Aug 16, 2009 Posted by BoxCycle on Aug 16, 2009 in Site Updates | 0 comments

Buyer Appointment Selection Improvements

A while ago I wrote about changes to buyer appointment choice selection.  The basic idea worked well, but the initial implementation handled some situations less than ideally.  We only used the appointment start time to determine if buyer choices provide a sufficient time range when short-notice and are within seller lead time requirements.

With today’s release we started to use the entire range supplied by the buyer to make appointment choices more flexible and lenient. 

In case of lead times, this means that as long as the latest point in the range meets the requirement, the appointment choice will be allowed.  As an example, lets take a buyer who  places an order at 8pm on Tuesday from a seller who has a 1 day lead time.  Previously, buyer’s appointment choices had to start after 8pm on Wednesday.  Now, the buyer can select 1pm +7 hours.  Since the end of the range is 8pm the appointment choice will be accepted.  The seller still gets their lead time, but has the option of accepting an earlier time when possible (which tends to be quite often.)

For short-notice appointments we now compare the latest time of the later appointment with the start time of the earlier appointment to make sure they are 5+ hours apart.  This means that appointments like 10am for 1st Choice and 1pm + 3 hours for 2nd Choice will now be accepted.  Previously, the 2nd Choice in this example would have to start after 3pm.

These changes allow for a wider range of reasonable appointment choices and make order placement easier and more flexible for buyers.