Looking over all the apps and discussions it appears that backorders with Shopify are really consumer/retail oriented. The customer places an order, they pay for everything on the order, and anything that is backordered ships when it becomes available.
We have a Shopify account set up for wholesale use. We aren’t using Plus as the sales volume does not compensate for the added cost. What we need is the ability for a customer to place an order and only pay for the items that are in stock. The remaining items stay on open order (backorder). When those items come into stock, we forward the open order, like a draft order, to the customer who can log in and pay to have those shipped.
I was not able to find an app that offers this service. But maybe I am using the wrong search terms?
We looked at pre-sales…but again, we are not trying to pre-sell an item. We don’t want to charge until that item is in stock and ready to ship.
We considered draft orders, but that requires the draft to be set up separate from the in-stock item order.
We considered something like a wish lists, but this doesn’t keep track in a way that we can monitor what is on open order.
You can actually do this natively with Shopify.
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/payment-authorization
You can have cards authorized (checking to see if the funds are there but not charging the card) and then only charging the card when the items are ready to ship.
I think there is a misunderstanding.
Looking at your link, I can charge the customer when I desire, but it is for the whole order, not a partial.
What I want:
- customer places an order (some items are in stock, some not)
- Shopify splits the order
- Shipping: the items in stock are processed and the customer’s card charged
- Open Order: the out of stock items are left on an open order to be fulfilled/charged later
Hi there, did you geta response to this? We have exactly the same issue?
We did not receive a usable response. And after a bit of research, I did not find a clean solution. What we are doing instead is generating a draft order for the customer for what is in stock and a second draft order for what is not in stock. We then select Reserve Items on both draft orders. This makes sure the items they want are on hold pulling them from the available inventory. Thus no one else can order that inventory before the customer can pay. And this puts a hold on future items to cover incoming inventory. Not the best system, but that is the only method we found that works.
We did have a couple of companies offer to make custom plugins. We don’t want to lock ourselves into custom apps for these types of actions. At least not at this time.
We have used an app called PreOrder Globo, this allows us to collect pre-orders but we have to take some up front payment, we have chosen just a minimal 5% upfront payment to secure the customers ‘place in the queue’ for the product. If they decided not to take the goods when they arrive we will refund the 5% otherwise we then take 95% payment. Not ideal as it causes extra work for accounting and may put off some customers. Hopefully someone will read this thread and create an app to solve this issue!