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The checkout time limit is the number of minutes your customer has to complete checkout once they've added an item to cart. Once this time limit is reached, the customer's cart expires and inventory is released so that someone else can buy it. Customers will see their checkout timer floating at the bottom of the Event as they’re shopping, and in their cart.

A checkout timer helps ensure that customers don’t just add items to their cart and never check out. When the timer is up, the inventory held in a customer’s cart is freed up, and someone else can buy it. Many of our chefs have menus that sell out quickly, and thousands of customers that get texted as soon as they go live, so the timer helps make sure that all inventory is being sold to customers who are waiting for it (and not getting stuck in carts!)

A countdown also creates a sense of urgency for your customers. A feeling like “I better check out fast if I want these bagels!”. We’ve learned that’s a good thing when it comes to building excitement around your food business!

To adjust the number of minutes customers have:

The default time limit is 5 minutes. There’s currently no way to remove the timer completely.

 in the bottom left corner of the Info tab of your Event

Change how much time customers have to checkout

What is a Checkout Time Limit?

Got a fellow baker friend? Or know a chef that makes the BEST BBQ? You can now help boost their biz by recommending them right on your Hotplate storefront! Other chefs can recommend your page too so we’re all spreading the love!

Recommendations will show up at the bottom of your storefront like this:

Enter the storefront address of the chef you want to recommend

 You can have up to 5 recommendations on your storefront at a time! 

You can come back to edit or remove a recommended storefront anytime on your 

page. Here you can also see the chefs that have recommended your storefront as well as how much revenue those recommendations brought in! 

will show you how your recommendations have helped drive sales and find new customers. 

Chef Recommendations

How to recommend other Hotplate businesses on your storefront

Want to see what your event looks like before taking orders? 

To do this, you'll want to temporarily make your event Private so you can publish and view it without notifying customers . Open your event and select the 

 your event. Then, click on the Event Link at the top to open up and preview your Event!  

After: be sure to make your event public 

Once you've reviewed the event, you can go back into your Hotplate portal make any changes. Be sure to 

 while you're making changes, and to turn off the setting that makes the Event private. When you're ready to go live to customers, just publish your event and they'll be notified of your drop! 

Feel free to reach out to us at support@hotplate.com or text us at (214)833-9248, and we'll gladly help answer your questions!

How to preview your Event 

Do you want to add flavors, quantities, or other customizations to a menu item?

🍪 cookies, and your customers can buy them individually or in multi-packs

🥯 a dozen bagels, and your customers can pick how many plain, poppy, etc.

🍕 pizza, and your customers can choose the type of crust and toppings

It’s very common for chefs using Hotplate to offer customers various flavors, sizes, or other options when they pre-order an item from their shop, so we make it easy to configure 

While many Hotplate chefs use the modifier and option group features, we found that 

 offer really small menus with limited or no options for modification at all. If you’re just starting out, you might be tempted to attract customers through an abundance of choices, but we’ve seen time and again that giving your customer fewer decisions to make increases the likelihood that they actually complete an order. Of course, it’s important that you do what works for you and your business, but part of the advantage of working with Hotplate is that we share back the learnings we’ve had through working with chefs just like you.

You’ll see all these options while you’re creating an item, either while building your Event or in the Items tab. Start by clicking 

 are changes a customer can make to an item. Think about using this to allow customers to add or take a way things. You can choose to charge or not for these modifications. In our example below, customers can customize their taco and by adding or taking away ingredients. When you select the 

 option, the changes a customer selects will appear in line on the order ticket (see below).

 on the other hand allow you to split out a specific item into distinct groups. Chefs usually use this feature to offer different flavors or quantities of an item. When you add a 

 the different options will be split as different items your prep tab (see below). You can also choose to charge customers extra for any specific option. This extra fee will be added to the base price you originally defined. 

When creating an option group, be sure to also turn on any rules that might apply.

 - means customers will have to pick one of your options before adding the item to cart. Chefs usually do this for something like a flavor choice.

 means that your customer can pick multiple options in the group. (Let's say if you want them to select multiple toppings.)

 means that when you add this item to an Event menu later, you will be able to set inventory limits on each variation.

Here are a few common cases in which chefs use groups, and how you’d set them up:

when you want to let customers pick their quantity of cookies:

Add option group, name the option group Quantity, make it a Variation. The options are 1, 3, or 12 cookies.

The base price is $3. This is the price of the single cookie.

The Single option adds $0 to the $3 base price = $3

Pack of 3 adds $5 to the $3 base price = $8

Pack of 12 adds $27 to the $3 base price = $30

Add option group, name the option group Flavor, make it a Variation. The options are Plain, Salt, Everything, Poppy, and Cinnamon Raisin.

The base price is $12 - this is the cost for the bag of bagels. Each flavor option is $0, so 12 bagels will cost $12 no matter which flavors.

Customers need to select exactly 12 bagels, so you'll want to set 

Lastly, to get your prep list in shape, email support@hotplate.com and ask for 

When you want to let customers build their own pizza

Add 3 option groups: Crust (Variation), Sauce (Modifier), and Toppings (Modifier).

Crust and Sauce require a selection. Toppings are not required, but customers are allowed to select up to 5.

Add option group

How to offer options for flavors, quantities, or item modifications

Many chefs using Hotplate sell “build your own” bundles or boxes of assorted goods. While it’s easy 

 to each item, you may find that too many choices can lead to your prep list looking like this (a mess!): 

In this example, the chef is selling a bag of 7 bagels, and they can see the flavors ordered in each assortment, but at a glance, they can’t know how many bagels total to make of each flavor.

Currently, the team is working on building a feature that will allow you to configure these bundles better, but for now, you can reach out to us and we can do some work on the backend so your prep screen looks more like this:

 Please be as specific as you can with details about how you want the items set up so we can get you ready to go quickly!

At the moment, this process is manual and requires a bit of work from our team so it’s best if you reach out a few days ahead of your event going live.

How to set up to sell assorted boxes and bundles 

Hotplate gives you a lot of control when it comes to setting limits on item inventories, or limits on how many of an item can be ordered at a time. You'll notice a few places where you can edit inventory or limits, so let's get into the difference between them:

If you plan to make a set number of a specific item, this is likely the inventory you’ll set. This number refers to the 

 number of that item that can be sold. If you set no other limits or inventory, the item will be marked as available until the number you have in inventory is all sold.

You’ll set an item inventory when you add the item to your Event menu like this: 

This refers to how many of an item each customer can order. For example, you may have high demand for a special item and want to limit each customer to only one.

This section allows you to limit the number of an item ordered for a particular pickup time, or a day. This setting is most useful when you offer an Event with multiple pickup dates, times, or locations.

For example, let’s say you sell ice cream and offer pickup Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but your freezer at the pickup location can only fit 15 pints. In that case, you may set this 

Do you want to control inventory across an entire 

For example: lets say you sell pizza. You've got 100 balls of dough and 5 pies on the menu, listed as separate items.

You can cook 10 pies every 15 minutes. It doesn't matter how many of each pie you sell -- selling 20 of each or 100 pepperoni works just as well -- you just need to make sure no more than 10 get ordered in each 15 minute time slot.

In order to do this, you can implement a 

 which tells the cheese, pepperoni, pesto chicken, Hawaiian, and veggie pies to pull from a shared inventory.

 of a section, then click the toggle next to 

Hotplate is designed to make your life easier and so our system will always try and make sure that you don’t oversell any items. That means that we’ll use whatever 

 for an item is. After that is reached, an item will be marked as “sold out” to customers.

For example, let’s say you’re selling pints of ice cream, and you set the inventory of the Chocolate Ice Cream Pint Item to 

. But then, you set the “Max per pickup date” to be 10. In that case, once 10 pints have been ordered for each pick up date, (even if 1 customer ordered all 10 pints), the item would appear as sold out.

My item shows as “sold out”, but I still have inventory

Because there are a few places you can set an inventory, its important that you check each of the settings above to figure out where the issue is. Our team is happy to help, but go through the list above and make sure they’re all set correctly.

Understanding and managing inventory limits 

The Items tab of your Hotplate portal is where you’ll create and edit all the goodies that you offer on your menu. Managing your Items here makes it easy to quickly build menus later when you put together an event.

 tab at the top of your Hotplate portal, then click the button that says 

 of the item, and the corresponding info like it’s name, description, and base price. Your 

 is the cost of the item without any modifications or options added (we’ll show you how to add those next).

Offering options for flavors, quantities, or modifications

We want to start off by saying while you can offer options on your menu items, too many options might make it harder for customers to figure out what they want! We recommend limiting your options. 

If you do have options for your menu items, you can add an option group by clicking this button at the bottom of the screen. Chefs usually add option groups to allow customers to choose different flavors, quantities, or make a modification to the item.  You can choose from 

 the different options will be split as different items your prep tab (see below). You can also choose to charge customers extra for any specific option. This extra fee will be added to the base price you originally defined.

You’ll see a few extra settings at the bottom of the screen when creating an item.

 If you turn this on, customers will be able to write in a note or request for the item. For example, if you’re selling personalized cakes, this can be where you ask customers to enter the text they want piped onto the cake.

 - This is optional, but you can set a custom tax rate that will apply only to this specific item. You may choose to do this if you’re planning to offer an item only in a specific county and want to apply their special tax rate. If you don’t set this, then your default tax rate will apply. (More on tax rates 

Making changes to any of the information or options you’ve created for an item is easy! Just navigate to the 

 tab, select the item, and you’ll be able to make any changes. Be sure to hit 

How to create and manage menu items

Selling gift cards is a powerful way to generate more traffic to your business. It gives your customers and fans the ability to give the gift of your products! 

The menu tab of the event is where you manage your menu for a particular event. If you want to sell gift cards as a part of your event, you can do that here! 

Turn on the Add Gift Card to Menu option: 

You can enable gift cards for sale on your menu by navigating to the 

 tab when setting up your event and enabling the 

option. Gift Cards will automatically be added to your menu - there is no need to do anything else besides enable the option!  

Gift cards are purchasable in your event: 

When viewing your event, you and your customers will see a Gift Cards section like this:

Customers can choose from presets of available gift card amounts, or can choose a custom amount:

The gift card will then appear alongside other items purchased in the checkout, order confirmation, and from your portal when you are viewing transactions and event stats. The gift card code is generated and made available to customers once they complete checkout. Gift cards currently have a minimum amount of $10 and a maximum amount of $1000. 

Sell gift cards on an event

If you’ve been in business for a while, you probably have a sense of what your best sellers are, but sometimes you need the cold hard data on what’s selling (and what’s not!). We can help!

Currently, you won’t see a sales breakdown by item on your Insights page, but you can download a summary of your order history from the 

 tab, then do some quick addition of the columns in your downloaded spreadsheet. Here’s how:

 button then select the date range for which you want order data

For example, if you want to see a summary of all your orders in 2024, select the fulfillment date between January 1 and December 31. Go to the 

tab, and you’ll see all the completed order tickets from time period. 

Click the three dots in the top right, then click 

This will give you a spreadsheet with each item as a column and the rows as orders. 

: open up the spreadsheet and add up each item column. You can do this very quickly by adding a row with the function SUM. 

Here’s a quick explainer on how to do this on Google Sheets

 (this is usually the same in Excel or Numbers). 

Events, Items & Inventory