Orders Queue
Every so often an order comes in and there's simply nowhere to put it — every Pickpad at the station is busy, or a cluster hasn't freed up yet. Rather than failing the order, Pickpad can hold it in a queue and place it the moment a pad becomes free.
Queue sorting
| Setting | Options | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Queue sorting | First in, first out / Ready orders first | First in, first out always places the longest-waiting order next. Ready orders first jumps the oldest ready order ahead of older orders that aren't ready yet — handy when the kitchen finishes a later order before an earlier one. |
What staff sees
Orders waiting in the queue show up in a dedicated queue view per station (or across the whole account). From there, staff can:
- Reorder the queue — drag orders up or down to change which one gets the next free pad.
- Distribute manually — push a specific queued order onto a chosen Pickpad or cluster, useful in manual mode or to override which pad an order lands on.
- Mark an order ready, finished, or canceled by hand, the same way the POS would report it.
Once a queued order is actually placed on a real Pickpad, it doesn't disappear from the queue view right away — it stays listed (now showing its assigned pad) until the order finishes or is canceled, so staff can still see recently-placed orders alongside anything still waiting.
How an order ends up queued
When an order arrives, Pickpad first tries to find it a free pad or a cluster. If nothing is
available — or the account always queues incoming orders — the order goes into the queue
instead. The webhook response reflects this: a queued order comes back with a queueId set and
pickpadIds/pickpads empty. Once the order is actually placed, the usual "order distributed"
webhook fires with queueId cleared back to null. See Webhook Payload
for the full field reference.
Orders sitting on a virtual cluster (no physical pad, just a cluster assignment) also show up in the queue view alongside pending queue entries, since from a staff member's point of view both are "waiting to be handled" — even though a virtual assignment never actually creates a queue entry behind the scenes.
See also
- Order Management — the settings that decide whether an order gets distributed automatically in the first place, and which order types reach a station's pads.
- Managing Clusters — clusters interact with the queue when they're full or not yet active, and virtual clusters skip the queue's pad-assignment step entirely.
- Webhook Events — how
queueIdandclustershow up in the webhooks you receive as an order moves through the queue.