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Offering Products for Pre-Order

 

Using some fields in the "Availability" section of your editable product listing you can specify that an item will be available for dispatch from a later date. 

This feature is ideal to start early promotion of seasonal items or products coming soon.

You can separately determine whether to accept pre-orders for the item or not.  If you don't enable pre-orders the item will not be available for purchase but customers can add it to their "wishlist" and be notified when the item does become available to buy.

 

Here's how:

1. Click on your editable listing on the Products page of the Seller Portal

2. Scroll down the page to find the Availability section, and click on the arrow to expand the section

 

 

3.  In the Avail since field use the date picker to choose the date when the item will be available for shipping out.

4.  In the Out of stock actions field below choose "Buy in advance" if you want to accept pre-orders.  Otherwise ensure it states "Sign up for notification".

5. Save changes

6. As always, then select "Preview" to check how the information is presented to buyers.

As always when editing your listings they will be unavailable on the public site for a brief period. Allow for 24- 48 hours.

 

Calculation of delivery timescales

The delivery timescales presented to buyers of this item will be recalculated as the date you have specified as the "Avail Since" date + the number of delivery days needed.  So for example if you offer Next Day Delivery that has 1 day delivery, they will see the delivery timescales as the day after your Available Since Date.  Likewise if you offer Economy delivery where in the shipping option you have set 2 days as the # delivery days, then the estimated delivery date will be 2 days after the available since date. 

Note: for these pre-order items, where they are ordering well ahead of your available since date,  the # days you need to process and dispatch orders are not also added on to the available since date to calculate the delivery timescales.

 

Christmas Deliveries

Use this feature for seasonal items like Christmas items that will not be produced until nearer to Christmas. 

If you offer Christmas items that you could dispatch sooner, but they have a short shelf life, so you need to be surer on when the items are wanted then we recommend that you use an Option to ensure the customer is clear on whether they want the item now or for Christmas. See our guide to Christmas deliveries here. 

 

See also

Christmas Deliveries

Shipping Options

Holiday Mode

Advance Orders

 

 

 

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