Table of Contents
ECommerce shop owners employ various techniques to attract customers to their shops. Preorder is one such sales strategy that allows shop owners to create interest and generate early sales for a product.
In this article, we will be discussing how to accept preorders in your WooCommerce store? Before we begin, let’s see the major advantages of having preorders in your WooCommerce store.
Benefits of preorders in WooCommerce
Following are the major benefits of accepting preorders in WooCommerce.
Promotion
Preorder can be an excellent promotional strategy before launching a new product. This is a common promotion method for vehicle brands and mobile manufacturers. For example, Ola, an EV manufacturer in India, received 100000 prebooking requests in just 24 hours last year. As another example, Samsung secured a record 70000 pre-book sales for its premium flagship Galaxy S22 series in India this year.
Likewise, you can also promote a newly introduced product in your store by preorder sales promotion. This helps in generating an initial push for the product. Furthermore, it helps with SEO, since the product will be indexed by the search engines by the time it’s launched.
Identifying the demand and market
Preorder helps you identify the demand for a product before its launch. This also allows you to build a proper marketing strategy by analyzing the market for the product. You will be able to make better decisions regarding the production and promotion of the product.
Generate early sales
Preorder lets you generate early sales for the product. In this way, you can have some guaranteed sales when the product is out on the market. This creates an initial impression and better sales figures for the product.
Create interest
Preorder also allows you to create interest among customers. You can use subtle banners, countdown timers, and notifications in your WooCommerce store for generating interest among customers for a new product.
Steps for accepting preorders in WooCommerce
Follow this step-by-step guide to enable preorders in WooCommerce. By default, there is no option for preorders in WooCommerce. So we will be using YITH Pre-Order for WooCommerce plugin for this article.
Step 1: Plugin Installation
Open your WordPress dashboard.
Go to Plugins > Add New.
Search for the YITH Pre-Order plugin.
Install and Activate the plugin.
Step 2: Plugin Configuration
Go to YITH > Preorder.
Select the General tab.
Make sure Enable all Pre-Order features for your visitors and Disable pre-order mode when the product becomes available is turned on.
Move to the Styles tab. Here you can do some customization options for the preorders.
Product price: Set how you want to display the product price.
Pre-order button label: Enter the text for the preorder button.
Text to show in products with availability date: Add the text to show on the product page in the text field provided.
Enable the Show availability text in the Shop pages button to show the availability text in the Shop pages.
Click on the Save options to save the settings.
Step 3: Adding new product
Go to Products > Add New.
Add product details including title, description, images, and price.
You can follow the same steps for updating an existing product for preorders in WooCommerce.
Scroll down to the Product data meta box.
Select Preorder from the side menu bar.
Enable Manage pre-order options for this product button.
Select Choose a date from the calendar to set a product availability date.
Add the date and time in the provided area.
Let’s give a 5% discount for the preorder product.
Select Discount a percentage % of the selling price as the pre-order price. Add 5% on the Discount on selling price box.
Click on Update/Publish to save the settings.
Step 4: Testing the preorder in WooCommerce
Go to the product page.
Here you can see the product is now available for preorder. You can see the preorder button and a 5% discount on the preorder price as we added.
Click on the Pre-order Now button. The product will be added to the cart.
Proceed to the cart for checkout.
Enter the billing details and complete the payment.
You can see the order details with the availability date and time.
Summing Up
Accepting preorders in WooCommerce can help promote a newly launched product. You gain some early sales this way and can better understand how customers perceive your product before it is released.
The plugin we discussed in this article has a premium version that gives some additional options to enable pay later, automated payment, etc.
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand how to add preorders to WooCommerce. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments section.
