2025-03-21 Upcoming Preferences Updates

Hey folks,

Happy Friday!

Next week we have a nice update to the Love/Hate (also known as Preferences) feature. Before it goes live, I wanted to give you a little preview and see if you have any feedback or if there's anything I might be overlooking. Here's what it does:

1- When preferences are set to 'no' and the customer has an open order, the system will now update their order. Example: if a customer sets Lemons to 'no', and the customer currently has lemons in their open order, the system will instantly look for a replacement and sub out those lemons.

2- If the above scenario happens, after 10 minutes of inactivity we send the customer an email saying "Hey, you updated your preferences, so we made some changes, here is what your order looks like now".

3- If the customer updates their preferences but their order for the week is closed, we send a different email saying "Hey, your preference changes can't be applied because your order is already locked in- but they will be in the future!"

4- System subbing is a little smarter now: the system builds a list of the customers 'most favorite' products according to their sub, base menu, and purchase history (using different weights), and attempts to put one of those items in the customers order. Previously, the order that the system looked at products was just based off 'in stock' counts, highest to lowest, which. This is not an editable list, it's automated.

5- When you create a brand new item, we use AI to find customers that would probably place that item on their 'no' list, and give you an alert on the dashboard showing what the system wants to do. This will help in a scenario where a customer might have 'carrots' on their 'no' list, but if you add brand new 'orange ground skinny things'- that customer probably doesn't want the 'orange ground skinny things'! It's hard to tell that those two products are similar or the same, but with AI we can get a pretty good idea.

6- On the Love/Hate page, we use AI to group products that are similar to reduce the number of clicks a customer makes. For example, if you have 10 types of potatoes in your classification list, the system will just display "Potatoes, yes/no?" so the customer can say no in bulk to all potatoes. (they will still be able to expand the list to say yes or no to each individual potato type).

7- Auto Love/Hate updates: This one I am still toying with. I want to update customer's Love/Hate list in scenarios where they consistently sub out a product.

For example, if a customer subs green apples out every single time green apples are in the customer's order... we should probably just put the green apples on the customer's 'no' list, right? Thoughts/suggestions on this one are welcome! What are the qualifications for auto adding an item to the no list? Subbed out of every order when it has been in their order at least... 3 times? Tell me what you think.

Thanks for any comments/thoughts and have a great day,

Wayne

coming down the pipeline:

- PWAs

- new shop buttons (a la doordash style)

- one click box-to-checkout using stripe

- stripe customer portal for payment management

- shop, choose box, checkout via stripe

- payment collected via stripe at checkout with new methods!

who uses helpscout?

- I've got a working model of automating customer service email responses w/ ai so all you have to do is review and send. Actions are still being built. Anyone use helpscout? Anyone?

what I'm working on in the background:

- modernized testing coverage w/ Playwright

- new ENV handling for secrets

- codebase <-> ai for deep analaysis :) hello codebase, this is wayne

(spelling errors? maybe, this email was hand typed no ai)