Preorder Feature

[butterscotch]

Hello,

Does anyone know if there's a Pre-order feature in this version of ablecommerce. We've been putting in the copy "Available from" but a lot of people are missing the message.
If you have any cool solutions to this problem let me know!


Serge

[jmestep]

No, there is none. We have a client who was very interested in doing this, but we couldn't come up with a way to use anything in Able to handle it without customizations.

[Katie]

Can you explain a bit more about what you would like? I was thinking about the inventory feature and the option to Allow Backorders. So, let's say that you could change out the Buy Now button to a Preorder button when this inventory condition exists. We also have the Available Date field which could be used to show when the expected item will be in stock.

After the order is placed, a merchant could use custom order statuses to make sure that these orders are marked as "Preorder" until the item becomes available.

It's definitely an interesting idea, but I am curious how merchants are wanting it to work - a little more detail please.

[jmestep]

Katie, one site that asked about it sells sound media and books and they wanted a pre-order feature for a book that was being printed. The problem they ran into had to do with payment. If they use Able's inventory control, then the charge card would be charged or charged and captured. This isn't a problem for a product that would be in stock in a few days, but it is a problem for a book that might be coming out in a month. They could work around the issue if the customer placed a separate order for just the book by having special code to use a special payment method. But if the book was pre-ordered with other products, there isn't a way to split the payment and not charge for the book. Maybe your new subscription features and CIM in R7 could be used- I just haven't had time to look into that.

[butterscotch]

Thank you Katie. In our business people like to order in advance - we have Christmas orders start coming in October. Yet, most products are not fully available until the 2-3 week of November
A lot of people place orders and use the shipping message box to let us know when they would like the delivery done.

Yes, ideally the Buy Now button would turn into Pre-Order button for products that aren't yet available and the available date would be shown as well...I think you are in the right track.

Thanks for the follow up Jamie!

Cheers,

Serge

[Katie]

Hi Serge,

I like your idea, so I went ahead and posted it to our Feedback system and gave it my vote. Go to this link and give it your vote too -

http://ablecommerce.uservoice.com/forum ... rder-items

Unfortunately, it looks like you've posted to the AbleCommerce 7 forum, so I'm assuming that you are not using Gold yet? Any new features would be added to our latest version. Otherwise, you would have to have this customized.