Changelog

Setting your store's base location just got easier — type your address or business name in the new search box and the pin jumps straight there and saves. No more scrolling and zooming the map to find your street. The search box is available on both the Delivery Map setup page and the Base Location page in your company settings. Clicking the map and dragging the pin still work as before, and we've also fixed an issue where dragging the pin on the Delivery Map page didn't save the new position. Since every delivery fee is measured from this pin, it's worth a quick check that yours sits exactly on your store.

Your store's location now also appears as a marker on the Delivery Area map, so you can see exactly where your store sits while you draw the area you deliver to. It updates the moment you move your base location.

Delivery Map fees are now calculated from the actual driving distance between your store and the customer's address, instead of a straight line on the map. If the real route detours around a river, highway, or one-way system, your per-kilometre or tiered pricing now reflects it — and your fees line up with what courier services like Lalamove quote for the same trip.

No setup needed, and your pricing settings are unchanged. Since driving distance is usually a little longer than the old straight-line measurement, it's worth a quick glance at your per-km rate or distance tiers to make sure they still feel right.

Distance-based delivery pricing is no longer capped at five ranges. In the Delivery Map settings you can now add as many "up to X km → price" tiers as you like, and remove any you don't need — no more leaving blank rows or squeezing your zones into a fixed set of five.

A couple of related improvements came along with it:

• One pricing method, clearly chosen. You pick either cost-per-kilometer or distance tiers — the storefront and the cart can no longer show one fee and charge another.
• No accidental free delivery. If an address is farther than your last tier, it's charged your top-tier price instead of slipping through to a zero fee.

Setting up your area is cleaner too: the base location and delivery area are now separate, clearly labelled steps, with a Use current location button and an automatic zoom to your saved zone. Your existing ranges carry over exactly as they were — nothing to redo.

You can now drop a pin on the map for each pickup area, so customers see exactly where to collect their order. At checkout, areas you've pinned show a small map and a Get directions button that opens the customer's phone maps app.

You can now upload item photos straight from your phone. Large images are resized automatically, so uploads no longer fail for being too big — no need to shrink them first.

Every AI feature in the panel — AI Enhance on items, Draft with AI on orders, the three AI Insight advisors (Catalog, Timing, Restock Forecast) — now renders output as the AI generates it. Tokens appear as they're written rather than landing all at once after a 5-25 second wait.

The total wait time is the same as before; what changed is what you see during the wait. Same trick the big consumer chat tools use — output looks like it's being typed for you in real time, so you can start reading and judging the result well before generation finishes.

Three small bonuses that come with the change:

• Bail-out saves credits. Close the AI Enhance modal (or click Generate again) while it's still streaming, and we cancel the request before the full charge lands. Useful when the first sentence is clearly off-brand and you want a fresh take.
• Long-form output feels alive. The Catalog Advisor digest emits 3 paragraphs of analysis — about 1500 tokens. Watching that build paragraph by paragraph beats watching a spinner for 15 seconds.
• Re-renders cleanly. During streaming you see plain text (so half-formed Markdown markers don't flicker). When generation finishes, the description re-renders with proper bold, lists, and links — same visual as before.

What you don't need to do: nothing. The change applies automatically. Same credit cost per generation. Cache hits (re-saving without changing the source) are still free and now arrive instantly as one chunk.

One thing that hasn't changed: the AI auto-translate background pass on item save still runs silently after your save — no UI to stream into. Refresh the item page a few seconds later to see translations.

If you picked Landscape or Portrait under Settings > Apps > Item image, your storefront catalog now shows item cards in that shape — instead of cropping every photo back to a square.

• A clothing-on-hanger shot stays tall.
• A long platter or banner-style image keeps its width.
• Square remains the default and is unchanged.

The shape applies to the whole storefront — every card uses the same aspect so the grid stays tidy. Items uploaded under an earlier setting are cropped (not stretched) into the new shape, so your catalog still looks uniform without re-uploading anything.

No setup needed. If you haven't picked an image size yet, your storefront keeps its current square layout.

We rebuilt the way your storefront serves products to a customer's browser. On a typical mobile network, pages now appear roughly twice as fast as before:

• Product catalogue is served from a fresh cache that rebuilds the moment you edit an item, category, or page — so customers always see your latest menu without paying the cost of rebuilding it on every visit.
• The first carousel slide loads in parallel with the rest of the page. Previously the browser would only start fetching it after parsing the entire product list, which added noticeable delay on slow connections.
• Uploaded images go through a proper resize step so a 2,400-pixel cover photo gets served as a properly-sized 1,200-pixel image to the customer, not full resolution.

The effect is most visible on storefronts with many items and on slower mobile connections. Customers spend less time staring at a blank screen and more time on your menu.

No setup needed — the speedup applies to every storefront automatically.

A small round of POS hardening based on real-world feedback:

• Settings propagate faster. Changes to your POS settings (initial view, show-completed-orders, order-completed-once-paid) now take effect within minutes. Previously the cache held them for up to a day, which made it look like a setting toggle "didn't work."
• More resilient orders queue. If a table referenced by an old order has been deleted from your floor plan, the orders refresh skips it gracefully instead of breaking the list.
• Safer move-order action. Moving an active order between tables now goes through a protected POST request. No functional change for you — just better protection against cross-site request forgery.

No setup needed.

After last week's Tables-as-an-app launch, Reservations gets two changes that complete the multi-industry picture: it works without any resource at all, and the "Seated" status — a restaurant idiom that didn't fit anywhere else — gets renamed everywhere.

Simple booking mode (no Tables required):

If your business doesn't assign customers to a physical spot — consultants, coaches, lawyers, online therapists, freelancers, anyone whose "resource" is just their own time — you can now leave Settings → Apps → Tables off and Reservations adapts:

• The Floor Plan / Tables tab in the panel disappears.
• The confirm flow skips the resource picker entirely — one click confirms the booking with date/time only.
• Bookings don't carry a table assignment, no fake "Zoom" or "Slot 1" placeholder needed.

If you do have tables, chairs, rooms, vehicles or whatever you call them, enable Tables and the existing flow works exactly the same as before — picker included.

Date and time editable on confirm:

The confirm modal now shows the requested date and time as editable fields, pre-filled with what the customer asked for. You can adjust before confirming — "we're full at 7 p.m. but can fit you at 7:30" — and the customer notification reflects the new time. Works in both simple mode and tables mode.

"Seated" → "In session":

The status that means the customer is here, being served used to read as "Seated". That made sense for restaurants but read as odd for salons (a stylist's chair isn't really "seating"), clinics (a patient isn't "seated" — they're in consultation), and impossible for online consultations where there's no seat at all.

The new universal label is In session — natural for restaurants (a seated diner is in their dining session), salons (client in session), clinics (in consultation), coaches and online consultations (call in session). Translated across every supported language: pt "Em sessão", es "En sesión", fr "En session", de "In Sitzung", zh "进行中", ar "في جلسة", and the rest.

What changes:

• The third tab in the Reservations panel: "Seated" → "In session"
• Status badge on every reservation card and in the legacy reservation list
• Action button on confirmed reservations: "Seated" → "Start session"
• Empty-state copy: "Mark a confirmed reservation as in session when the customer arrives or the call begins."
• Toast messages after confirming a status change

Internally the database value stays as seated — only what you see changes — so historical reports, exports and any external integrations that read the status field continue to work unchanged.

Restaurants don't need to do anything:

The new wording reads naturally for restaurants too. Tables stays enabled, the picker still shows, the workflow is identical — only the word on the third tab and the action button changes.

A small polish pass on Reservations that finishes off the multi-industry shake-out: the customer booking form drops two fields that were always restaurant-y, the time picker snaps to 15-minute intervals, and booking duration is now something only you control.

Time picker snaps to 15-minute intervals

Customers no longer pick "7:23 PM" by mistake. The time field on the booking widget (both the embedded chat-bubble widget and the Spreader/Kaleo/Cosmika storefront modal) now offers 7:00, 7:15, 7:30, 7:45 only. Mobile shows a snap wheel; desktop steps in 15-minute increments. Restaurants book on quarter-hours, salon appointments come in 30/45/60 blocks, clinic slots are 15/30 — 15-minute snap fits everyone without a per-merchant setting.

"Number of Guests" → "Party size", and hidden in simple mode

The party-size field used to read "Number of Guests" / "Guests" — restaurant-flavoured wording that didn't fit salons, clinics or 1:1 consultations. Two changes:

• Renamed everywhere visible to "Party size" (the merchant card now shows "4 people" instead of "4 guests").
• Hidden on the customer booking form when Tables is off. Almost every simple-mode booking is for one person (consultant, lawyer, coach, single-room therapist, salon stylist) — asking is friction. The booking submits 1 silently. If a merchant wants party size for couples therapy or family clinic visits, they'll be asked when they enable Tables.

In Tables mode, the field still shows on the customer form (because party size genuinely matters for table-capacity matching) and is required.

Booking duration is merchant-only now

Previously the customer picked their booking duration from a 1-to-4-hour dropdown on the storefront modal. That made sense for restaurants (long lunch vs quick coffee) but was meaningless for salons, clinics and consultations where the duration is fixed by the service type. We've removed the field from the customer form universally.

Instead:

• Set a default in Settings → Apps → Reservations → "Default booking duration" (15 min, 30 min, 45 min, 1 hour, … up to 4 hours). The new default ships at 30 minutes — adjust to whatever your typical booking takes.
• Override per-booking in the confirm modal. When you confirm a pending reservation, the duration field is right next to date and time — pre-filled with your default, change it for atypical bookings ("this haircut is a colour, 90 min").

This is more accurate scheduling for everyone: the customer doesn't have to guess, and you're never overcommitted because someone picked "1 hour" for a 4-hour family dinner.

A note on WhatsApp confirmation templates

The notification class itself (the bit WhatsMenu controls) is industry-neutral — it just passes data fields to your campaign template. If you've configured a custom WhatsApp campaign in WhatsBox that says "Your table is confirmed for X guests" and your business doesn't have tables, you'll want to update the template to match. The data fields available include customer_name, reservation_date, reservation_time, number_of_guests, special_requests, company_name, etc. — use whatever fits your wording.

No action needed for restaurants

Set Tables on, leave Default duration at whatever fits (1.5–2 hours is common for dinner), and the customer form looks the same as before with cleaner time-picker behaviour. Everything else is identical to what shipped on 2026-05-13.

The reservation chat-bubble widget you embed on your own website was rewritten end-to-end. The biggest day-to-day win: customer phone numbers now save in international format automatically, so your WhatsApp and SMS notifications actually reach them.

Phone numbers always save in a format that works:

• A customer typing 0123 456 789 on a Malaysian merchant's site now saves as +60123456789 — directly usable for WhatsApp / SMS.
• Customers can also type their own international format (e.g. +44 7700 900123 for a UK number) and it's preserved.
• If a customer types something we can't recognize, they see a clear message asking them to include the country code, instead of the form silently saving a number you can't reach.
• Coverage spans ~70 countries (SE Asia, Latin America, EU, Mid-East, Africa, NA, Oceania) and uses your Default country setting to fill in missing country codes.

Cleaner form panel:

• Dropped the chat-message styling (the green-bubble look with the speech-bubble tail). It implied a back-and-forth conversation that never actually existed — your customers were filling a form, not chatting. The new design is a clean form panel that opens from the same floating bubble, with your logo and brand colors prominent in the header.
• Field labels are now translated into the customer's language — "Your name" / "Phone number" / "Date" / "Time" / "Guests" / "Special requests" all show in the panel's working language across 19 supported locales.
• Inputs have proper focus highlights in your brand color, the submit button shows a subtle "Sending…" state while the request is in flight, and the launcher bubble is slightly smaller (52 px) to match Intercom / Crisp / Tawk conventions.

Better error handling on submit:

• If the date or time you've configured rejects the booking (outside business hours, beyond your max-advance days, etc.), the customer sees the actual reason inline — they fix it and resubmit without reloading.
• If the network drops mid-submit, they get a clear "Network error, try again" message instead of a hung form.
• Network failures and validation errors no longer hide the form, so a single mistake doesn't make the customer start over.

Spam protection:

• Bots scraping the form are silently blocked via a hidden honeypot field — they think their submission worked, you never see fake bookings clutter your panel.
• Submission rate is capped at 10 per minute per IP, so a misbehaving script can't flood your reservations queue.

Reservation history listing:

• The /reservations/reservation page (linked from the panel as Reservation history) had a heavy bold-everywhere look. Toned down to match the rest of the panel — single emphasis on the customer name, lighter secondary lines, action buttons right-aligned to match Staff and Contacts.
• The "Seated" status icon is now a small armchair instead of an empty square (the previous icon name didn't exist in our icon set, so it never rendered).

No setup needed — open Settings > Apps > Reservation Widget to see the new design in action, and your existing embed code on your website continues to work without changes.

When a customer submits a reservation through your storefront or embedded widget, the panel now reacts in real time — no refresh needed.

What changed:

• Doorbell + on-screen toast — if you (or a staff member) have the panel open, you hear a short doorbell sound and see a toast with the customer name and reservation code the moment the request arrives. Same behaviour you already get for new orders.
• Top-bar bell badge — the new request lands in the bell dropdown in the top navigation, so you see it next time you load any page even if the panel was closed.
• Mobile vendor app push — if you use the WhatsMenu vendor app on your phone, you get a native push notification with the request details.

What didn't change:

The existing Twilio SMS and WhatsApp via WhatsBox notifications still fire when the Notify me when a new reservation is submitted setting is on. They are now an extra channel rather than the only way to find out.

No setup needed — these alerts are on by default for every merchant. If you don't want the doorbell sound, your browser tab controls work as expected.

We tightened up Reservations so you spend less time chasing bad requests and more time confirming the good ones.

New settings in Settings > Apps > Reservations:

• Enable customer-facing reservations on your storefront — controls whether visitors see the booking entry. The panel still works for staff phone bookings even when this is off.
• Maximum days in advance customers can book — leave blank for no limit, or cap at any number of days. The storefront date picker respects the limit automatically.
• Accept bookings outside business hours — off by default, so a customer cannot book a 3 a.m. slot when you are closed. Turn on for venues that handle private events outside posted hours.
• Notify me when a new reservation is submitted — pings your registered phone the moment a request lands, so you do not need to keep the panel open to spot it. Uses the same Twilio or WhatsApp channel as confirm/reject.

Smarter automatic rejections:

Three rules now reject obvious garbage before it reaches your panel — past dates, party sizes outside 1–50, and times outside your business hours (unless you allow off-hours). The customer sees a clear message explaining what to fix and can resubmit.

Mode-aware visibility:

• On a QR Ordering storefront, the customer-facing reservation entry is hidden — your customer is already at the table, so the booking form would be confusing. Staff still take reservations through the panel.
• On a showcase storefront (Disable Ordering), the Reserve / Book button is promoted as the primary call to action — exactly what salons, clinics, and consulting businesses need.

Reservation Widget date input also honours the max-advance setting now, so an embedded widget on your external site can't accept dates beyond your panel's horizon.

Open Settings > Apps > Reservations to try the new controls.

We rebuilt three of the daily-driver pages around Reservations with the same look and feel as the rest of your panel — clearer typography, consistent badges, and a more usable preview where it matters.

Reservations panel cards:

• Status badges now use distinct colors per state — pending (warning), confirmed (primary), seated (success), completed (neutral), late and no-show (danger) — so you can scan a long list and spot what needs attention at a glance.
• Each booking card was tightened up: customer name leads, contact info groups under labelled icons, and the table assignment shows as a chip next to the party size.
• Empty tabs ("No pending reservations", etc.) now include a one-line hint about what would normally appear there, instead of just a heading.

Cleaner panel header:

• The Widget, Contacts, and old "All reservations" buttons collapsed into a single More dropdown next to New reservation, so the toolbar stays tidy on small screens.
• "All reservations" was renamed to Reservation history to make its role clear — the panel is for today's work, the history page is for lookups, exports, and edits to past records.

Contacts list:

• Modals, dropdowns, and the Bulk action menu were rebuilt on the current Bootstrap 5 base, so they open and close reliably across browsers.
• Action buttons (Chat, Reservation, Edit, Delete) collapsed into compact icon buttons with tooltips, freeing up horizontal space for longer names and group tags.
• Status pill ("Subscribed" / "Not subscribed") and group tags now match the rest of the panel's badge style.

Web Widget creator:

• Form is split into three labelled sections — Branding, Content, and Appearance — so you can find a setting without scrolling the whole form.
• The two color pickers sit side by side instead of stacking vertically.
• The live widget preview and the embed-code snippet moved to a sticky right column, so the preview stays visible while you tweak settings on the left.

No behaviour changes — every existing setting still does exactly what it did before. Open Reservations, Contacts, or Settings > Apps > Reservation Widget to see the new layout.

If you run a QR Ordering storefront, your customer-facing reservation entry no longer disappears for everyone — it now appears for visitors who reach your storefront without scanning a table QR code.

The new rule:

• A customer who scans a table QR code (URL has ?tid=) is physically at a table — the Reserve button stays hidden because they're already there.
• A customer who visits your storefront URL directly — from search, a social link, or a saved bookmark — sees the Reserve button and can book a future visit, exactly like on a non-QR venue.

This unblocks QR-mode merchants who also want to take phone-style reservations from remote customers, without forcing them to choose between QR ordering and a public reservation flow.

No setup needed. The behaviour switches automatically based on whether the customer arrived via a table QR code. If you don't want any customer-facing reservations at all, the existing Settings > Apps > Reservations > Enable customer-facing reservations on your storefront toggle still controls that — turn it off and the button is hidden everywhere, just like before.

A week after launch, Schedule picks up the next big set of sources: every order, every delivery, every pickup — all on the same calendar as your reservations.

Three new event sources you can toggle on the sidebar:

• Order Created — every order positioned at the moment the customer placed it. Watch the inflow shape across the day or week.
• Delivery — orders set for delivery, positioned at their scheduled delivery time. See exactly when drivers should be heading out.
• Pickup — orders set for pickup or takeaway, positioned at their scheduled pickup time. Spot pickup spikes before they hit the counter.

Each source has its own colour so a busy day stays readable, and you can toggle any combination on or off without leaving the page.

Pre-orders parsed properly. Schedule now understands the full set of timestamp formats your storefront produces — single-time slots like 30_60, day-only pre-orders like 2026-05-08, and the full range form 2026-05-08 07:30am - 10:00am. Pre-orders show a Pre-order tag in the day-detail panel so you can tell them apart from same-day orders at a glance.

A sidebar promotion. Schedule now lives directly under Orders in the main sidebar instead of nested in Apps — one click to your calendar from anywhere in the panel. Enable it once in Settings > Apps > Schedule and the entry appears.

Times in your format. Events render in the time format you set under Settings > Store > General — 12-hour with am/pm or 24-hour, in your store's time zone.

Open Schedule in the sidebar to see the new sources in action. Toggle Order Created off when you only care about what's leaving the store; toggle Delivery and Pickup off when you only care about inflow. The view is yours.

WhatsMenu has always called the things customers occupy "tables" — because most dine-in venues think about them that way. But a salon assigns chairs, a clinic assigns rooms, a co-working space assigns desks, an auto dealership assigns vehicles. Forcing every business to read "table" in their staff panel and on their customer receipts always felt off.

Two changes shipped together:

1. Tables is now an app you toggle on under Settings → Apps

It joins Floor Plan, Reservations, POS and the rest. Enable it whenever your business assigns customers to a physical spot — restaurants do, but so do salons (chairs), clinics (rooms), co-working hosts (desks), auto dealers (vehicles), and any service business with appointment slots. If your business is pure delivery / pickup / showcase, leave it off and the menu stays clean.

2. You pick what to call them

Inside the Tables app card, you'll find two label fields:

• Singular — what you call one of them (defaults to "Table"). Set to Chair, Room, Desk, Vehicle, Slot, or anything else.
• Plural — used in lists and counts (defaults to "Tables"). Set to Chairs, Rooms, Desks, Vehicles, Slots.

Save and the label propagates everywhere the system used to say "Table" or "Tables":

• The sidebar menu link itself.
• The Floor Plan editor — "Add Chair", "Round Chair", "Delete this Chair", every confirmation prompt.
• The Reservations panel — "Select a Chair", "Available Chairs", "Reservations on this Chair", the floor-plan tab, every empty-state message.
• The POS picker when staff opens a dine-in cart.
• The customer cart at checkout — "Chair: 5" instead of "Table: 5".
• The order receipt (printed A4 and 57mm / 80mm thermal).
• The WhatsApp order confirmation sent to the merchant.
• The order-status page customers see after placing an order.
• The analytics dashboard ("Chair Reservations" instead of "Table Reservations").

Sidebar layout cleaned up at the same time

The old "Restaurant" section in the sidebar held three items — Kitchen Display, Status Display, Tables — and only made sense for restaurants. We dropped the section header and moved all three under the existing Apps group, where they sit alphabetically next to Floor Plan, Reservations, and any other modules you've enabled. A salon now sees a clean Apps list with their own labels; a restaurant sees the exact same item set, just labeled "Tables" by default.

Translated across 19 languages

The label override works in every language WhatsMenu supports — Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese. The placeholder slots into the localized sentence so a Portuguese salon merchant typing Cadeira sees "Selecione uma Cadeira", a Spanish auto dealer typing Vehículo sees "Vehículos disponibles", and so on.

A small caveat: in languages with grammatical gender (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Russian, Polish), the surrounding sentence keeps the original gender of "table" — so a French salon's "Choisissez une Chaise" reads naturally, but a few phrasings will look slightly off. The label still gets through; minor grammar quirks are the trade-off for one-click flexibility.

Restaurants don't need to do anything special

Enable Tables under Settings → Apps (one click), leave the labels blank, and the system uses the original "Table" / "Tables" wording everywhere — exactly how it worked before.

Why this matters now

Floor Plan, POS, KDS and Reservations cover a lot of business types beyond restaurants — and the next wave of merchants joining WhatsMenu (salons, clinics, co-working hosts, dealerships) shouldn't have to mentally translate "table" every time they look at their dashboard or send a customer a confirmation. This is the smallest change that makes the rest of the platform feel native to whatever they actually do.

If you use Custom Item Fields to let customers attach files to an order — design artwork, prescription, contract, photo of a faulty part — those uploads now go through tighter checks before they touch your storage.

What changed:

• Allowed file types are enforced at upload time, not at checkout. Allowed: images (jpg, jpeg, png, gif, webp), pdf, docx, and txt. Anything else is rejected before the file is saved.
• A 10 MB per-file size limit keeps a single visitor from filling up shared storage with one oversized upload.
• A per-visitor rate limit stops a script from looping uploads to fill the disk.
• Clearer feedback for visitors — when a file is the wrong type, too large, or sent too quickly, the form shows an inline error next to the field so the visitor knows to retry with a smaller or different file.

One small change for new fields. When you add a new File upload field, the default accept list now suggests .gif, .jpg, .png, .pdf, .docx instead of including the older .doc format. Existing fields keep whatever accept list you configured. If a visitor tries to upload a .doc file, they'll be asked to send .docx or .pdf instead — both are widely supported by Word, Google Docs, and Pages.

You don't need to change any setting. The new checks apply automatically to every storefront with Custom Item Fields enabled.

Your Carousels app now has a Carousel height setting — five presets that control how much vertical space the hero slider takes up:

• Compact (400px) — short hero, more room for content below.
• Normal (600px) — the previous default; balanced for most storefronts.
• Tall (800px) — bigger visual impact, great for image-led brands.
• Hero (75% of screen) — the "peek" style: the hero dominates but a sliver of content below is visible, inviting scrolling.
• Cover (full screen) — the Apple/Airbnb landing-page look: the hero fills the entire viewport.

New: scroll-down arrow on Hero and Cover. When you pick one of those two heights, a subtle animated down-arrow appears at the bottom of the hero. Clicking it smoothly scrolls visitors past the hero to your content. Great for signalling "there's more below, keep scrolling" on full-bleed landings.

Tip: Cover and Hero look best with Full width frame (set in Template Settings → Appearance → Page frame width). Boxed frame leaves side margins that break the edge-to-edge feel.

Where to change it:

1. Go to Settings → Apps → Carousels (or the Carousels entry in your sidebar → Settings).
2. Pick a height.
3. Save.

Your existing carousels stay the same — the default is Normal, which matches the previous behaviour. No image re-upload needed.

Mobile tip: Compact, Normal, and Tall use the natural size of your mobile carousel images on phones (so narrow screens don't get a weird super-tall hero). Hero and Cover take up the phone's viewport the same way they do on desktop.