Olo Rails Frequently Asked Questions
What is our Olo Rails integration?
The Catering Integration functions for sales and inventory reconciliation. It reduces the operational lift from the store operators by not requiring them to manually enter every order into the POS system, ultimately reducing errors and helping ensure proper sales are being recorded.
While the integration was not intended for fulfillment purposes, the ezCater and Olo teams continue to add and enhance the integration to where it can be used for fulfillment purposes in a limited capacity. ezManage will still be required for order acceptance and review.
How are orders accepted?
As a part of the natural workflow with ezCater, all orders when placed, must be accepted via ezManage. Store Managers and/or those managing the catering orders will be notified of new orders via email, SMS or iOS Push Notifications.
This notification then leads the operator into ezManage, where they will review the order details and click a button to acknowledge and “Accept” the order.
By doing so, they are making a commitment to fulfill and should be considered aware of the order. If this is a new ezCater Brand/Caterer, as a part of onboarding, we will train this process as well provide details on additional reminder notifications.
ezCater cannot support auto-acceptance for any of your ezCater orders.
Once the order has been accepted, when is it sent over to Olo?
Immediately upon acceptance, the order is sent to Olo Rails.
From there, the configuration of Olo Rails determines how the order is treated. It will sit in a scheduled state and be visible in Olo Rails until the configured Lead Time. Order will push to the POS based on Olo’s “Fire to POS” setting.
Further details on this should be explored with your Olo Rep as at this point, the order resides within the Olo environment.
When does the order fire? Does it fire based on some preset make time, or do all advance orders fire at the same time?
Ultimately, this is for your Olo Rep to provide details. ezCater does not control what happens on the Olo side.
That being said, it is our understanding that each order will fire to the POS based on your Olo configured Lead times.
What information about the order / delivery is passed through to Olo and visible in Olo?
At this time, the Order details (Menu Items and selections) are passed through based on mapped ID’s between Olo Rails and ezCater. The Fulfillment date/time is also provided. The customer for all of these orders is ezCater. As such the customer information is all based on ezCater. The Email address passed is an ezCater email that references the order number. There is no phone number passed. Any questions should go through ezCater Customer Support (This will be trained as well during onboarding). Self delivery and ezDispatch are supported through this integration. We send through all delivery details (delivery address, delivery fee, delivery time, delivery instructions, and tip).
Today, the time in Olo will be the customer’s requested event time, not when the driver will be picking up the order. Please use ezManage to verify pick up and delivery times.
Is ezCater still acting as the payment processor and the billing/commission structure is the same?
Yes, that is correct. Please note though, that with the Olo Integration comes an additional $0.50 per order. The integration fee will be taken from the weekly payments that are remitted to the stores.
Please be aware that Promotions, Preferred Partner Program, ezRewards, and Commissions are not passed through the integration. You will receive the value of the order to the guest in Olo.
As Olo is not able to support Tax Exemption today, these orders will not fail, but will have tax calculated in Olo. Please ensure the accounting teams are utilizing the ezManage and the Olo Rails Reconciliation Reports.
What are your operational practices if Olo is offline (either due to disabling/closure or due to internet connection/outages)? If the order doesn’t fire, what happens?
In the event that Olo is unreachable, a notification via email and/or SMS is sent to the team. Failure notifications will be sent to all who receive new order notifications that the order was not able to be passed into Olo and thus this order will need to be manually entered.
There is no cancellation of the order, it is still expected to be fulfilled as the details remain available via ezManage.
What ezCater orders will transmit through the API?
ezCater Marketplace and ezOrdering orders will transmit through the API. Direct Entry and Relish orders will not pass through. Off menu items are not supported through the integration.
What are the reasons an order might fail?
There are a number of reasons for an order to fail. A few are as follows:
- Store Closed
- System Timeout
- Updated/Canceled order – Locked/in past
- Error Validating Basket
- Missing Required Selection
- Online Ordering unavailable
- Time settings and lead times not matching between the platforms
- Incorrect configurations in Olo/POS
- Order throttling
- POS is offline at time of transmission
- Incomplete order details
Interested in our Olo Rails integration?
Our team at ezCater is currently working through a long list of partners to get them onboarded with Olo Rails. If you’re interested in this integration, please reach out to api_support@ezcater.com to find out if you’re already on the list, or how you can be added.