Some people are running their website from home, and when they are on holiday they need a way to let their customers know that they won't be able to fulfil any orders, or they might want to stop people making orders altogether. Well if this is you then here is what you can do;
Notifying your customers
To let your customers know that you are away the best thing to do is to create a panel that you can assign to your layouts on the site, the new panel will have a message that you are away and let them know when you will be returning. To do this go to Content > Panels and create a new panel with your message.
Once your panel has been created then make it active in the usual way, this will let your layouts know that the panel is ready to be shown.
Now go to Configuration > Layouts and add the panel to each of your layouts that you want the new panel to display in, we would recommend the minimum of your basket page layout, and probably your home page layout, but it wouldn't hurt to place it on all of your layouts.
This should now display your new message to your vsiitors and let them know there might be a delay in their orders.
Turning off the notification
To turn off the notification all you need to do is go to Content > Panels and deactivate the panel with the holiday message on it and it will be removed from each of your layouts.
Stopping orders completely
If you would also like to turn off purchases until your return then you can do this by deactivating your payment providers, if you have no valid payment providers then this will remove the checkout button from your basket page and nobody will be able to checkout.
To do this go to Configuration > Payment make sure that your main payment provider is set to none, and that all of your other payment methods have been deactivated, this will then hide the checkout button on the basket page.
Reactivating orders
To reactivate the orders simply go back to Configuration > Payment and reselect your main payment provider and/or reselect your other payment methods, the settings should remain the same as they were previously without losing any data, so your website should now display the checkout button on the basket page once more.
If you have any further questions that you can't find answers to within our knowledge base then please get in touch.
