How Water Butlers schedules grocery delivery to Disney World resorts on Shopify

The shop

Water Butlers delivers groceries to people on holiday. Their customers are staying at the Disney World resorts in Orlando, and the promise on the front of the store is one order, several shops, one delivery: milk from one retailer, a birthday cake from another, a case of bottled water from a third, all arriving together at the right resort on the right afternoon.

The order does not go to a house. It goes to a resort bell desk, where it waits for someone who is still in the air. Most of the resorts will hold a grocery order, chilled and frozen included, but the storage is shared with every other guest arriving that day, so it is tight. Water Butlers asks its customers to schedule delivery within two hours of the time they expect to arrive.

Two hours, keyed to a stranger's travel plans, for a grocery business running on Shopify. The guest is the only person who knows that number, and Shopify checkout was never going to ask them for it.

The problem

Everything about this operation runs on a date and a window, and none of it was being captured where the money changed hands.

Every order has to be shopped before it can be delivered, across more than one retailer, then split into shelf, chilled and frozen and labelled per resort. Then someone drives it. The driver needs to know which stops, which resort, in what order, and every morning that list came out of Mehdi's head and Mehdi's notes.

At the end of the week it turns into paperwork. The drivers are paid for what they delivered, and that is a different question from what was ordered. Shopify lists orders by the day they were placed, so a week of deliveries is not something it can hand you. That delivery date exists on the order at all only because a customer picked it in the cart, which means the schedule is the only place the week can be counted from. Mehdi was assembling that report by hand and cleaning it up before it reached the accountant, and it used to take a long time.

And because nothing stopped it, orders kept arriving for slots the crew could no longer cover, after the shopping was done and the van had gone. Every one of those was a phone call to a guest who was probably still at the airport.

The fix

Water Butlers runs Bird Pickup & Delivery on Shopify, an app that adds a delivery date and time picker to the cart and writes the customer's choice onto the order. The setup does one thing: it settles the day and the window before the customer pays, then hands that same information to everyone downstream.

• A date and time picker in the cart, so the delivery day and the window are chosen up front instead of guessed afterwards. It sits in the middle of the cart page rather than off to the side, at Mehdi's request, because a lot of his customers are older and he wanted it impossible to miss.
• Time slots as ranges rather than exact times, which is the honest unit for this job. A guest picks an afternoon window, not a minute.
• Prep time and cutoff rules, so the calendar only ever offers days the crew can still shop for and drive. When the working day is spoken for, it stops being an option instead of becoming a phone call.
• Widget copy carrying the resort rules, in plain language, right where the customer picks a date. It explains what the bell desk will hold, and asks them to schedule inside two hours of arrival. The scheduling step does the explaining that used to happen over email.
• Google Calendar sync shared with the delivery driver. Mehdi asked for three fields on the event and nothing else: order number, name, delivery address. Everything else, the totals and the fulfilment status, is noise to a man in a van.
• Multi-location support, so slots come from the location fulfilling the order.
• Post-order editing for the flight that lands late, which is most weeks. The date changes on the order and the calendar follows it.
• Orders filtered by delivery date, and that range exported. This is the one payroll runs on: choose last week, pull the deliveries that actually went out in it, hand the accountant something clean. Sorting by order date would answer a different question and pay the wrong week.

Bird live on waterbutlers.com. The resort storage rules and the two hour arrival guidance sit directly above the calendar, so the customer reads the constraint at the moment they choose a date.

The calendar quietly turned into the shop's whole workflow. A new order lands on it in orange. The person shopping the order recolours it as items come off the shelf in each store, so anyone glancing at the week can see what is bought, what is packed, and what is out for delivery, without asking. By the time the boxes reach a bell desk they are labelled by order, by resort, and split by temperature, and every one of those labels traces back to a slot a guest chose in the cart.

Shopify's own pickup and delivery covers the basics well. A window keyed to arrival time, prep rules that close a day once the shopping is done, and a calendar the driver can actually work from are the parts it leaves open, and those were the parts Water Butlers needed most.

"Your app is great, and customer service is excellent."

What changed

The driver's morning list is not built any more, it is just there. The shopper works off colours. Payroll is a date range and an export instead of an evening of counting. Around 280 orders a month go out with a date and a window on them that the crew can cover, not one a customer invented at checkout.

Nearly three years in, the calendar the driver opens is the same one the guest filled in when they paid.

"Since I use you, we never had any issues. We're very happy with your service and customer care."