Changelog

At checkout, the delivery distance to your customer now shows to one decimal place — so a trip reads as 10.4 km instead of being rounded to 10 km. It's a small change that makes the distance clearer and easier to trust. Your delivery fees are calculated exactly as before.

We fixed a calculation issue where map-based delivery distances were being measured in miles instead of kilometres, which made the distance — and any distance-based delivery fee — come out lower than the real trip. Distances now reflect the true kilometre distance between your store and your customer, matching what courier services quote. If you charge by distance or use distance tiers, your fees may be a little higher than before because they now use the correct measurement — it's worth a quick look at your rates to make sure they still feel right.

Late-night dayparts now behave the way you'd expect: a daypart set to 22:00-02:00 on Friday keeps its categories visible from Friday 22:00 straight through to Saturday 02:00 — no need to tick Saturday just to cover the after-midnight stretch. We also added a safety check when you edit a daypart's times: if the new schedule would clash with another daypart assigned to the same category, WhatsMenu warns you and names the conflict before saving.

Booking a Lalamove delivery just got faster. If your store uses map-based delivery, the drop-off location is now filled in automatically from the exact spot your customer pinned at checkout — no more re-searching their address on the order page. You'll see a "Location pinned by customer at checkout" note under the delivery address, and you can go straight to Get Quotation. You can still search for a different address any time.

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.