Overview

Shipping Calendar introduces  the concept of three different types of blackout day and/or date. A blackout day or date is any day that is unavailable for the specified action, so for example a blackout delivery date means no deliveries can occur on that day. This is covered in more detail below for the three different types of blackout.

Production Days

A production day is a day in which the product is actually made up. If for example you own a florist and it takes 1 day for the flowers to be prepared we would say that your configuration has 1 production day or a lead time of 1 day.

In order for a blackout production day to properly take effect you will need to have the “Amount of Lead time on Order being shipped” set to a value greater than zero.

If you define a blackout production day it will have a knock on effect to the available delivery days after the black out day by making some of them unavailable due to the delay caused by blacking out the production day.

Dispatch Days

A dispatch day is the day of the week the package to be delivered can be dispatched from your distribution centre or collected by the courier. The dispatch day is worked out by taking the number of days for the delivery to occur (the D=x algorithm in your CSV file) and counting backwards from the date the customer has selected for delivery.

If you define a blackout dispatch day this will have a knock on effect to the availability for delivery on the following days of the week. For example if you only have a next day delivery option available and define Sunday as a blackout dispatch day that would mean there would be no delivery options for Monday. This is because the package would have to be dispatched on Sunday in order to be delivered on Monday. In order to have shipping available on Monday you would need to create another shipping option which is defined as two day delivery for example and only available on Mondays. This option would be dispatched on Saturday.

Delivery Days

A delivery day is the actual day the package is delivered to the customer. This would be the day they select on the calendar on the frontend.

If you define a blackout delivery day it has no knock on effects at all other than blacking out the date/day on the calendar on the front end. If you define the 25th December as a blackout delivery day the only effect will be that the 25th is blacked out on the calendar on the front end so the customer can’t select it.