Pickup date: a calendar of order pickup days for CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor

An extension for Store Builder and Multi-Vendor that turns a product variation feature into a pickup calendar, one that moves forward on its own every night. It was built for shops that hand over goods on a specific day: pastry shops, bakeries, caterers, florists and anyone taking holiday orders. Variations in CS-Cart know about sizes and flavors, but not about calendars, so a list of pickup days typed into the variants by hand is out of date by the next morning. Our add-on takes over that daily chore, and the customer only ever sees the days on which the bakery will actually hand over the order.

Key Features

- Pickup schedules with selling days, an order cutoff hour, preparation time and pickup hours in every store language.

- Daily rotation of dates in the feature variants, run by CRON from the command line or through an HTTP address protected by a token.

- Days off and holidays entered once for the whole company, plus a sales start and a last pickup date that open and close the season on their own.

- Fixed dates such as Christmas Eve or Easter, each with its own caption, visibility threshold and colored highlight on the product page.

- A cart that remembers the chosen day: when the date moves, the customer confirms the new one before placing the order.

- The pickup date stored with every order item, a column in the order list and a daily item count for the bakery.

The global configuration fits on a single screen. Here you decide whether the pickup date appears under the order items and in its own column of the order list, and which order statuses count toward the report used by the bakery. Below sits the CRON block with three ways to run the generator: a button for a manual recalculation, a ready command for the server task scheduler, and an HTTP address with a token for hosting without PHP CLI access. The dates therefore move forward by themselves on any server:

Screenshot 1 - add-on settings: order display, report statuses and three ways to run CRON

Schedules are the heart of the add-on. Each product line can follow its own pickup rules, so cakes, sweet buns and seasonal baking live side by side, each with its own feature, number of dates, preparation time and the hour after which an order moves to the following day. The screenshot shows the six schedules of a real pastry shop, gathered in one place:

Screenshot 2 - pickup schedules: separate rules for each group of products

In the schedule form you write down the rules, and the generator works out the dates. You choose the feature whose variants become date tiles, tick the selling days, set the cutoff hour and the number of days the bakers need. The label format is built from date, weekday and hours placeholders, and the pickup hours table has a separate column for every store language, which is why an English-speaking customer sees "9 a.m. - 3 p.m." where a Polish one reads "9.00 - 15.00". Products in the selected variation groups are enabled and disabled by the add-on itself, depending on whether their variant received a date:

Screenshot 3 - schedule rules: selling days, cutoff hour and pickup hours in every language

A bakery calendar is rarely even, so the lower part of the form holds the exceptions: single days off and whole ranges, such as a holiday break written as one line. Next to them stand the fixed dates, special occasion dates that join the daily rotation instead of replacing it. Each one carries its own caption and hours, and a visibility threshold can keep Easter hidden until Christmas Eve, so that two seasons never light up at once. Finally you choose the highlight style and its color:

Screenshot 4 - fixed dates with a caption, a visibility threshold and a custom highlight color

Company-wide days off do not have to be copied into every schedule. On the shared exceptions screen you enter a public holiday, a break from Christmas Eve to Epiphany or an extra trading Sunday before the holidays just once, and the generator merges this list with the exceptions of each schedule. A single line closes sales for every product at the same time:

Screenshot 5 - shared days off and extra days that apply to every schedule

This is what the customer sees. The pickup day is chosen on the product page just like a size or a flavor, and the tiles show consecutive days with the weekday name and pickup hours. The Christmas dates stand out with a red border and background, and their caption tells the customer which occasion they were prepared for. The highlight is created without touching the theme templates, so it never gets in the way of theme updates. Behind every tile stands a regular variation product with its own stock, price and sales history:

Screenshot 6 - the customer picks a pickup day, and special occasion dates stand out in color

A cart can wait for days, and the dates keep moving in the meantime. The add-on remembers the day chosen when the product was added and compares it with the current one every time the cart is recalculated. When the date has moved, the customer sees a banner with the day they picked, the day that applies now and a confirmation button. Until the new date is confirmed, the order cannot be placed, and an item whose date has dropped out of the calendar is removed with an explanation. Nobody turns up for a cake on a day they never chose:

Screenshot 7 - the cart warns when the chosen pickup date has moved while it was waiting

Once the order is placed, the add-on stores the real date and the label from the moment of purchase with every item. This matters, because tomorrow the same variant will carry a different date, while last week's order still shows the day the customer actually bought, exactly as it was labeled at checkout. Staff see the pickup date in the order details in the admin panel, and the customer sees it in their account:

Screenshot 8 - staff see the pickup date next to every order item

The order list gains a pickup date column, so the date is visible without opening the order. An order spread over several days shows every date separated by commas and stands out at once. The advanced search offers the "Pickup from" and "Pickup to" fields, which pull out every order for a given day with a single filter, ready for printing or a status change:

Screenshot 9 - the order list with pickup dates and a filter by pickup day

In the morning a bakery needs to know one thing: how much of what to bake. The pickup date report lists every day with the number of items and the number of orders, from today onwards by default, with date range and schedule filters. Production planning no longer calls for a spreadsheet export or counting by hand:

Screenshot 10 - the report: how many items and orders fall on each pickup day

A click on a day opens its breakdown by product, with the item and order count next to each one. It is a ready list for the bakers for that day, and from this screen you can also move on to the orders with that pickup date:

Screenshot 11 - a single pickup day broken down by product

The Pickup Date add-on relieves the shop team of rewriting the calendar every day and guards the date on both sides of the counter. The customer buys only the days on which the bakery will really hand over the order, and when a date moves, they confirm it knowingly. Staff see the date next to every item, in the order list and in the report they plan production from. The add-on works on the core product variations of CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor, so the stock, prices and sales history of every date stay exactly where they have always been.

Feel free to contact us and purchase the add-on!