A few months ago, Rishi hosted a chef meetup in Dallas - and he loved meeting so many of you in person! 🙌🏾

A lot of you shared feedback, and two things came up more than anything else:

Both of those features are now live as of today! 🎉

We think that an "orders are closing" notification is a great way to build hype and encourage that last minute purchase before orders close.

You can now set up your defaults in the settings tab so that all future events start with the same configuration. You can find this in your Settings under Event Notifications.

And you can modify notifications on a per event level giving you maximum control over what notifications are sent to your subscribers and when. You can find this on the "Publish" or "Share" tab of an Event.

Hopefully this is a helpful visualization for what notifications you're sending and when!

here

We gave gift cards a facelift – making them more attractive and match your brand. Additionally, we added a bunch of updates to gift cards to make them easier to buy and use for customers.

And a highly requested update – you will now be notified whenever a customer buys a gift card from your storefront!

You can see how your gift cards look by heading over to your storefront and clicking "Gift Card" in the top right.

We hope you enjoy this fun little improvement, have a good week!

We have been rolling out a new mobile design for your sale pages over the past few weeks, and we are now confident it has a on customer and , so we are rolling it out to everyone today!

We have updated the look of your drops on mobile according to feedback and internal testing:

We also added a new Info page for events, which customers access by clicking "More info"

This will include all of your locations, pickup times, delivery times, and everything else a customer may want to know about the sale, without cluttering the main sale page with all that info.

To ensure customers are always have placing an order on their mind, we also include a button at the bottom for them to click to place an order, which brings the menu front and center :)

We’re excited to launch a space for chefs and bakers using Hotplate to connect! We hope this community becomes your go-to place to ask questions, get inspired, and offer support to other chefs and bakers like you. Most of all, we hope these conversations help everyone grow their businesses and learn from each other’s experiences.

Some ideas for what to post (but feel free to do what’s natural!):

Here’s how you join:

Note: To keep the community relevant and helpful, we’re currently only opening the invite to businesses with more than 10 orders. If you’re just starting out and would like support in getting there, send us an email at support@hotplate.com, or check out our guide on how to get started.

❤️ Oryan + Tenaya

Last week, we launched our — and in just 10 days have already enabled it! 🎉

As part of that launch, many of you noticed we included an optional bonus feature:

Today, we’re circling back to officially launch this feature as our new

If you have this setting enabled, customers who share your storefront with their friends will now see a prompt like this:

Customers can share your storefront from a few different places:

How It Works

Similar to Loyalty Points more broadly, we’re excited to keep building on and improving this feature based on your experiences and feedback. We can’t wait to see how you use it!

🎉 Nico

Introducing — a little "thank you" that keeps your customers coming back!

With our new loyalty points feature, customers will start earning points on every order they place through your storefront. These points can be redeemed for discounts on future orders, making it easier (and tastier) for them to come back for more.

You’re in control — set the points accrual rate anywhere from 3 to 10 points per dollar spent to match your business needs and customer rewards strategy.

You can enable loyalty points and set your accrual rate in the new Loyalty Points tab of your settings. Once turned on, customers will see how many points they’re earning at the bottom of their order summary:

On future orders, customers with available points will see the option to redeem them at checkout. If they do, they’ll receive a discount of and see it reflected in their receipt:

And the best part? Even after redeeming points, customers will continue earning points on the remaining balance — keeping the rewards cycle going strong.

We're launching loyalty points with a few additional - and optional - features to help incentivize the growth of your business:

You can find the settings for all of these features in the Settings panel, along with more information on each - and the program generally - in the Help Center.

We’re so excited to see how this feature helps you build loyal, returning customers — and we can’t wait to hear your feedback and keep making it better!

🎉 Nico

We have added a new breakdown to your Insights tab: Items sold!

This graph shows you how many items you have sold overall + a breakdown so you can see which item is the most popular among your customers.

We love getting your feedback on what you want to see from insights, so please keep the requests coming so we can build you even more useful tools!

🚨 Hotly requested, you can now add Cash, Venmo, and Zelle as payment options in the new checkout flow.

In addition to our existing payment options, you can have customers pay you outside of Hotplate with Cash, Venmo and Zelle. In the section of your settings, you'll be able to toggle each of these and provide custom instructions on how you want to be paid.

After you've flipped these on, customers will be able to checkout with any of the options you've enabled.

And once they've confirmed, they'll see your payment instructions on their order confirmation page.

Adam <3

Now you can offer gift cards directly as menu items in your events! This update allows you to seamlessly integrate gift card purchases alongside your event offerings, making it easier than ever for customers to grab a thoughtful gift while checking out other items.

When setting up an event, you can now add gift cards as part of your event menu so customers can purchase them just like any other item.

Gift cards have always been available on your storefront, but adding them to your menu creates a powerful opportunity to increase sales. Whether it’s a pop-up dinner, a cooking class, or a holiday event, gift cards are now front and center for customers who may not have considered buying one before.

Here’s the new option on the event configuration page:

And here's how it looks on an event page:

In the spirit of the holiday season, we're pleased to offer this 🎁 for Hotplate chefs!

🤑

Simple, inflexible discounts are becoming a thing of the past as we introduce a far more feature-rich process for creating and managing codes. WIth this update, you can now:

We've also moved discounts out of settings, and into their own tab on the new Store page:

On this page, you can add, view, and manage all of your active and inactive discount codes:

Clicking on a discount code will show you details about that code, including discount specifics and how much it's been used:

And finally, you can create event-specific discount codes directly in an event:

...and customer-specific discount codes directly from the customer page:

With these changes, you can finally create the perfect discount codes for your customers!