Launching a new product? Allow customers to order them before the product is shipped or released. It’s a great opportunity to acquire new customers, increase repeat customers count and build a list.
This blog explains how you can use the WooCommerce Pre-Orders extension to set up pre-orders for your products and services.
Read on.
What are pre-orders? What are its benefits?
A pre-order is a sales strategy where customers can place an order for a product that has not yet been released or is not yet available for sale.
The idea behind pre-ordering is that customers can reserve a product in advance and ensure that they receive it as soon as it becomes available.
Benefits of WooCommerce pre-orders
Opting for WooCommerce pre-orders seems promising. Let’s take a look at the plethora of benefits it has to offer:
- Increased demand: Pre-ordering can create excitement and anticipation for a product, leading to increased demand.
- Early access: Allows customers to receive a product as soon as it is available, giving them an advantage over those who wait until the product is officially released.
- Improved cash flow: By accepting pre-orders, businesses can generate revenue in advance of a product’s release, improving their cash flow.
- Better inventory management: Helps businesses determine the expected demand for a product, allowing them to better manage their inventory and reduce the risk of overstocking or understocking.
- Feedback: Provides valuable feedback about the product demand, allowing businesses to make any necessary changes before the product is released.
WooCommerce Pre-orders plugin overview
We’ll use the WooCommerce Pre-Orders plugin to sell pre-orders for products and services in your store.
This plugin is developed by the WooCommerce team and is used on 7000+ websites.
Pre-orders can be paid for either beforehand or at the time of availability, with the option of specifying a specific date and time for when the pre-order will become accessible.
Plugin features:
- Specify a desired date/time for product availability.
- Trigger payment for orders when the product is ready for release.
- Adjust the launch date for the pre-booked item.
- Cancel pre-bookings in case the product becomes unavailable.
- Organize pre-bookings with a personalized ‘pre-order’ order status.
- Compatible with both basic and variable products, but not with WooCommerce Subscriptions.
- Notify all pre-order customers via email.
- Helps with inline edits, bulk edits, and exports as well.
- Optionally impose a fee for pre-ordering.
- Easy pre-order management and customization.
- Compatible with Cart and Checkout blocks.
- Customize the “Add to Cart” button text.
- Set up a “pre-order” status for both simple and variable products.
- Notify users when products’ pre-order periods are over and they’ve become fully available.
Pricing: $179/year
Get WooCommerce Pre-Orders plugin
How to add pre-orders in WooCommerce?
Install and activate the WooCommerce Pre-Orders plugin. Go to your WordPress Admin panel > WooCommerce > Pre-orders and configure as follows:
General settings
- Add to Cart Button Text: Controls the text on the single product page for pre-order-enabled products. For example: use ‘Pre-Order Now’ instead of ‘Add to Cart’.
- Place Order Button Text: Controls the place order button text on the checkout when the order contains pre-orders. For example, use ‘Place Pre-Order’ instead of ‘Place Order’.
- Single Product Page Message: Add an optional message to the single product page below the product price. Use
{availability_date}and{availability_time}to announce pre-order availability. - Shop Loop Product Message: Add an optional message above the ‘Add to Cart’ button for each pre-order enabled product on the shop loop page using
{availability_date}and{availability_time}. - Availability Date Title Text: Controls the title of availability date section on cart/checkout, “thank you”, view order, order email templates, and order details tables.
- Charged Upon Release Order Total Format: Controls the order total format for pre-orders charged upon release. Use
{availability_date}and{order_total}to indicate when the customer will be charged for their pre-order. - Charged Upfront Release Order Total Format: Controls the order total format for pre-orders charged upfront. Use
{availability_date}and{order_total}to indicate how the customer is charged for their pre-order. - Disable automated pre-order processing: Used for staging/testing sites to prevent automatic pre-order processing.
Product settings
Select a simple product or variable product you’d like to enable pre-orders for. Under Product data > Pre-Orders, you’ll find these settings:
- Enable Pre-Orders: This turns your product into a pre-order.
- Availability Date/Time: Set an optional date/time for the product to go from pre-order to regular purchase.
- Pre-order Fee: Adds a fee to the regular product price for pre-orders.
- When to charge: Gives you two options as to when a pre-order product will be charged for:
- Upon Release: Charges the customer when the product is available for purchase. Pre-order customers’ saved credit cards will be automatically charged by supported payment gateways or a ‘Pay Now’ email can be sent for payment through any gateway.
- Upfront: Charges the customer at checkout, like a normal product.
Publish your product
Updating product pre-order configuration.
The Pre-Orders section can be edited and updated with different limitations.
The Pre-Order tab becomes read-only if ‘When to Charge’ is set to ’Upon Release’.
While there are active pre-orders for a product, the fee and ‘When to Charge’ settings cannot be altered, but the release date can be adjusted using the WooCommerce > Pre-Orders > Actions tab.
Product Inventory
If stock management is turned on, each pre-order will decrease the product’s inventory, making it easy to restrict the number of pre-order items available. If the item is out of stock and backorders are not permitted, users will see the message “No longer available for pre-ordering”.
Pay Later payment gateway
The Pre-Orders plugin has a ‘Pay Later’ gateway for pre-order products paid ‘Upon release’. It is available during checkout with a pre-order and ‘Upon release’ charge in the cart. Check the list of supported gateways.
Configuration can be done in WooCommerce > Settings > Checkout > Pay Later, where it can be turned on/off and its title/description can be changed.
Pre-orders email
The Pre-Orders plugin comes with several pre-order-specific emails, which can be configured and customized just like any other WooCommerce core emails via the WooCommerce > Settings > Emails tab.
For customized WooCommerce email templates, try our Email Customizer Pro plugin.
That’s it.
For more details on the plugin, refer to this documentation.
How to manage thousands of pre-orders from one place?
Like normal orders, you need to open each order to make changes to it, especially the order status.
For hundreds of such pre-orders or even more than ten, managing or editing them is very time-consuming. But not when you have the Smart Manager plugin in your arsenal!
Smart Manager plugin allows you to view, manage and edit all your orders, including pre-orders from one place using an Excel-like spreadsheet.
Be it the default order statuses or custom order statuses for pre-orders, you can edit and bulk manage them.
Avoid going to each order individually one by one. Use Smart Manager to manage pre-orders within seconds or minutes.
Here’s what it helps with:
- Create new pre-orders directly – Use the spreadsheet to directly add new orders with the required details. This is Inline editing.
- Modify order status directly – Use Inline edit feature to make changes to the order status directly from the spreadsheet. Locate the order, change the status and save your changes.
- Change payment methods for pre-orders – Set or change payment methods for the required pre-orders directly.
- Increase/decrease pre-orders price – Do it for all pre-orders or only specific ones using advanced search filters.
- Bulk edit statuses – For more orders, select the required orders and set the status for all of them at once.
- Schedule order status changes in bulk – Consider that the product will surely be available for the pre-orders two days later at 5:00 PM. In such cases, you can schedule the bulk status change operation for those pre-orders from Draft to Pending Payment and Smart Manager will make sure it is updated at the selected date and time.
- Export order data to CSV – Export all your orders data to CSV or based on advanced search filters.
and many more…
Learn more about managing orders
Conclusion
Pre-order products offer a great option to promote new products, get early feedback and improve.
As the brand’s target audience expands, so does the array of benefits that it brings. Besides its benefits, the current cut-throat competition that the e-commerce domain showcases, the need for WooCommerce pre-orders has become more vital than ever.
I hope this article helped you create pre-orders in WooCommerce and manage them better.
For any questions, leave a comment below.
FAQ
Do pre-orders cost more?
In most cases, pre-orders cost the same amount as the actual and initial price. It could be a little less in case of a discount. The pre-order price depends on the nature of the item, who is releasing it, and any promotional pricing and price differences for product bundles.