Pre-Orders for WooCommerce

Description

Sell it before it exists.

Pre-Orders for WooCommerce lets you take money for a product weeks or months before it lands, then hands the whole launch back to you as a normal WooCommerce order on release day. No spreadsheets, no manual chasing, no launch morning spent clicking.

Three ways to get paid

Deposit and pay-on-release both raise a real, linked WooCommerce order for the balance and email the customer a secure payment link. That means your gateway, your fraud checks, your 3D Secure flow and your refund tools all work exactly as they already do.

This plugin never stores a card number. If your gateway supports saved payment methods you can switch on an automatic charge attempt, and if it fails for any reason the customer is emailed a payment link instead. Nothing is ever silently lost.

Launch day runs itself

A background job releases every waiting order in small batches through WooCommerce Action Scheduler. Stock is reduced, orders move into your normal fulfilment queue, balances are invoiced, customers are emailed, and you get a summary with the totals. None of it needs anyone logged in, and a launch with fifty thousand orders costs a page load exactly the same as a launch with none: nothing at all.

Miss a release because of a server restore or a plugin conflict? A nightly sweep finds anything overdue and releases it on its own.

Sell scarcity, honestly

Cap the total units you are willing to promise and the maximum any one customer can take. Shoppers see a live progress bar: “82 of 100 pre-order slots claimed.” Cancelled pre-orders return their slot to the pool immediately, so the number is always true.

Add a cut-off date to close orders before release while you confirm quantities with your supplier. Or take pre-orders with no announced date at all, then fill the date in later and have every waiting customer emailed automatically.

Dates move. Customers find out from you.

Shift a whole launch forwards or backwards in one click. Every open pre-order is updated and every affected customer is emailed the new date, in the background. Handling a slip well is the single biggest thing that stops pre-order cancellations, so the plugin makes it a one-click job instead of a mail merge.

Know what you have pre-sold

• Value booked, money collected, money still to collect
• Units reserved per day, with a peak marker
• Most pre-ordered products, cancellation rate, average line value
• A release calendar of everything due, with one-click release
• CSV export for your warehouse

Charts are inline SVG generated in PHP. No charting library to download, and nothing phones home.

Nine emails you actually control

Pre-order confirmed, release reminder, date changed, released, balance due, payment failed, cancelled, plus new pre-order and release summary for you. Every one is a real WooCommerce email class you manage under WooCommerce, Settings, Emails, with an editable message, merge tags and a table of the products pre-ordered, in both HTML and plain text, all overridable from your theme.

Built to stay fast

Pre-orders live in their own indexed table, not order meta, so nothing turns into a slow meta query as you grow. Product settings are read from the object WooCommerce already loaded and cached for the request, so a shop page of pre-orders costs zero extra queries. The CSS and JavaScript are not loaded at all on pages with no pre-orders.

Works with what you already run

• High Performance Order Storage and legacy order storage, both declared and tested
• Cart and Checkout Blocks, with limits and cart rules enforced through the Store API
• WPML and Polylang, configured once on the original product, with release emails sent in the language the customer originally ordered in
• Any payment gateway, because everything is an ordinary WooCommerce order

For developers

Over thirty documented hooks, a helper function API, a REST namespace for ERP and headless integrations, six overridable templates, and a full audit log of every action taken on every pre-order. Documentation ships inside the plugin and in the docs folder.

What you get

Customer self-service portal in My Account · self-cancellation windows you control · per-variation release dates · pre-order pricing that stops at launch · deferred stock reduction · mixed cart rules · activity log · health and status screen · GDPR export and erasure · full documentation built into the admin.