if you know of any platforms that can deliver on that, we'd definitely be interested! We've been doing research but we haven't found anything yet that can both take pre-orders where cards are authorized but not charged (an important feature since we don't like to charge credit cards unless necessary) and regular orders other than Celery, our current e-commerce solution. We have discussed building our own on Stripe and Moltin. I'd love to be using something like Shopify if they had better pre-order support.
From a pure distribution/fulfillment perspective there seems there is no good argument to combine a pre-order with a regular stocking order. I'd guess that this issue was the topic at a lot of meetings.
I was one of those that bought a bundle core/photon nonetheless. Why? because you marketed me to do it that way!
Maybe in the future offer a discount code for the deferred piece of the transaction. Purchaser could apply the (single use) code once the ship-from-stock purchase transaction (i.e. payment) is completed, therefore separating the two purchases but also meeting your objective of getting two devices sold instead of one. This would also allow tracking of the two discreet orders from the customer side.
Wouldn't you rather stay focused on really cool products like Photon and Electron and Core...
eDistribution/eFulfillment is a very crowded and mature space (even more so than the IOT breakout).
Hi @zach, Happy 4th. Before I start looking for solutions, would you help me understand your plans? Do you want the provider to handle inventory and the shopping cart? Shopping cart only, with order advice sent to a warehouse/shipping service? Want to do it all in house? A layout of your desired solution would help.
Bulldog made the suggestion and it was on the tip of my tongue also; if Celery cannot provide accurate customer facing order status for orders that are composed of both released and unreleased products, then don’t mix them. If it is a constraint of the system then I’m sure custoemrs would understand that they are better off placing two orders.
But that raises the question; does Celary not handle backorders gracefully? So if you ship a partial the only information a customer can see is “fullfilled” because that’s partially true? At least that is the gripe some of Particle’s customers have.
I spent some time researching Celary, and understand that they have positioned themselves as the solution for pre-orders of yet to be released products as well as for products available from stock. So might I ask, how do they deliver on the back end for Particle? Everything good there?
If Particle is happy with the back end and reporting, then the problem is with their customer facing software and that should not be a big fix. Are they unwilling to work on that? A company that depends on sales commissions rather than fixed fees should be very sensiitive to your requests. Losing Particle and its 30,000 or so oders for 60,000+ items would be a huge blow financially and in reputation.
If you want me to bear down on this, perhaps we should have a conversation on some old fashioned medium, such as phone, to help me understand how best I can be of service to you.
