Pre Orders - Payment Process, Capture?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment
,
3

Hey Tim,

Owner of a pre-order app here. Some pre-order apps like ours (Early Bird) are designed to handle the complexities of partial (deposit) payments and extended pre-order periods.

As Dirk mentioned, if you’re using Shopify Payments and don’t authorize the payment within 7 days, the authorization becomes void. You’ll need to request a new authorization from the customer (in this case, your friends) to complete the remaining payment.

We’ve actually been talking to different stores who share similar frustrations. Our pre-order app can automate capturing the remaining payment on a specific date of your choice, beyond 7 days.

Capturing partial deposit is becoming more popular as it helps avoid losing sales on customers who prefer not to pay in full.

How our app might work for your pre-order flow:

  1. Set up a Pre-order campaign (sell as many as you’d like, or in limited quantities)
  2. Option to pay in full (you can offer discounts separate from Shopify’s promo codes)
  3. Option to capture a partial deposit (% or $ amount)
  4. Select final payment due date (after X days or at a specific date & time)
  5. Select expected fulfilment/shipping date to display to your customers (A specific date or just set as ASAP/Not sure yet)
  6. Choose to reserve your stock when the pre-order is placed, or when it’s fulfilled
  7. Auto-capture the final payment and auto-send your customers the invoice receipt on your selected due date
  8. 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
  9. If the supplier has shipment delays, just update the estimated shipping date and our app can auto-send a pre-order delayed email for you to inform your customers too

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, our pre-order app has a Free Plan available with no commission fees.

Happy to send you some screenshots of what we’ve done for other stores, or share two 5-minute videos to show you what the partial deposit and remaining payment capture process looks like.