Why is my Glovo store showing as closed when the restaurant is open?
Restaurant operators lose orders on Glovo in three distinct ways, and only one of them is a decision anybody remembers making. A store can be set to busy, which Glovo lifts after thirty minutes. It can be closed for the day, which lasts until the next scheduled opening. Or it can simply never open, because Glovo asks a member of staff to check in ten minutes before each scheduled opening hour and nothing opens the store if nobody answers. All three look identical to a customer, and none of them is reported to head office.
What does “Close for the day” mean on Glovo, and when does the store come back?
It means the store stops taking orders and stays that way until the schedule brings it back. Glovo’s guidance for its order taking apps says it directly: “When you choose ‘Close for the day’, choose an accurate reason (7). Pick the accurate reason, and then click ‘Update’. Your store will remain closed until your next opening time is set.” Source: sell.glovoapp.com.
That is a better default than several platforms in this category, because the schedule is the thing that ends it rather than a person remembering. It is also the reason the mistake is expensive. Choosing close for the day at seven in the evening does not cost thirty minutes, it costs everything until tomorrow’s opening time, and the operator who chose it has no countdown in front of them to make that concrete.
The route out of it is short and Glovo documents it step by step, which is set out on our page about getting a Glovo store back online. What matters for diagnosis is the asymmetry between its two ends. It is entered in one tap by whoever is holding the device and left only by somebody who first notices it is still on, which is why the schedule rather than a person usually ends it.
What is the difference between busy and closed on Glovo?
Duration, and Glovo is unusually clear that busy is a closure with a timer rather than a longer preparation window. The instruction reads: “If you want to temporarily change your availability status, click on the status of your store and choose between ‘Set to busy (30 mins)’ and ‘Close for the day’.” Source: sell.glovoapp.com. And on what busy actually does: “If you select ‘Busy for 30 minutes’, it will close your store for 30 minutes and automatically reopen after 30 minutes.”
This is worth holding next to the other platforms a chain may sell on, because the same word means opposite things. On Deliveroo, busy mode keeps the site selling and only extends the promised time. On Glovo, busy closes the store outright for half an hour. A manager who learned the habit on one platform and applies it on the other has turned a slow period into a closed one.
The practical consequence is that a Glovo busy period is rarely shorter than its full length. It gets chosen in the middle of a rush, ending it early takes a deliberate return to the store status control, and the half hour expires on its own before anybody goes back. That gives a useful reading rule. A Glovo store that was unavailable for a round thirty minutes during service was almost certainly set to busy on purpose, and a store that was unavailable for three hours was not.
Why does Glovo ask you to check in ten minutes before opening?
Because opening is confirmed rather than automatic. Glovo describes the reminder plainly: “10 minutes before each scheduled opening hour, you will see a reminder to open your store to start receiving orders from Glovo customers.” In its grocery and retail app the same reminder carries two buttons, and the second one loops: “‘Confirm’ (1) is your store will open up at your normal set time. ‘Later’ (2) is you will be asked 3 minutes later if you are ready to open. If you close the Pelican app, you will get the same notification when you open it. If you keep clicking on this button, you will get a notification every 3 minutes.”
Glovo then states what happens if nobody answers at all: “If you don’t check in at the designated time, you can manually change the status by clicking the store status button at the top left corner.” The sentence is written as a helpful workaround and it carries the whole failure inside it. If the check in did not happen, the status is something a human now has to change by hand.
That puts Glovo in the same family as several other platforms, each with its own timing. Talabat and HungerStation both use a 30 minute window and both leave a shop closed when nobody acknowledges. Deliveroo repeats an alert every ten minutes and states that an unanswered reminder leaves the business closed on the app. Glovo gives ten minutes and repeats every three. In every case the branch that opened its kitchen on time is not the branch that opened its listing on time.
Can Glovo close or remove a store itself?
The partner terms reserve the right in broad language: “GLOVO also reserves the right to restrict, suspend, delete, at any time and for an indefinite period, the PARTNER’s products and/or services, and or PARTNERS’ profile on the APP. GLOVO will communicate said decision to the PARTNER fifteen (15) days prior to the final deletion of its profile, together with an explanation of the facts and circumstances that justify it.” Source: glovoapp.com partner terms.
The same terms turn the state described on this page into a billable one rather than a merely empty hour, because a cancellation that happens while a store is shut inside its own published working hours is treated as attributable to the partner. That clause is quoted on our page about whether Glovo tells you when a restaurant goes offline. The terms page serves several national versions, so the text governing your branches is not necessarily the one a browser loads first.
What we did not find is any published rule that Glovo automatically closes a store after rejected or unaccepted orders. We looked, and there is nothing. That is a real difference from Just Eat, DoorDash and Uber Eats, all of which publish such rules, and we are not going to invent one to make the platforms look alike.
What can a Glovo integration actually control?
Less than integrators expect, and this is the detail worth checking before a rollout. Glovo’s public partner API exposes exactly one resource for switching a store off, at /webhook/stores/{storeId}/closing, with three operations. The write operation is summarised as a temporary closing and described as follows: “Allows you to close a store temporarily until a specified date and time in the future. This will ignore the opening times defined in the store schedule, forcing the store to be closed until the specified date and time.” Removing it returns the store to normal: “After the removal, the store will continue following their regular schedule.” Source: api-docs.glovoapp.com.
For diagnosis, the end time is the useful half of that. A closure sent through the API always names the moment it stops, so a store unavailable since Tuesday did not arrive there by this route. The rest matters for anyone treating the portal as evidence. Scheduling is not something the integration takes over, so the hours on screen keep describing an intention while a software closure quietly overrides it, and the two never contradict each other in the interface.
How do you catch a Glovo store that closed itself?
By watching duration rather than status, because on Glovo every self service state is supposed to end. Busy ends after half an hour, a day closure ends when the schedule reopens the store, and an API closure ends at the timestamp it was given. Anything that runs longer than its own design is the interesting event, and the most common of those is the store that never opened at all because nobody answered the ten minute reminder.
That failure has no artefact anywhere. There is no closure to inspect, no reason code to read, and the schedule in the Manager Portal still says the store opens at eleven. The only way to see it is to place the question a customer places, from outside and at the hour in question, which is how Kitchain (kitchain.co) reads a Glovo store against the hours that store itself published.
One practical note on which app you are reading about. Glovo runs two separate order taking applications, one for restaurants and one for grocery and retail, and the availability wording differs between their guides, which is why two branches of the same brand can describe the same control differently. That split is covered in some of your branches are offline on Glovo and the rest are fine. Background on the platform itself is at kitchain.co/aggregators/glovo/.