Sell the batch before you buy it.
The product is still at the factory and your customer is already buying it: with its cap, its delivery date and its spot reserved in the batch. By the time the goods land, you already knew how much to order.
PREVENTA! Honey mask Estimated delivery 12/09/2026 8 left in the cap In their order Ships once available, on that item's estimated date.
Buying something that doesn't exist yet has to feel ordinary.
PREVENTA! Honey mask US$ 4.180 The badge sits alongside the rest of the catalog. You write it: "PRE-ORDER", "COMING SOON", "SEPTEMBER BATCH".
Mask + exfoliantQuantity: 36 US$ 128.700 Honey maskQuantity: 24 PREVENTA!Estimated delivery: 12/9/2026 US$ 100.320 Your order includes pre-order items: they ship once available, on the estimated date shown per item.
One cart, one total, one document. The date rides on each item, not on the whole order.
Hi Daniela,
Good news! The pre-order items in your order are now available and we're preparing the shipment.
Honey mask · Dry skin24 ×The email goes out with your store's branding and the detail of what ships in this batch — not the whole order.
Selling what you don't have is easy. Selling exactly what's going to arrive isn't.
An unlimited pre-order is a promise you can't keep. The cap is the batch that's coming: once it fills, the product stops selling on pre-order by itself. And the window sets when it opens and when it closes, with nobody having to remember to switch it off.
- A cap per product and per variant: the batch brings 240, but 120 are dry skin and 40 are oily. Each variant has its own; the one that fills is struck through in the store and its siblings keep selling.
- The window closes itself: the close fires no scheduled job — it's evaluated every time someone looks at the product. Past the date it stops selling that instant, with nobody touching anything.
- "8 left" is flagged on add, not at confirm: if the buyer loads 20 units of a variant that has 8, they find out right there, not after finishing the whole checkout.
- You write the badge: "PRE-ORDER", "COMING SOON", "SEPTEMBER BATCH". There's a store-wide default and each product can carry its own.
340 units already sold, before buying the batch The question isn't how much you sold. It's how much to order.
Order too much and the capital sits in the warehouse. Order too little and the season is gone. Today that call runs on the instinct of someone who's been buying for twenty years. The demand report turns it into a number: how many units are sold, across how many orders and for which date.
Nobody wants to place two orders because one box arrives in September.
The order is a single one and the lines live in the same list. The ones waiting carry their chip and their date; the ones shipping now carry nothing. One total, one account, one document.
- Each line with its own date: a shirt arriving on September 12th and another on the 25th coexist in the same order, each with its own. There's no single date lying to half the lines.
- The date freezes at the sale: if you later move the product's estimated date, orders already sold don't budge. Each buyer keeps the date you promised them.
- The list filters by pre-order: with, without, and "pending delivery" — the ones that still have lines waiting. Seeing what you owe whom is a filter, not a walkthrough.
- And the order shows its state at a glance: upcoming if delivery falls within seven days, overdue if the date has passed and you haven't released yet, or released once it's gone out.
Goods never arrive all at once. The delivery doesn't have to either.
The container arrives with half the order, or one color lands and the other is a week behind. You release what arrived, line by line, and the rest keeps waiting for its date. Each wave notifies its buyer and drops to the warehouse to be picked.
- You release the lines that arrived: you pick which, not all-or-nothing. The rest of the order stays held with its date, and the buyer gets a notice of what ships in this wave.
- Picking reopens on its own: if the warehouse had already closed that order, the release reopens it and syncs the new lines. Nobody has to remember to tell the warehouse.
- The second shipment's freight is added, not recomputed: a pure pre-order charges no shipping at checkout, because nothing ships. On release the freight for that dispatch is added on top of the frozen total, without re-running prices or discounts.
- And releasing twice breaks nothing: if someone re-releases an order that already went out, nothing happens. The operation doesn't duplicate or resend the email.
Selling what doesn't exist is exactly where a system breaks.
Negative stock, two buyers holding the last unit, a voided order still taking up room in the batch. Four things that don't happen, and why.