Eliminate rejections and cancellations to remain in good standing on the ezCater marketplace
Customers tell us that rejections and cancellations are two of the most negative experiences when ordering food for work. They depend on catering partners to deliver the order placed in full, on time, as expected.
When you eliminate rejections and cancellations from your restaurant, you'll also appear higher on marketplace search with the lift in reliability. Watch our quick video and read the best practices below to stay in good standing and meet our operational standards.
As of May 1, 2024, ezCater will hold catering partners accountable for their performance in cancellations and rejections from the last 90 days by pausing them from the ezCater marketplace for two weeks. If you fall below the standard and are at risk for pause, you'll be notified in ezManage by banner.
Review the best practices below and adjust your operational settings and parameters to accept and fulfill orders reliably.
Reduce Order Rejections
Eliminate Harmful Cancellations
Best practices for avoiding rejections and cancellations
Ensure your team has ezManage access and notifications turned on.
- Review your users and store settings. Give the right people access to ezManage and setup notifications.
- Users can get set up with text, email, or push notification (iOS).
- Download our ezManage iOS app to quickly accept orders on the go.
Turn on daily capacity management tools.
- Open the Settings tab and set your daily order limit appropriately to prevent customers submitting an order to your store after you’ve reached your set threshold.
- Once the restaurant has reached the daily capacity limit, a pop-up will appear in ezManage giving you the option to either set a temporary closure or continue accepting more orders over your set limit. ezCater will never automatically shut your store down once you've reached your limit, temporary closures need to be manually set by the caterer.
Turn on holiday closures or set temporary closures.
- If your stores are closed for major US holidays, make sure you turn on the appropriate closures. Check off each holiday from the dropdown to prevent customers from placing an order on those days. If you need to close your store for a few hours, or an extended period of time due to maintenance or other reasons, use the temporary closures feature.
Set your lead time to 24 hours or greater.
- Customers depend on catering partners to deliver the order placed in full, on time, as expected. The majority of our customers are placing orders more than 24 hours in advance. Make sure your team has enough time for ordering, staffing, and preparing the food. 24 hour lead time works for a lot of our partners.
- A day before cut off time could also be helpful. This would ensure any order for the next day would have to be submitted by a certain time.
- Make sure your store lead time is set appropriately so your team can accept orders quickly and with confidence.
Utilize ezDispatch for additional delivery coverage.
- Before you reject an order because you do not have a driver, open ezManage and check if ezDispatch is available. ezDispatch can be requested up until 90 minutes before the event time and delivered up to 20 miles away.
- For requesting orders on demand, customers will pay your delivery fee you have set, and you'll be responsible for the cost of ezDispatch delivery. ezDispatch cost: $30, or 10% for orders above $300.
- Get setup with Automatic ezDispatch to have a driver assigned automatically for every order that's submitted. Your customer facing delivery fee will need to match our ezDispatch cost to get automatic ezDispatch turned on.
Streamline your menu to avoid rejections.
- Make sure you're not rejecting or canceling orders due to menu discrepancies. To submit an update open ezManage and fill out the form in the menu tab.
- If you need to make a substitution or you're out of an item, please reach out to our customer service team at 1-800-488-1803 and we'll contact the customer to find a solution.
When in doubt call our Customer Service team
- We're here to ensure you and our customers have an amazing experience. Make sure before you reject or cancel any order you're calling our team and working with us to save the order. We'll be able to call the customer on your behalf and try to work out a solution, whether it’s a new delivery time, or a substitution for an 86'd item.
- Call us at 1-800-488-1803 or email us at support@ezcater.com
What is the rejection and cancellation limit?
Please review our operational accountability article to better understand the maximum number of rejections / cancellations allowed on our marketplace before your store is temporarily paused.