Pre-Orders

With the Pre-Orders module, you can allow your customers to pre-order products that are yet to be released.

You can create as many pre-order rules as you want, and for each rule, you can:

• choose the product(s)
• the date it will ship
• whether the order should have a discount
• … and so on

In the screenshot below, you can see an example of a pre-order button on a WooCommerce product page:

Below, we’ll see how you can configure and enable the Pre-Orders module.

1. Open the Pre-Orders Module

Open your Merchant dashboard by clicking the Merchant menu in the left sidebar of your WordPress admin area.

In the Boost Revenue section, click the Pre-Orders module to open its settings page:

2. Choose a Pre-Order Mode

When the module’s settings page opens, scroll down to the bottom of the page where you can find the Pre-order Modes option:

Here, you can choose between two pre-order modes:

Mode 1: Allow only pre-orders

In Mode 1, customers will only be able to order either in-stock products or pre-order products. They will not be able to order both at the same time.

For example, if they have an in-stock product in their cart already and they try to add a pre-order product, a message will display letting them know they will have to remove the in-stock product first if they want to be able to do that.

Let’s run through the mechanics of how pre-orders work in Merchant:

Example 1: A Single Pre-Order Product

Let’s take the example of a customer ordering a single pre-order product.

Payment is taken at the time of the order. An email confirmation of the order is sent to the customer, stating when the item will be shipped. An email is also sent to the store owner, informing them of the sale.

The order will appear under WooCommerce > Orders with the status ‘Pre-Ordered’, and the shipping date will be displayed.

Once the shipping date passes, the order status will change to ‘Processing’. You should now process the order and then mark it as ‘Completed’.

Note: For the reports under Analytics > Overview, pre-orders are counted as sales from the moment of order.

Example 2: Two or More Different Pre-Order Products

Let’s now take the example of a customer ordering two (or more) different pre-order products with different shipping dates in the same order:

In this case, a single order will be generated on the backend, and the shipping date for the whole order will be the latest shipping date of the pre-order products in the order. So if there is more than one shipping date of the items in the order, the latest one will be used and applied to the whole order.

Mode 2: Treat the whole order as pre-order

In Mode 2, if at least one product in the order is a pre-order, then the whole order will be treated as a pre-order, including any in-stock products.

Example 1: One Pre-Order Product + One In-Stock Product

Let’s take the example of a customer ordering one pre-order product and one in-stock product. A single order will be generated on the backend with the status ‘Pre-Ordered’, and the shipping date will match that of the pre-order product.

Example 2: Two or More Pre-Order Products + In-Stock Product(s)

If there is more than one pre-order product in the order, the latest shipping date of the pre-order products will be used and applied to the whole order.

Note for developers: We are running a cron job twice a day that checks whether the shipping date has been met. If you’ve ever wanted to run this cron job manually for testing or other purposes, you can use a plugin such as WP Crontrol. The name of the hook is check_for_released_preorders.

3. Create Your Pre-Order Rules

Now, scroll up to the top of the page where, under Pre-order Rule, you can create as many pre-order deals as you want.

For each pre-order rule, you get access to the following settings:

• Order name – The name of the pre-order rule; it will only appear on the module’s admin page.
• Trigger – Here, you can configure which products you want to add to this pre-order rule. The available options are Specific product (start typing the product name, and Merchant’s real-time search function will find it for you), Specific category (you can select one or more of your product categories from a dropdown list), and Specific tags (you can select one or more of your product tags from a dropdown list).
• Do you want to offer a discount on this pre-order? – If you toggle on this option, you can add a percentage or fixed discount to this pre-order rule.
• Shipping date – Here, you can use a date picker to add the shipping date to the rule.
• Pre-order starts at – Here, you can define the start date of the pre-order period.
• Pre-order ends at – Here, you can define the end date of the pre-order period.
• User Condition – This option lets you select the users who get access to this pre-order deal. The available options are All Users, Selected Users, and Selected Roles.
• Button text – This is the label that shows up on the pre-order button (default value: ‘Pre-Order Now!’).
• Additional information – Here, you can add a short text string that appears either before or after the pre-order button (default value: Ships on {date}). You can use the {date} variable to dynamically add the shipping date to the text.
• Placement – Here, you can select whether the ‘Additional information’ text appears before or after the pre-order button.
• Label text on cart – This is the text that shows up on the Cart page next to the pre-ordered product (default value: ‘Ships on’).
• Button text color – Here, you can use a color picker to set the text color of the pre-order button (default value: #FFF).
• Button text color hover – Here, you can set the text color of the pre-order button when a customer moves the cursor over it (default value: #FFF).
• Button border color – This is the default color of the border of the pre-order button (default value: #212121).
• Button border color hover – This is the color of the border of the button when the cursor is moved over it (default value: #414141).
• Button background color – This is the background color of the pre-order button in the default state (default value: #212121).
• Button background color hover – This is the background color of the pre-order button in the mouseover state (default value: #414141).

Once you’ve configured all the settings, click the Save button in the top-right corner of the page to save the changes.

If you want to create a new pre-order rule, click the Add New Offer button. Note that if you have more than one pre-order rule, you can use drag and drop to change their order on the admin page:

4. Enable the Pre-Orders Module

On the module’s admin page, click the Enable button to activate the Pre-Orders module:

5. View Your Pre-Orders

You can check your pre-orders by clicking the View Pre-Orders button that you can find below the Enable button on the module’s admin page:

The View Pre-Orders button opens the WooCommerce > Orders admin page (also available from the left sidebar of your WordPress admin area) where you can see all the pre-orders made on your website:

FAQ

1. Is it possible to set a limit to the number of pre-orders per product?
   Yes, you can use the default WooCommerce stock management options to do this. Go to the Edit Product page, then Inventory and tick ‘Track stock quantity for this product’. In the next field, set your Quantity. For ‘Allow backorders?’ tick’ Do not allow’. Once the stock quantity reaches 0 the product will show as out of stock and won’t be able to be pre-ordered anymore.