Suggest add-ons when a customer picks a product

A customer who has just chosen your steak menu is the easiest person in the world to sell a bottle of red to. Link the two, and the calculator does the asking for you.

Suggested add-ons are a Pro feature.

Setting it up

• Open Products, edit the product people order first, for example your steak menu.
• Expand Advanced and open Suggested add-ons.
• Choose the products that go with it. Search by name or browse by category.
• Optionally write a headline, something like These go beautifully with the tenderloin. Leave it blank and the calculator uses its own wording.

That's it. Nothing to publish, the calculator picks it up straight away.

Limiting an add-on to some calculators

Not every suggestion fits every event. Red wine belongs in the wedding calculator and has no place in the office lunch one.

Each add-on carries its own button in the product form:

• All calculators is the default, and it covers calculators you make later too.
• Chosen calculators opens the list. Tick the ones that may offer it. Tick nothing and the add-on is offered nowhere.

The bulk action has the same setting. When you apply the same add-ons to several products at once, set Offered in in that dialog.

Copy a product and its add-ons come with it, offered nowhere until you pick the calculators. The copy usually sits in the same calculator as the original, so this is what stops a customer being asked the same thing twice.

What the customer sees

When they select the steak menu and move on, one popup appears with the products you linked, each with its photo and price. They tick what they want, adjust the amount if they need to, and carry on. Tapping No thanks or the X moves them along with nothing added.

If they picked two different dishes that both have suggestions, everything arrives in a single popup grouped by dish, never one popup per product.

Choosing the amount

Every suggestion has a quantity picker. Per-person products start at the guest count, per-item products start at one, because adding a bottle of wine should mean one bottle, not one per guest. Any minimum or maximum you set on the product still applies.

On the one-sheet menu style

The Illalliskortti style puts everything on a single page, so there is no "next step" to wait for. There the suggestion appears right after the customer adds the dish instead. Choose several dishes quickly and they still get one popup, not one per tap.

Good to know

• A suggestion never appears twice for the same product, going back and forward will not nag anyone.
• Anything already in the order is left out of the popup.
• If a category has a "choose at most 2" rule and the customer is already at 2, products from it are quietly skipped rather than offered and then refused.
• At most six suggestions appear at once, spread across the dishes that triggered them.
• Added items behave exactly like any other product on the quote, in your emails, on the PDF and on the prep sheet.

When the picker warns you

Some products can be linked but will never actually be offered, and the picker says so on the row rather than letting you find out from a customer who never saw the add-on. An amber line under the product name explains why:

• It is a draft. No calculator offers a draft to anyone. Publish the product and it starts appearing as an add-on.
• Its category is info only. Nothing in an info-only category can be ordered, so it cannot be an add-on either. See Show something without selling it.

Only reasons that apply no matter what are flagged this way. Something that is merely out of season today, or sold out this week, is not warned about, because it will be offered again the moment that changes.

It works, but nobody takes it

Suggestions do best when the link is obvious to the customer: wines with a main, a cheese board with a dinner, coffee with a cake. If a pairing needs explaining, the headline field is the place to explain it.