Anticipo - Pre-Orders for WooCommerce documentation

Anticipo - Pre-Orders for WooCommerce lets you sell a product weeks or months before it arrives. On release day the plugin hands each pre-order back to you as a normal WooCommerce order. Waiting orders sit in their own Pre-ordered status, so they stay out of your normal fulfilment queue.

On the release date, a background job releases every waiting order, reduces stock, moves the orders into your normal workflow and emails your customers. Nobody needs to be logged in for this to happen. The Pro edition adds deposits and pay on release billing, and collects balances as linked WooCommerce orders with a secure payment link. It also adds allocation limits, pre-order pricing, scheduled release reminders, bulk date shifting, reports, a release calendar, CSV export and a REST API.

The plugin is for WooCommerce store owners who launch new products, restock limited editions or pre-sell items from a supplier. It works with simple, variable and external products.

Anticipo Pro needs WooCommerce, so install and activate WooCommerce first. The Pro plugin replaces the free edition. If the free edition is active, activating Pro switches it off automatically and keeps all your existing pre-orders and settings.

Anticipo works fully as soon as it is activated. The license key turns on automatic updates, so new versions arrive in WordPress like any other plugin update. Pro features never depend on it.

Once the license is active, new versions of Anticipo show up under Dashboard > Updates and on the Plugins screen. Click Update now, or click Enable auto-updates in the Anticipo row on the Plugins screen and WordPress installs every future release for you.

• Keys are checked once a day in the background, so your site never waits for the license server. If the server is briefly unreachable, the plugin keeps its last known status.
• An expired key or a key that is not accepted only stops updates. Anticipo keeps working. After renewing, click Check now in its row.
• Moving to a new domain: click Deactivate on the old site first, then activate the key on the new one. The status shows Site address changed, checking until the new address is confirmed.
• On the command line: wp ppl-license list, wp ppl-license activate <plugin> <key>, wp ppl-license check and wp ppl-license deactivate <plugin>.

Go to WooCommerce > Pre-orders. The first tab, Pre-orders, lists every pre-ordered line in your store with these columns: Order, Product, Customer, Qty, Billing, Status, Release date, Value and Placed.

To narrow the list:

• Use the three drop-downs (Every status, Every billing mode, Every product) and click Filter.
• Type in the search box and click Search pre-orders.
• Click a sortable column heading (Order, Qty, Status, Release date, Value, Placed) to sort.

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 adjust the list view.

The Release calendar tab helps you plan launches. Releases run automatically in the background, so you use this screen for planning rather than for watching.

What is due to release groups your open pre-orders by release day. For each day it shows the number of Pre-orders, the Units, the 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 product's cap). In the Actions column you can:

• Click Release now to release that product's pre-orders straight away.
• Enter a number of days 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 demand and money for your pre-orders. Choose 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, Units reserved and Customers
• Value booked (full value of everything reserved)
• Collected so far (deposits and upfront payments)
• Still to collect (balances due on release day)
• Cancellation rate (worth watching after a date change)
• Average line value

Below the cards you find:

• Pre-orders per day: a chart of units reserved each day.
• Most pre-ordered products: units, value and outstanding amount per product.
• Where the money sits: lines, collected and outstanding amounts per billing mode.
• By status: lines, units and value per pre-order status.
• Commitment outstanding right now: a sentence that sums up what you currently owe customers and what has not been collected yet.

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

The Settings tab holds the store wide behaviour. Every product can override the release date and wording on its own Pre-order tab. The screen is split into five groups:

• General: switch pre-orders on or off, decide whether pre-orders can share a cart with in-stock items, and set the default billing and deposit.
• Display: what shoppers see, such as the button text, availability message, badge, countdown and allocation progress bar. Use {date} for the release date and {time} for the release time in the text fields.
• Release workflow: the 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 saved cards and customer self cancellation.

Click Save settings at the bottom after making changes. Every field is listed in the settings reference below.

The Status tab is where you look first when something seems wrong.

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

Background queue lists the scheduled jobs the plugin has queued, with the Job name, when it Runs at and its Arguments. For example, you see a release job for each product with a release date, plus daily maintenance and reminder jobs.

Activity log shows 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 can change how much is recorded with Activity log detail on the Advanced settings group.

The Documentation tab contains a guide inside your dashboard. Click a heading to expand it. Topics include:

• Set up your first pre-order in five minutes, and what the customer sees
• Every setting explained, with defaults
• The Pre-order tab on a product, and listing upcoming pre-orders on a page
• What happens on release day, including releasing early, missed releases and stock
• The emails, where to edit them, merge tags and changing the layout
• Running a multilingual store
• Keeping your store fast
• If something looks wrong
• Developer reference: hooks, helper functions and template overrides

You turn a product into a pre-order from the product edit screen. It works for simple, variable and external products.

1. Edit the product and scroll to the Product data box.
2. Click 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 before a date is announced by ticking "date not announced yet". When you fill in the date 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" or "Limited edition") instead of the store wide wording.
• Set the product's own billing rule, such as a deposit. Products that do not set a rule use Default billing from the settings.
• Cap the total units and the maximum per customer (allocation limits).
• Add pre-order pricing: a discount or premium that stops applying when the product releases.

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

When Release automatically on the availability date is on, the plugin releases each product's waiting orders on its release date. For each order it:

• Reduces stock (when Reduce stock on release rather than at checkout is on).
• Moves the order from the Status for orders awaiting release to the Status once released, usually Processing, so it joins your normal fulfilment queue.
• Emails the customer.
• For deposit and pay on release orders, collects the balance as a real, linked WooCommerce order with a secure payment link. If Try to charge the saved card automatically is on, the plugin tries the saved payment method first and falls back to emailing a payment link.

Releases run in the background through WooCommerce Action Scheduler in small batches, so a large launch never blocks a page load. A nightly sweep catches anything that was missed.

To release by hand, use Release now on the Release calendar tab, or bulk actions on the Pre-orders tab.

The plugin's emails are real WooCommerce emails. You manage them under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails. They 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. The Documentation tab lists every email, who it goes to and when it is sent.

Two examples:

• 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 a release date on a product that already has pre-orders.

Each email has Enable/Disable, Subject, Email heading, Message, Additional content, Email type, Cc(s) and Bcc(s). The Message is 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 below the fields shows how the email looks. Click Send a test email to send one to yourself, and Save changes to keep your edits. The HTML and plain text templates can be overridden from your theme.

Shoppers see pre-order products clearly marked in your store:

• A pre-order badge on the product image, in shop listings and in the cart. The wording comes from Badge text in the settings, or from the product's own Badge text.
• Your Add to cart button text (for example Pre-order now) instead of the usual Add to cart label.
• The availability message under the price, with the release date filled in (for example Ships on {date}).
• A live countdown to release on the product page, when a date is announced.
• An allocation progress bar such as "82 of 100 claimed" on products with a maximum number of pre-orders.

When you add the [anticipo_preorder_products] shortcode to a page, shoppers see a grid of upcoming products with the same badges, messages and buttons.

Logged-in customers also get a Pre-orders tab in My Account. It lists everything they have reserved, its status and when it arrives. If you allow self cancellation, it also shows a Cancel button.