Pre Order Solution for Christmas

Shopify Apps
1

Hey

I’m looking for a solution for our Christmas sales.

We currently have a site that we sell from our inventory, however in the run up to Christmas we get lots of requests from customers to pre-order for collection on a future date. As our stock inventory is constantly changing we would like the pre-orders to come from a separate inventory and still have the option for customers to purchase items that are in stock. For example

Product A - live inventory 30

Product A - inventory available for pre-order 50

So if a customer would like to purchase for delivery now then they can select from the live inventory and if a customer would like to order for a date in the future they can select from the Pre-order inventory. Ideally, a button for ‘buy it now’ and a button for ‘pre-order’.

Just to add we also have a Bricks and Mortar shop that shares the inventory from our website.

Any help or assistance with finding a suitable app would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Bob

2

Hi @edwardandirwyn , thank you for posting here!

Christmas sales are coming, we have a great pre-order solution for you:

You can try Snap Presale & Backorder for FREE. The app is simple and easy to use.

If my answer is helpful, please let me know by accepting the Solution and giving a Like !!!

3

Hey Bob @edwardandirwyn ,

We’ve had an similar enquiry for our preorder & back-in-stock app (Early Bird) before.

Not the exact two-button solution you’re after - but have you looked into creating custom product variants in Shopify? Maybe you could add a variant for “Pre-order” with its own inventory level. This way, your customers can select either the in-stock version or the pre-order version directly on the product page.

This could be a simpler and clean way to handle your Christmas pre-order sales.

You might also want to look into Shopify’s new Split Shipping in Checkout feature. It allows merchants to split their customers’ shipping automatically if items are from different fulfilment locations or shipping at different dates. (In case they purchase a pre-order and an in-stock item within the same cart.)

If you have any other questions around Shopify’s pre-orders (and partial deposits too), happy to help you look into it further.

1 Like
4

@edwardandirwyn We run a preorder app full time - STOQ - happy to help you out here based on what we learnt so far.

  1. What you’re looking for is technically possible. You will need a third-party app to create the preorder offer, and the rest of the work—like letting your customer choose their delivery date—will need to be handled by a developer separately. Most preorder apps don’t have a solution like this out of the box; however, any app that offers APIs should make it really easy for a developer to pick this up and build out your preferred flow.

  2. If you’d prefer to avoid custom work, the better option would be to create two separate variants (or products)—one for the product available today and another for the one coming later. You can set this up easily in a few minutes with any preorder app, including ours.

  3. On our app specifically, you can also take it one step further - sell your available inventory today as a presale with partial payment options & discounts. Later, convert it into a preorder when it runs out of stock. You get the best of both worlds by selling out all of your units! :slightly_smiling_face:

As for your brick & mortar shop sharing inventory - that shouldn’t be a problem. Orders through the physical location will go through just fine, since it won’t be affected by any preorder flows.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions, and we’re more than happy to help you get set up all the way through to your first preorder.

5

Thanks for all the replies!

Having gone over what you’ve all said I think the best option, for now at least, is to add a separate variant to each product. As we have a number of staff it means that it is a relatively simple thing to train them on. I’ll also have a look at split shipping but this might complicate matters.

I’ll see how I get on with it this weekend and report back!

Thanks again,

Bob

2 Likes
6

Sounds like a plan! I’d generally recommend disabling Split Shipping. There are a few cases where it can be useful though - like collecting a separate shipping fee for the preorder item if the order contains both in-stock and preorder products!

Feel free to DM if you have any questions about it.