After setting up an ecommerce store, it becomes challenging to manipulate a powerful marketing strategy. Marketing your brand and products could take a lot of time and efforts. This mainly involves generating brand awareness and making them switch to your platform.
The successful business strategies involve focusing on portrayal of perfect product listing, shipping services and integrating products in the inventory that are high in demand. Customers hugely gravitate towards high-end products.
Therefore, ideally, entrepreneurs can setup pre order feature to get attention from numerous potential customers and can integrate back order for existing products to avoid customer disappointment and make them place orders despite their out of stock statuses.
Open Pre Ordering According to your Production Cycle
The schedule for preorder relies on the nature of the products you aim to list. Get to know the production cycle or order-lead time, consumer interest, and the capacity of orders you can manage so that pre-ordering can be enabled accordingly.
For example, announce the launch of special edition Denim jeans may create great excitement among fans. As a result, a higher number of users may place pre-orders and wait eagerly for the consignment. Failing to meet their expectations may not only result in fund-payback requests, but you may lose trust in launching products afterwards.
Enable Backorders for Most Demanding Products
For instance, your ecommerce store deals in on eatables that are not offered by other nearby stores and are sold out so soon, you can enable the backordering for them to keep serving the customers and know its exact demand.
The same can be applied to lots of other store items if they are high in demand. The electronic products like mobile, devices, cameras, earphones and other accessories can be made available on backordering so that customers’ leads are acquired rather than letting them shop from other stores.
Allow Pre Ordering for Product Types/Variations
You may have an extensive catalog and a series of products in different categories, but failing to provide that single variation a customer is looking for may lose you from a definite conversion. Customers are choosy in ordering products in a specific color, style, design, size, or any other attribute they are concerned about. If you do not hold the inventory yet and can arrange the same product with customer preferences, allow pre-ordering for it.
Transpose ‘Add to Cart’ Button with Pre/Backordering
If you are enabling your new launch product for accepting preorders or some of your products got out of stock and you have activated the backorder feature, then remember to switch “Add to Cart” option to a preorder or backorder. Otherwise, the manifested “Add to Cart” option will make your customers believe that the product is available in the product inventory and is ready to be shipped.
Announce Product Launch Date to Create Curiosity
The product that has already gained much fame based on its quality and effectiveness takes no longer to become out of stock. If the brand is planning to launch an upgraded version with advanced feature, then customers tend to wait for its launch.
Besides waiting for product to be delivered to your product catalog, announce a launching date for the product and setup a pre order feature to accept orders prior to the product availability. In addition, the product listed for pre-order stands out from the rest, if the brand is influential and has a strong customer base already.
Start getting funds before the product goes live on the store. You can enhance it more with a custom message that explains the significance of product or any extra features like coupons, discounts and promo codes etc.
Allow Pre and Back-Ordering for Higher Quantities
Increasing eCommerce sales is about giving incentives and making it easier for them to place orders. With pre and back ordering option, you can allow customers to place orders in higher quantities. You can set a limit as well so that they can request how much they need rather than restricting them to few items.
For any product that is about to launch, you can scale up its production or stock by encourage customers to multiple items in one order rather than waiting for another cycle of stock-refill and placing multiple orders. This ultimately increases the store revenue.
Set a Pre-order Cancellation Criteria
Customers are more attracted towards an online platform that offers more diversity and flexibility. It is ideal to allow customers to cancel an already placed order. This flexibility will allow them to explore more products in your online domain and place orders for other products.
On the other side, this can harm your revenue and cash flow. Therefore, it is always recommended to define cancellation criteria that save the interest of both. For example, your company is dealing in commercial refrigeration. The client places an order, you get the payment, and production starts. After a month, he wants to cancel the order, but the product is in finishing stages. In such a case, reverting an order may cost you a lot. So, be fair in setting up a cancellation policy with a note to your professional and commercial restraints.
The Magento platform does not offer preorder functionality by default. In order to access all those advanced pre order and back order features, merchants managing a Magento based ecommerce can integrate a
Magento 2 Pre order extension. It facilitates all the features and functionalities mentioned above.
Final Words
In order to keep up with the demands of your customers and to make them inclined towards your web domain it is ideal to adopt preorder and backorder practices. Make your customers aware about the product’s current situation, if they have already interacted with it through your online domain.