Anticipo – Pre-Orders for WooCommerce

Anticipo lets you sell a product weeks or months before it lands, then hands the whole launch back to you as a normal WooCommerce order on release day.

Customers pay in full at checkout and the order waits in a dedicated Pre-ordered status, out of your fulfilment queue. On the release date a background job releases every waiting order, reduces stock, moves the orders into your normal workflow and emails the customers. None of it needs anyone logged in.

What you can do

• Turn any simple, variable or external product into a pre-order from a Pre-order tab on the product.
• Set a release date and time in your store timezone, stored in UTC so a timezone change never moves a launch.
• Take pre-orders with no announced date at all, then fill the date in later and have every waiting customer emailed automatically.
• Set a cut-off date so orders close before release while you confirm quantities with a supplier.
• Reduce stock on release day rather than at checkout, so your inventory figures stay honest.
• Decide whether pre-orders can share a basket with in-stock items, or must be bought on their own.
• Give each product its own button text and availability message, or set them once for the whole store.
• Show a pre-order badge and a live countdown to release.
• Release or cancel any pre-order by hand, individually or in bulk.

On release day

Releases run in the background through WooCommerce Action Scheduler in small batches, so a launch with thousands of orders never blocks a page load. A nightly sweep catches anything that was missed, so a launch interrupted by a server restore recovers on its own.

Emails

Five emails, each a real WooCommerce email class you manage from WooCommerce, Settings, Emails: 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. Every one has an editable message with merge tags and a table of the products pre-ordered, in HTML and plain text, both overridable from your theme.

Customers can see their pre-orders

A Pre-orders tab in My Account lists everything a customer has reserved, its status and when it arrives.

Built to stay fast

Pre-orders live in their own indexed database table rather than in order meta, so nothing turns into a slow meta query as you grow. Product settings are read from the object WooCommerce has already loaded and cached for the request. The CSS and JavaScript are not loaded at all on pages with no pre-orders.

Works with what you already run

High Performance Order Storage and legacy order storage. Cart and Checkout Blocks, with the cart rules enforced through the Store API. WPML and Polylang, with release emails sent in the language the customer originally ordered in. Any payment gateway, because a pre-order is an ordinary WooCommerce order.

For developers

Over twenty documented hooks, a helper function API, six overridable templates and an activity log of every action taken on every pre-order. Full documentation is built into the plugin under WooCommerce, Pre-orders, Documentation, and in the docs folder.

External services

This plugin does not connect to any external service. It makes no outbound HTTP requests and sends no data anywhere.

A paid edition is available

Anticipo Pre-Orders Pro is a separate plugin sold at propluginslab.com. It adds deposits and pay on release billing, allocation limits, pre-order pricing, scheduled reminders, reports, CSV export and a REST API. Everything described above is included in this free plugin and is not limited in any way.