Delivery Dates

In today's marketplace, online shoppers are very demanding and thus it is very important to pay attention to every little aspect of your online business. The delivery dates management is one of the very crucial aspects which is often overlooked.

Sana Commerce Cloud allows customers to select the requested delivery date for the order during checkout. Nevertheless, when you allow your customers to choose the delivery date, you must deliver the order on the specified date without any serious delays in order to satisfy customers with quality and promised service.

For more information about requested delivery date, see Checkout Header Fields.

Using the delivery dates settings, you can show to your customers the dates that are available with you and let customers schedule their delivery. For example, if your company does not work on the weekends, or you have a few uncommon holiday days like any business days, then using the delivery dates settings in Sana you can exclude these days. This will ensure that your customers will not choose these days as requested delivery dates during checkout.

Besides, you can configure cut-off time and show the message with the explanation of the delivery conditions on any page in the webstore. The Cut-off time info content element is used to add the cut-off time message to a page.

Using the delivery dates settings in Sana, you can provide transparency to customers, build customer loyalty, improve your brand value and ensure greater customer satisfaction.

Configure Delivery Dates

To manage the delivery dates, in Sana Admin click: Setup > Ordering > Delivery dates.

There are three sections on the Delivery dates tab: Delivery date settings, Delivery date configurations and Unavailable dates.

Delivery Date Settings

In the Delivery date settings section, you can configure two settings: the Exclude unavailable days from lead time option and the Date range limiter (days) field.

If a customer places the order later in the day on Friday and your business does not work on the weekends, probably, you will not be able to deliver the order on Monday. The Exclude unavailable days from lead time setting can help you in cases like this, providing you with extra time to deliver the order.

Let’s say you configured the delivery dates in the following way:

The Exclude unavailable days from lead time option is enabled
Cut-off time: 12:00 PM
Lead time before cut-off (days): 1 day
Unavailable days: weekends

If a customer places the order on Friday before 12:00 PM, you still have the rest of the day to prepare and ship the order, thus the first available delivery date a customer can select will be Monday.

If a customer places the order on Friday after 12:00 PM, considering that weekends are non-working days for your business most likely you will not be able to deliver the order on Monday, thus the first available delivery date a customer can select will be Tuesday.

In case the Exclude unavailable days from lead time option is disabled and a customer places the order on Friday after 12:00 PM, the first available delivery date a customer can select will be Monday.

The number of days that your business might need to ship the order after the non-working days can be set in the Lead time before cut-off (days) field. If the value is 0, then a customer will be able to select the first day after non-working days. If the value is 2, then the third day after non-working days will be available for selection.

Using the Date range limiter (days) field, you can limit the delivery dates which will be available for selection in the checkout, preventing customers from selecting delivery dates in the distant future.

For example, the value set in the Date range limiter (days) field is 20. It means that 20 days starting from the next day after the current day will be available for selection. The days which are not in this range will be unavailable for selection. Non-business days, as well as any other designated unavailable days such as holidays, will remain unavailable.

Let’s say today is the 1st of August, the value set in the Date range limiter (days) field is 20. In this case, the last available for selection delivery day will be the 21st of August.

Delivery Date Configurations

The Delivery date configurations section provides you with more advanced settings for delivery dates configuration. There is one configuration which is present by default. You can set up the default delivery date configuration the way you need or create a new one. The default delivery date configuration cannot be removed.

The table below provides the description of the settings necessary for the delivery date configuration.

Field	Description
Name	Enter the name of the delivery date configuration. If you edit the default delivery date configuration, the name cannot be changed.
Cut-off time	You can enable and configure the cut-off time. If the Cut-off time option is enabled, you need to enter the Cut-off time. It means that if a customer submits the order by the specified cut-off time, the order will be delivered on the same day. If a customer submits the order after the cut-off time, the order will be delivered later. When exactly the order will be delivered in this case, you can specify in the Lead time before cut-off (days) field. If the value in this field is 0, then the order will be delivered the next day, but you can enter any other suitable value. Make sure that the cut-off time matches the time zone of your Sana Commerce Cloud instance. Example: The Cut-off time option is enabled, the Cut-off time is 12:00 PM and the Lead time before cut-off (days) is 0. In this case, if a customer submits an order before 12:00 PM, then the order will be delivered on the same day. If a customer submits an order after 12:00 PM, then the order will be delivered the next day.
Available days in the week	Specify which days of the week should be available for delivery. You can choose one of the following options: All days Weekdays Custom: If this option is selected, you can manually select the necessary days.
Apply existing customer segment	You can assign customer segments to the delivery date configurations to show them to different customer groups. For example, you can create different delivery date configurations and apply them to customers from certain countries. The customer segments cannot be applied to the default delivery date configuration. It is a mandatory field for the custom delivery date configuration.

Unavailable Dates

In the Unavailable dates section, you can set up days which should not be available for selection as requested delivery dates in the checkout.

Enter the name, select a specific date or set the date range which should not be available. You can enable the Recurring annually option for events which happen every year at the same day, for example, holidays, like New Year, Christmas, etc. If there is some event which happens on different days each year or this is just a one time event which does not repeat again, then you can keep the Recurring annually option disabled.

You can also remove the unavailable dates.