Customer Orders

[LaneRepsol]

I run a small hobby shop and we take pre-orders for items that are not yet produced. For example the vendor releases a catalog and I take pre-orders on these items before they are made. How do I track these pre-orders in the Shopify system? Is there a place to put them? In QuickBooks POS I used to be able to do customer oders. 

[petgrocer]

They way I do this is I set up the product as a draft item (not published to your website, unless you want to publish it), then I use the 'reserve item until' feature at the top of that draft order. 

If you select to send an invoice to your client during this draft stage it will add the sales to THAT DAY, not the day you actually get the payment. There is no good way to track partial payments or layaways, but you can certainly take a full payment in advance and track it manually (we use print offs of the completed draft orders AND an excel spreadsheet - Shopify isn't a real POS yet), or you don't process the payment on the draft order and it remains open for you to track.

[LaneRepsol]

So with it reserved and if i don't take a payment, when the item comes in does it show that i have x number of people reserving that item? If this works this way maybe i will do that without taking payments. There are a lot of short falls. I am coming from Quickbooks POS and struggling. 

[petgrocer]

Step one - open a draft order on the admin panel and add the customer and product to it.

Step two - if you want to ensure you don't oversell the quantity you have coming, use the 'reserve items' at the top of the spot where you add products, and select how long you need to hold that

Step three - if you want to see how many are on hold, go to the product page in your admin and look at the adjustment history (this may be on your one product, or if you have variants, it will be on the variant page). You will see how many are 'unavailable' - those are your reserved ones (or if you have it as a live item on your website, it could be orders in progress that aren't fulfilled yet).

The system is not intuitive and it changes constantly in how it works and how inventory is controlled. I did this all from the admin, - I don't use the draft orders on the POS because the save cart feature worked great and it was removed. If you need help with using the draft orders on the POS, someone else will need to chime in. Your sentence of 'there are a lot of short falls' basically sums up a lot of people's feelings lately. We remain hopeful for returning functionality to the POS. For this purpose, I strongly recommend using the admin if you can.

[Jo_EarlyBird]

Hiya Lane,

It's pretty common for hobby online stores to use a Shopify pre-order app like ours (Early Bird) to help with tracking pre-orders.

I'm not 100% sure if/how it works with POS though. Will have to get back to you on this.

But for online purchases, there are several benefits of using a pre-order app over manual workarounds.

Mainly to save your time from tedious admin and better managing customer expectations.

Gonna list an example pre-order campaign setup below for selling collectibles, using our app:

1. Set up a Pre-order campaign (You can sell your collectibles only in limited quantities, or sell as many as you'd like for items like apparel/accessories.)
2. Option for your customers to pay in full now (you can offer discounts separate from Shopify's promo codes)
3. Option for your customers to pay a partial deposit first to reserve their item (% or $ amount), and the rest later
4. Select the final payment due date (after X days or at a specific date & time)
5. Select expected fulfilment/shipping date (A specific date or just set as ASAP/Not sure yet)
6. You can choose to reserve your stock when the pre-order is placed, or when it's fulfilled
7. This info will be displayed to your customers throughout their purchase journey. i.e. On the Product page, View cart, Checkout etc. 
8. You can track all these pre-orders in our app's real-time dashboard OR under their specific order in Shopify > Orders
9. Our app will auto-capture the final payment and auto-send your customers the invoice receipt on your selected due date
10. If you'd like to manually capture a specific customer's payment before the automated capture date, you'll still have control to do so
11. If the supplier has shipment delays, just update the estimated shipping date in your pre-order campaign, and our app can auto-send a pre-order delayed email for you to inform your customers

Would love to hear your feedback, as I'm always learning what different businesses need when managing pre-orders.

If this is relevant to what you need, happy to send you some screenshots of what we've done for other waitlist customers (we've just opened up for early private access), or share two 5-minute videos to show you what the pre-order process looks like.

[LaneRepsol]

I will look into your app and see what that looks like.