Options for the new Preorder capability

[thefibreshop]

I'd love to start using the preorder options now available, however I don't want to have to "Receive Stock" as we don't have the products yet until closer to the date they are released. I want to be able to sell as many as I can as preorders so I know how much to actually order from my vendors. These are usually books that have specific publish release dates or other limited edition items. Items that I don't have until the date they release (or at least a few days before), but that I will have stock of AFTER the preorder date has passed. 

As I see the current preorder capability in Square for Retail working right now, you have to have inventory already loaded, and once the preorder date passes, customers are no longer able to purchase the item. Does this mean we need to create two different items? One for the preorder and one for after we have stock and carry it in the store?

(Preorder cutoff

This item will no longer be available for purchase after the specified date and time.)

We don't need our customers to choose a pick up time but we would like to let them know their item will be available to pick up any time after the release date, or that we will ship out their order for them to receive it by the release date.

We currently have to create an item in the system with [PREORDER] in the front, and in the description enter in the release date of the product. Then we manually go in after the release date to remove that and the release info we write in the description. What I was really hoping when I saw the preorder option (randomly) at the bottom of the item creation page was that we could sell below zero quantity for preorders, without having to enable that for the entire shop. Then create a purchase order for the preorders + regular inventory that would then be officially received in when the shipment came.

[Arie]

Hi @thefibreshop,

Thanks for writing in with this question about pre-orders, and your suggestions of how you'd like to see this function to make things easier for your business. 

At this time, you'd have to assign a stock to the item in order to fulfil pre-orders, and the item would not be able to be ordered after the cut-off date. I understand how this doesn't make a lot of sense for how your business places orders. I see this feature working best for businesses where a limited amount of items will be available for pre-order, e.g a bakery selling a limited edition cake for Easter, to be picked up before the holiday weekend. In order to sell the same item after the pre-order expires, you'd have to create a new item. 

Since pre-orders is a new feature, I can definitely see there being changes to what you can achieve with pre-orders in the future. We appreciate your feedback and business use case! 

[Sugarmamasbake]

I am wanting to do the same thing, but with the added feature a customer can choose to either walk in and pickup their order, or notify us when they arrive, and we take it to their vehicle.

I appreciate the information given here, but I'm scratching my head as to WHY none of the engineers and teams building these features didn't seem to think this through very well. Perhaps they should try consulting with their customers before designing and releasing features that don't meet the actual, real-world needs of your customers.

Thanks, and I'll keep an eye open for the needed improvements.

[JJ_]

Hey there @Sugarmamasbake and welcome to the Seller Community

Most of our features are developed based on requests like yours and Beta tested by Sellers that have joined our Beta Community. Thanks so much for this Request. We’d love it if you'd submit this request on our Ideate page for Square Online. Our team monitors these boards and we triage them to measure needs. You can search the boards to see if this has been requested before and add your use case if so!

I would also like to extend you an invitation to join our Beta Community so you can collaborate with other Sellers and our Product Teams.