Displaying Products for Pre-Orders

[DBurrows]

There are a few products that i wish to pre-sell on my new site that are not out yet, they have set release dates (computer games).

What would be the best way of acomplishing this both in terms of customers point of view online and my end in Catalog.

Regards

[cdicken]

I reckon you need a product layout template that has 'Pre-Order Now' written on it clearly, and then just take it as a standard order.

How are you taking payment? Are you taking it online (through a Payment Service Provider) or offline (throught a credit card terminal). If it is the former, then per-orders are going to be tricky as you are not really going to want to carry out the credit card transaction until the goods are shipped.

[DBurrows]

Yes we process payments through our creditcard terminal.

I have been looking into the help file and it mentions "back ordering" would it be viable to add into the product description that the item is available on XX date and use the back order system to deal with these orders my end?

[NormanRouxel]

There's an optional field in Actinic that may be useful to you.

If you look in View / Business Settings / Options you will find a checkbox "Enable Extended Product Description for Customer Reports".

If you check this then your Product Details will grow an extra tab "Report Description".

Text you put in there will be displayed on the printed reports.

I've also done a simple patch that will add this info to the Customer e-mail. See www.rouxel.cwc.net/actinicstuff.html for that patch. Look for "Poor mans digital download".

Norman

[fleetwood]

Our orders contain a mix of pre-orders and in stock items.

We currently handle this by placing the pre-orders on back order.
This has a real downside in clogging up the pending orders screen.

What would be useful (ie add to the wish list please) is a way of splitting down the order so that the in stock part is processed and moves to completed, and allow us to 'park' the pre-orders into a new order tab for pre-orders only.

This keeps our orders pending list more workable, and would allow for easier processing of, and far better reporting on the pre-orders order tab.

In fact it would be useful for back orders as a whole to move to their own order tab, rather than occupy two lines in the orders pending list.

Has any of this been requested before?

[cdicken]

Thanks for all those comments.

I'll pass them on to the development team.