Implement Pre-Order Functionality

The pre-order functionality is essential to many industries, including businesses selling merchandise, digital products, or tickets. It allows customers to purchase a product before its availability date and receive it once it becomes available. This feature helps businesses manage inventory, build anticipation, and secure early revenue.

Building Pre-Orders with a Customizable Commerce Platform

Medusa is a digital commerce platform with a built-in Framework for customization. You can extend it to build any custom feature for your business use case, including a product pre-order system. Medusa's framework makes it possible to add new data models, hook into existing flows, and automate background processes.

These capabilities are especially useful when implementing pre-orders. Developers can store custom pre-order data, create robust pre-order workflows, trigger actions when a customer places a pre-order, and automate fulfillment once products become available.

Step-by-Step Guide to Implement Pre-Orders

The pre-orders tutorial in our documentation will guide developers into building the backend logic for pre-orders, with Next.js storefront customizations. The tutorial is ideal for developers looking to create a custom pre-order implementation without relying on third-party plugins.

By following the pre-order tutorial, you'll learn how to:

• Set up a product pre-order system from scratch.
• Create pre-order workflows to manage pre-order variants and create pre-orders.
• Automate fulfillment logic when pre-ordered products become available.
• Automatically cancel pre-orders when an order is canceled.
• Automatically create or cancel pre-orders based on order edits.
• Show pre-order information on the Next.js Starter Storefront.