Your schedule controls when customers can order. You can leave ordering open all the time, or collect orders in windows and fulfill them on set days.
Always open
If you keep the schedule off, customers see Orders can be placed anytime and can check out whenever. Good for shipping from stock.
Ordering windows
Turn on Enable schedule in Schedule to use ordering windows instead. A window has four dates:
Ordering opens — when customers can start adding to their cart and check out.
Ordering closes — the cutoff. After this, no new orders for this window.
Fulfillment day — when you roast, pack, or ship.
Ready by — when the order is ready for the customer.
A window's status follows the clock on its own: upcoming → open → closed → fulfillment → fulfilled. You never set it manually.
Recurring schedules
Most producers order on a rhythm — ordering opens Thursday, closes Monday night, roasts Tuesday, ready Wednesday. Set that shape up once as a recurring schedule and new windows are generated each cycle, so you're not rebuilding dates every week. You can still create a standalone window for a one-off drop or a holiday.
Choosing what's available in a window
Listing a product in a window and having stock for it are two separate things:
Availability says whether a product is offered in that window at all.
Inventory says how much can be ordered.
So a product can be listed with zero stock (customers see it sold out), or in stock but unlisted (nobody sees it). Open a window from Schedule to set which products it offers, and add an extra window-specific quantity on top of your standing stock if you want to hold something back.
What customers see
At checkout, customers pick the ordering window their order belongs to and see the ready-by date for it. If no window is open, checkout is blocked and they're told when the next one opens.