
Use pre-orders to increase sales and create a sense of urgency in your ecommerce
When using a pre-order plugin, you can list a product in your shop that isn’t for sale yet but will be launched at a certain date or time. Then, customers will be able to pay for the product to reserve it before it’s available, so they know it won’t be sold out and they will receive the product as soon as it launches.
It is a strategy used by the most popular companies, like Amazon or Apple, because pre-orders are a great way to create a sense of urgency, engage your customers, and get an early cash flow to fund production, advertising or marketing campaigns.
With YITH Pre-order for WooCommerce, you can build an effective pre-order strategy in your shop, push your customers to buy by offering a special discount on the regular price, and choose between requiring an upfront payment or allowing them to pay later when the product becomes available.
With the integration with our plugins YITH Stripe, YITH Stripe Connect or YITH Braintree you can also sell the pre-orders and automatically charge the customer’s credit card only when the product becomes available: no manual payment will be required to the users and everything will work seamlessly.
Enable the pre-order automatically on out of stock products
Automatically enable the pre-order mode on out of stock products. In this way, your customers will be able to buy items temporarily unavailable or out of stock and you will not lose the sale.


Enable the pre-order manually on specific products or categories
Do you need more control? You can enable or schedule the pre-order mode in all products of a specific category or, also, only in specific products of your choice. This allows you to build a pre-order strategy for your new or exclusive items.
Set the pre-order price (and offer a special discount to push users to buy)
We offer a ton of options to manage the pre-order pricing. You can use the same regular price of the product or set a fixed price for the pre-order. Even more interesting, you can offer a fixed or a percentage discount on the regular price for all users who pre-order the item before it is available in the shop. Offering an item with a special price is a powerful strategy to create a sense of urgency and push users to buy.


Manage the products’ availability in an advanced way
For each product, you can choose to set a specific availability date (and optionally a time) by picking a date in the calendar (e.g. “Available on May 15th, at 10 am”), or to set an availability time interval after the user places the pre-order (e.g. “10 days after the pre-order”). However, you can also avoid setting an availability date and end the pre-order mode manually.
Add an extra fee to each pre-order
Ask users to pay an extra fee to pre-order the products and set the value. You can set a global fee for all pre-orders and override it with a different value for specific products.


Offer free shipping to customers that pre-order a product
Do you want to offer an additional incentive to your customers to push them to pre-order? With just a single click, you can offer free shipping for all orders that contain a pre-order product.
Charge the product price upfront
Charge the product cost upfront to avoid the risk of unpaid pre-orders. Don’t worry: users are happy to pay upfront if they can be sure that they are taking advantage of a discount, or that they can get a product that is exclusive or available only in limited quantities.


Enable the “Pay Later” option to ask users to pay manually when the product is available
If you want to offer more freedom, let your users choose the “Pay Later” option at Checkout. Once the product becomes available, they will get an email that informs them about the product availability and redirects them to pay for the pre-order.
Automatically charge the product price on the customer’s credit card when the product is available
Thanks to the integration with our plugins YITH Stripe, YITH Stripe Connect, or YITH Braintree you can ask your customers to enter their credit card info and, only when the product is available, the plugin will automatically charge the price on the customer’s credit card. This solution will reduce the percentage of unpaid pre-orders and will make managing pre-orders easier.


Manage pre-orders and pre-order products through the apposite tables available in the plugin
Manage pre-orders and products in pre-order mode with the new tables available from version 2.0. You can easily monitor the status, export the data in a CSV file, enable/disable the pre-order mode, and so on.
A wide range of notifications for the admin and the customers
Automatically send emails to the customers to confirm the pre-order and to keep them updated about the availability date and the pre-order status. The plugin also provides several notifications for the admin to help him/her easily manage pre-orders and products.


Customize text, buttons, and prices with the advanced style options
Replace the standard “Add to cart” button with a “Pre-order” button, customize the label and the colors, and set a custom message (to show in product detail pages and in shop pages) to inform your customers about the availability date. The plugin includes many options to customize the way your shop looks to the customers.
ben64 - verified owner
Great plugin, but it's like a car with no tires...you have to buy another stripe plugin to get expected featuresThis plugin *could* be really great just like a great car...but they took a major feature of a pre order plugin and have it in another completely separate plugin that costs $100+ (i.e. their stripe plugin).
This causes a couple problems:
1. It's like selling a car without tires...and then acting surprised when customers aren't happy that they have to spend money to buy the tires separately.
2. We already have a stripe plugin that is specificly needed on our site to make certain plugins work on our site. If we use the Yith stripe plugin, that puts the functionality of those other plugins at risk since they are already specifically functional with the stripe plugin we have.
I don't know why Yith decided not to include this functionality with the pre order plugin but I'll be getting a refund processed today and hoping that they change things on their end in the future so other customers don't have the same issues.
Carla
Hello Ben,
We greatly appreciate your feedback!
If I understand correctly, you are referring to the “Upon release” payment option. If so, upon checking, YITH Stripe is not needed, you can use WooCommerce Stripe if preferred, as it is also integrated for “Upon release” payments.
If you need further support, feel free to submit a support request, our developers will be happy to help you 😉
Best regards!
Alfonso Gómez - verified owner
Excelente!Me encantó este plugin desde que lo encontré. Tiene las opciones perfectas, especialmente que puedo cobrar automáticamente los pedidos en el momento del lanzamiento
rideandglide.co.uk - verified owner
Expected better from YITHPretty poor UX with confusing user flow and confusing emails to both customers and admin. Not really geared up properly for sites that require full payment for pre-orders up front. Also contained a bug that removed items from stock even when purchase didn't complete - causing a big headache manually updating stock.
Athena Kiourka
Hello there!
and thank you for your feedback.
We are sorry to hear you're left unsatisfied by the plugin. Our development team informed us however, that your requirements were quite specific and different from the ones the plugin provides. You were advised via ticket that your use case would require customization as it was not possible by default. We do appreciate any feature suggestion or recommendation though, as based on these we continuously improve our services. :-)
Mason Barlow - verified owner
GoodGreat tool for almost any store on the internet. I could recommend it
Gregory J. Martell - verified owner
Very happy with the purchaseI had to buy this plugin last minute as I was running out of stock often and I did not wanted to lose customers. Altough I was in a hurry to set it up, I took the time to read the guides and they were greatly helpful, all settings were done un 1 day! I'm so happy for this!