Anticipo - Pre-Orders for WooCommerce documentation

Anticipo lets you sell a product weeks or months before it arrives. Customers place a normal WooCommerce order. The order waits in a dedicated Pre-ordered status, outside your fulfilment queue, until the release date. On release day a background job releases every waiting order, reduces stock, moves the orders into your normal workflow and emails the customers. Nobody needs to be logged in.

The Pro edition adds deposits and pay on release billing, with balances collected as a linked WooCommerce order and a payment link. It also adds allocation limits with a "82 of 100 claimed" progress bar, pre-order pricing, scheduled release reminders, bulk date shifting, reports, a release calendar, CSV export, a REST API, per variation release dates and customer self cancellation.

Anticipo is for WooCommerce store owners who launch new products, take reservations for limited runs or pre-sell stock that has not arrived yet. You manage everything from WooCommerce > Pre-orders and from the Pre-order tab on each product.

Anticipo Pro needs WooCommerce, so install and activate WooCommerce first. The Pro plugin replaces the free edition. When you activate it, the free edition is switched off automatically and all of your existing pre-orders and settings are kept.

Go to WooCommerce > Pre-orders. The first tab, Pre-orders, lists every pre-ordered line in your store.

The table shows Order, Product, Customer, Qty, Billing, Status, Release date, Value and Placed. You can sort by order, quantity, status, release date, value and date placed.

To narrow the list:

1. Choose a status, a billing mode and a product from the three drop-downs (Every status, Every billing mode, Every product).
2. Click Filter.
3. To find a specific pre-order, type in the search box and click Search pre-orders.

You can release or cancel pre-orders by hand, one at a time or in bulk. Tick the rows you want, choose an action from Bulk actions and click Apply. Use Screen Options to change how the list is displayed.

The Release calendar tab shows what is coming up. Releases run automatically in the background, so this screen is for planning.

What is due to release groups open pre-orders by release day, with the number of Pre-orders, Units, Value and the amount still To collect.

Products with open pre-orders lists each product with its Release date, Open units and Allocation (units claimed against the maximum you set). The Actions column gives you two tools:

• Release now: releases the product's pre-orders straight away, without waiting for the release date.
• Shift days: enter a number of days in the box and click Shift days to move the release date. Shifting a date updates every open pre-order for that product and emails the affected customers in the background.

The Reports tab shows how your pre-orders are doing. Pick a period (Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days or Last 12 months) and click Apply.

The summary cards show:

• Pre-orders taken: lines placed in the period.
• Units reserved, with the average per day.
• Value booked: the full value of everything reserved.
• Collected so far: deposits and upfront payments.
• Still to collect: balances due on release day.
• Customers: distinct pre-order customers.
• Cancellation rate: worth watching after a date change.
• Average line value: booked value per pre-ordered line.

Below the cards you find a Pre-orders per day chart of units reserved each day, Most pre-ordered products, Where the money sits (collected and outstanding amounts per billing mode), By status, and Commitment outstanding right now, a one-line summary of what you currently owe customers and what has not been collected yet.

Report figures are cached. You set how long under Settings > Advanced > Cache reports for this many minutes.

The Settings tab holds the store wide rules. Every product can override the release date and wording on its own Pre-order tab. The settings are grouped in five boxes:

• General: switch all pre-order features on or off, choose whether pre-orders can share a cart with in-stock items, and set the default billing and deposit.
• Display: what shoppers see. Use {date} for the release date and {time} for the release time in any of the text fields.
• Release workflow: order statuses before and after release, automatic release, batch size, when stock is reduced and when release reminders are sent.
• Advanced: report caching, the My Account endpoint slug, the activity log and data removal.
• Payments: how long customers have to pay a balance, what happens if they never pay, automatic charging of a saved card and customer self cancellation.

Click Save settings at the bottom after making changes. Turning off Enable pre-orders does not delete anything: existing pre-orders stay in the database and resume when you switch it back on. See the settings reference below for every field.

The Status tab is the first place to look when something does not happen as expected.

Health checks reports on Action Scheduler, Database tables, Schema version, Overdue releases, Order storage and Translation plugin. A green dot means the check passed.

Background queue lists the scheduled jobs, when each one Runs at, and its Arguments. You will see jobs such as anticipo_po_release_product (one per product release), anticipo_po_send_reminders and anticipo_po_daily_maintenance.

Activity log lists everything the plugin has done, newest first, with When, Level, Order and Message. Use it when a customer asks what happened to their order. You change how much is recorded with Activity log detail on the Advanced settings.

The Documentation tab contains the plugin's own guide, organised in collapsible sections:

• Set up your first pre-order in five minutes
• Every setting explained
• The Pre-order tab on a product
• What happens on release day
• The emails, and where to edit them
• Running a multilingual store
• What this plugin does to keep your store fast
• If something looks wrong
• Developer reference (hooks, helper functions and template overrides)

Click a heading to expand it.

You turn a product into a pre-order from the product itself. This works with simple, variable and external products.

1. Go to Products and edit the product.
2. In the Product data box, open the Pre-order tab.
3. Tick Enable pre-orders and set the release date and time. Dates are entered in your store timezone and stored in UTC, so changing the site timezone later never moves a launch.
4. Click Update.

On this tab you can also:

• Take pre-orders with no announced date, then fill the date in later. Every waiting customer is emailed automatically.
• Set a cut-off date so orders close before release.
• Give the product its own button text, availability message and Badge text (for example "Coming soon") instead of the store wide wording.

Variations inherit the release date and rules from the parent product. The Pro edition also supports release dates per variation.

Each pre-order email is a real WooCommerce email. You manage them under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails. The emails include pre-order confirmed, release date changed, pre-order released and pre-order cancelled for the customer, plus a new pre-order notice for the store.

• Pre-order confirmed is sent to the customer as soon as their pre-order is paid for. It confirms what has been reserved, when it is expected and anything still to pay.
• Pre-order date changed is sent when you change the release date on a product that already has pre-orders.

Each email has the usual WooCommerce fields plus a Message field: the text shown above the table of pre-ordered products. You can use these merge tags in it: {site_title} {site_url} {customer_name} {order_number} {order_date} {release_date} {product_list} {old_date} {account_url} {pay_url} {balance} {due_date} {days}.

The Email preview at the bottom shows how the email will look. Click Send a test email to send yourself a copy, then click Save changes. Emails come in HTML and plain text, and both can be overridden from your theme.

Shoppers see pre-order products much like any other product, with a few additions:

• The add to cart button uses your pre-order text, for example Pre-order now.
• An availability message under the price, with the release date filled in, for example "Ships on" followed by the date. Products without an announced date show your unknown-date message instead.
• A pre-order badge on the product image and in the cart. Each product can use its own badge wording.
• A live countdown to release on the product page, when a date is announced.
• A progress bar such as "82 of 100 claimed" on products with an allocation limit, when Show remaining pre-order allocation is on.

You can collect all upcoming products on one page with the [anticipo_preorder_products] shortcode, as shown below.

Customers also get a Pre-orders tab in My Account that lists everything they have reserved, its status and when it arrives. If self cancellation is enabled, they can cancel from there until the cut-off you set.