The eCommerce pre-orders Examples are much like MVP (minimum Viable Product) in the world of SaaS. eCommerce pre-orders — among other things — help you get sales, keep that cashflow coming, generate buzz, spike up excitement, and more.
Just what you need for eCommerce success. Why bother with eCommerce pre-orders, you ask?
Picture two different scenarios (still related):
Scenario 1: You have an idea for an eCommerce business. Whether it’s selling services, physical products, digital products, eCommerce subscriptions, online courses, membership sites, or anything else in between.
The smart way to do it is to anticipate demand, feel the “buzz”, ascertain the viability of products or services, get valuable feedback (to iterate and make changes), and then sell (all cylinders firing).
This should have been the case even for traditional business instead of setting up plants, machinery, hiring full-time (all of this even before a single product is sold). Sorry, I digress.
Why launch, all hand aboard without “feeling the market” a bit?
Scenario 2: You already have an eCommerce store up and running. You’ve been selling products. Your best-selling products are now out of stock but you don’t want your customers to go away empty-handed (as if shopping cart abandonment, checkout friction, and other issues biting eCommerce businesses wasn’t enough).
Would you let your customers walk out of the door?
Scenario 3: Get cash for products still in development. Let’s say you are working on your online course.
Why wait for the whole course to be completed and then start marketing your course? why not do it earlier? Why not let the word out, let people sign up for the online course (+ give you feedback or inputs), and then launch the course to a set of customers who already paid for the course?
Or, take physical products: Let’s say you are still trying to find a reliable source or supplier for eCommerce products (but you know what the product is). Why not get some sales in while you keep looking?
In the three scenarios above, you’d never want to:
- Launch a full-fledged eCommerce business (if transactions happen online, it’s eCommerce) without knowing with a fair bit of certainty that there’s demand for products, and that you get a “vote” to go ahead.
- Wait until your products are ready. Sell before products are available.
- Let your customers walk away just because your inventory is low, products are out of stock, or that it’ll take some time for you to bring those products into your fold.
The answer to both the scenarios above?
eCommerce Pre-orders.
Large platforms like Shopify make it easy to take preorders for products. Platforms like Podia and Payhip allow you to sell digital products, memberships, and online courses with pre-orders.
Each platform allows you to create dedicated landing pages, built for pre-orders. In some cases, some brands use regular product pages (depending) for pre-orders, customer notification forms, regular forms, and more.
Examples of eCommerce Pre-Orders
eCommerce brands might use preorders for forecasting demand, to generate buzz and excitement, or to sell more (even before they have products ready to ship). The reasons are many, but there are brands that do a great job with pre-orders.
Brizy Pro
Brizy is a WordPress page builder — much like Divi — which helps you create complete WordPress websites or design individual pages of a website — without code.
Brizy, obviously, was built on WordPress (using Brizy).
For a long time, there was a free version of Brizy and Brizy cloud available for everyone to use.
Their paid offering called “Brizy Pro” was on pre-launch for a while at with a sweet deal of purchasing a lifetime license for Brizy at $299 — for freelancers, agencies, and businesses that were the perfect audience for Brizy.
Lifetime licenses — like those you get for Divi and the one that you got (earlier)with Brizy — are some of the best deals you can get (Use the product for life, and no monthly fees, ever.)
Earthbits
Earthbits is an eCommerce brand that sells Zero-waste and Plastic-Free makeup and cleaning products. The brand also sells bamboo cutlery, bathroom products, haircare, and gift cards.
Earthbits uses a Shopify app for pre-orders called Pre-order Manager.
The interesting use case (at the time of writing this) is that EarthBits doesn’t actually put a button out there “asking for the sale”. Instead it uses a simple form for customers to get notified when the product is available (distantly related, but reminds me: You can use Shopify Forms).
It’s likely that Shopify Automations along with Shopify Email is involved behind the stage to send emails to customers when products are back in inventory.
Spoke
Spoke e-retails (they also have physical stores — and so might be using industry-leading Shopify POS — trousers, denims, t-shirts, tops, shorts, and fashion accessories on sale.
Also built on Shopify, using Purple Dot to manage pre-orders, Spoke has the typical product pages that a fashion-based eCommerce brand should have — a fantastic collection of image (better with people wearing them on), multiple images per product, well-written product descriptions, and ways to choose variants.
In another interesting Twist, Spoke uses a dedicated form (shows up on-click) when a particular product shown doesn’t “fit” the customer or if customers have different requirements (currently not available on the eCommerce store).
Endless Blading
The spunky name and eCommerce store design on Shopify notwithstanding, Endless Blading makes makes precision, multi-setup inline skate frames.
Endless Blading products include skating wheels, skating frames, branded merchandize, skating accessories, and more.
For the new products (soon to be launched), Endless Blading uses Shopify as the platform and PreProduct Next Gen Order — a pre-order app for Shopify.
Eyes are the Story
The brand “Eyes Are The Story” uses all of the good features that the Shopify App “Pre-order Manager” provides — a customer notification form (in this case) which says “notify me when available”.
The app itself has direct pre-order features, “Coming soon” features, and good customer support.
Notice that the eCommerce brand also uses other Shopify features such as ShopPay (the fastest accelerated checkout on the Internet).
Do you use eCommerce pre-orders for your business?
Tell me all about it on Twitter, LinkedIn, or my LinkedIn Brand page.
