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How Preorders Work

Preorders let customers order food and drink before they arrive, so they collect instead of queue. Less pressure on the bar, more F&B revenue, a better night for the customer.                                                                                                      This is the whole preorder system on one page - read it before the how to articles and they'll make sense.

The path, start to finish
  1. Products — the individual items you sell: a house lager, a G&T, a programme, a tub of ice cream. Set these up once. If your till is integrated, they pull in automatically.
  2. Menus — a grouped selection of products a customer sees, with its own open and close times and its own audience. You might run a stalls bar menu, a merch menu, and an interval ice-cream menu off the same product list.
  3. Attach to performances — a menu does nothing until it's attached to the performances it should appear on, the same way a flow is.
  4. Orders  — customers order and pay from their mobile ticket. Orders land in crowdEngage and, if your till is integrated, get pushed to the POS to be made up.
  5. You manage and reconcile — track orders live, pull item breakdowns, handle refunds.

 

Integrated or manual - It does the same.

  • Integrated POS — crowdEngage talks to your till. Products pull through automatically, and orders push back to the till to be printed and made up. See Supported POS integrations.
  • Manual — your till isn't integrated (or you're selling something the bar doesn't handle, like merch). You build products and menus by hand in crowdEngage, and orders come to you by email at close.

You can mix the two — an integrated bar menu and a manual merch menu side by side.

 

Timing, the crowdEngage way

Every time in pre-orders is an offset in minutes from the performance start time, not a clock time — so it works across every performance you attach a menu to.

  • -60 = 60 minutes before the performance starts
  • 0 = performance start
  • +60 = 60 minutes after

You'll use this to set when a menu opens, when it closes, and when orders get sent to the till.

 

Payment

Customers pay by card straight from their mobile ticket. You connect one payment processor, Stripe is the recommended one. You can also use the same account for donations and seat upgrades, should you wish. It's easy to refund customers through stripe and you can get to your account directly from the crowdEngage dashboard See Connect a payment processor.