Ditch Your DIY Pre-Order Setup: How Purple Dot Makes Setting Up and Managing Your Pre-Order Process Simple and Scalable

They say every great idea starts with a problem. 

In your case, the problem is a good one: a new drop sells out, demand spikes faster than you expected, or your bestseller just won’t stay on the shelf. Then someone throws out an idea: 

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could just flip this to pre-order?”

It would be great. You’d keep momentum going, hold onto customer excitement, and never truly be out of stock. And, bonus: you eliminate the risk of ever having to delay a launch because of a supply chain snafu.

So you do it. After switching the “Add to Bag” button to “Pre-order” with an estimated ship date, it feels like you’ve figured it out.

But then the logistics hit.

Ship dates shift.
One variant arrives, but another is delayed.
CX wants to know what’s live.
The warehouse team can’t find pre-order line items (obviously).
Merch needs visibility into what’s selling.
Finance wants to understand deferred revenue.

Every tweak and task takes just a moment — each too minor to notice on its own. But those little bricks start stacking up quietly until, before you know it, all your team can see is a giant wall.

A BETTER WAY TO BUILD

At Purple Dot, we’ve watched this story unfold more times than we can count. A brand has a great idea, the right instincts, and the drive to move fast — but then gets buried under the details that come with making pre-orders work in practice.

Because it’s never just about flipping a button. It’s about everything that happens after.

Every pre-order strategy comes down to two distinct phases — setup and management — each with its own moving parts and complications. Let’s break down both so you can avoid the chaos and get back to celebrating your growing sales. 

PRE-ORDER SETUP MADE EASY

When most brands first decide to run pre-orders, the setup is usually where things start to unravel.

You know the drill — Slacking developers, updating product pages, endless email threads, and managing embarrassingly massive spreadsheets just to keep up with all of the different SKUs and their changing ship dates and quantities. 

This all works for a while — but it doesn’t scale.

The reason that this doesn’t scale is because your existing systems aren’t designed to sell stock that isn’t in the warehouse. The building blocks of eCommerce were built on the assumption that stock needs to be on a shelf to sell it – and if it’s not, it’s a 'computer says no' situation, over and over until your hair falls out!

That’s where Purple Dot steps in. We believe in your big idea: you don’t need stock on hand to sell it, only to ship it. So instead of asking your team to juggle the setup, we take it off your plate entirely.

Purple Dot integrates directly with your store and eCommerce system — no dev drain, no manual fixes, no endless back-and-forth. You can build against our APIs if you want to handle that in-house, or we’ll do the full integration for you.

Once you’re connected, all you need to do is upload your Purchase Orders. From there, our AI takes over — parsing and tracking each one against your incoming inventory. As stock moves, your storefront automatically updates, flipping between pre-order and in-stock at just the right moment and for the correct amount of stock.

The result? You keep selling without overselling, and your customers always know what to expect.

And here’s the best part: you’re still in full control. With flexible settings, you can tailor exactly how pre-orders run — from shipping logic and mixed carts of both in-stock and pre-order, to timing and messaging — all shaped around the way your business operates.

This type of support is exactly how Oh Polly turned their sharp instincts into a scalable strategy.

Like you, they had the vision: use pre-orders to never truly go out of stock. But almost immediately, the logistics became overwhelming, and they turned to hiring extra staff simply to keep up with the manual overhead of the process. 

With Purple Dot’s partnership, Oh Polly chose to persevere and that chaos disappeared. Now the brand’s pre-orders run like clockwork, and their pre-order revenue has grown 49% YoY.

What once felt unmanageable now runs quietly in the background, driving real growth and results.

SIMPLE PRE-ORDER MANAGEMENT

Setting up pre-orders can feel challenging, but managing pre-orders is often where the real chaos begins. In order to understand why, let’s look, again, at your warehouse. 

Warehouses are designed to fulfill orders where all line items are stocked on the shelf. By definition, they are places that store and ship stock that is on hand. Confusion sets in when staff are directed via their WMS / 3PL software to pick, pack, and ship orders…. only to find the stock missing from its assigned location.

Once pre-orders start flooding the warehouse floor prematurely, it’s too late to find a fix. 

We’ve witnessed one too many hacked-together manual solutions for this issue — post-it notes, huge whiteboards, unread memos, loudspeaker announcements — all meant to instruct warehouse staff on what to do with pre-orders and pre-order line items. This inevitably leads to human error at scale and ultimately misses the mark on customer expectations, leaving customer service to pick up the pieces.

Transforming this part of the pre-order process is one of our proudest achievements at Purple Dot.  

Instead of letting pre-orders flood your warehouse too early, Purple Dot’s platform holds them safely outside your 3PL or WMS until stock actually arrives — keeping operations both efficient and predictable. And for notorious mixed orders with both in-stock and pre-order line items, brands can configure logic to either split orders dynamically when line items are available or hold the entire order back to only ship once per order. 

In short: we’ve created an intelligent system that automatically knows the difference between stock on hand and stock on the way. 

When inventory lands, pre-orders flow automatically into your warehouse system as normal orders, perfectly timed for fulfillment. Stock levels stay accurate, and every team has the clarity they need based on when stock arrives and when stock ships:

• Ops keeps the warehouse running smoothly without extra effort.
• CX knows exactly what’s live and when it ships.
• Finance can track deferred revenue in real time.
• Merch gains instant visibility into demand before stock even arrives.

Before Purple Dot, OAK + FORT knew pre-orders could solve a lot of problems — bridging supply chain gaps, smoothing demand, and capturing missed sales. 

But running the process manually created a whole new set of challenges for their internal teams. Every launch meant juggling tools, cross-team spreadsheets, and half a dozen Slack threads.

Handing pre-order management over to Purple Dot changed everything for OAK + FORT. They expected pre-orders to make up just 5–10% of total eCommerce sales — the reality? Now roughly 25% of all their online revenue comes from pre-orders, with strong conversion rates on lead times from two weeks even up to three months.

When managing pre-orders becomes simple, they stop slowing your team down and start driving your business forward.

KEEP THE IDEA, LOSE THE CHAOS

At the end of the day, your instinct was right on the mark.
Pre-orders were never the problem — the process just needs smarter support.

With Purple Dot as your partner, running pre-orders can be just as simple as managing your in-stock operations.

‍Together, we’ll build:

A plan your teams can trust.
A process that scales effortlessly.
A growth strategy that runs quietly in the background while you focus on what’s next.

Interested in making pre-orders finally work the way you imagined? Let’s explore the idea together:

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