poor.
- Your Lightspeed's application is in the background on your device, while other apps are being used on the tablet.
- Your POS device screen is locked or asleep.
Online Orders failing due to configuration
- The order includes old menu data. E.g. A product, modifier or option set in your online ordering menu that is not up to date on your point of sale device, this can be resolved by performing a 'Sync'
Online Ordering failing due to a system issue
- Lightspeed's service is degraded or experiencing an outage
- The Ordering Partner is experiencing degraded performance or an outage.
How can we handle these situations?
Rather than auto-rejecting orders, our Online Ordering providers accept orders and take payments in the app.
Some providers have a notification system where they send you an email or SMS notifying you that an order has failed to reach the POS, some of these providers include Lightspeed Ordering (Bopple), Mobi2Go & Me&U, other providers like Lightspeed Delivery (Deliverect) will allow you to view the order status in their merchant portal.
If a customer comes into a venue with a confirmed order, these are valid and should be entered through the POS Manually.
How can we resolve this?
If you are finding that you're experiencing failed Online Orders, attempt to perform a sync on all your POS devices to confirm that the menu is up to date on all devices.
Confirm with your Ordering Partner that any new products have been added and old/deleted products have been removed.
If the issue continues to occur, you likely have a network issue. This guide goes through a few best practice tips around troubleshooting your network