Website Order Backorders and Preorders

What do you do if you won't be able to ship all of a website order right away and you don't want to make the customer wait for all of the inventory? With the Backorder function enabled, you are now able to:

• Split orders as needed to set items not yet in stock as Backordered and ship the ones you have.
• If a customer wants to preorder something you can facilitate that as a backordered item, with the funds preauthorized at the time of the transaction.
• You are also able to cancel part of an order and only charge the card for the part that you are shipping with this option.
• All of this must be done before you capture the funds.

You can get to this part of the system by clicking on Products in the blue Admin Toolbar and then clicking on Orders.

Activating Backorders for Web Orders

If you're interested in using this functionality, you'll need to call in to our Support team and request that the module be activated for you. Call us at 877-909-6699 and use option 2 for support. Before calling, make sure you meet the requirements for this system to be activated (see below).

We will notify you once the module is available for you, and at that time, you can go into your settings and activate it there. Go to the gear-shaped button on the far right of our blue Admin Toolbar and go to Settings > Website Settings > Shopping Cart and near the middle of the page you will have the option to Allow Backorders. Click Save at the bottom to finalize the new setting.

Requirements

There are three settings that need to be in place for you to be able to use Backorders/Preorders:

1. You must be using Worldpay (formerly Vantiv) as your web order processing company. Please note that we plan to add other processors in the near future, including Transnational. It will not be developed to work with PayPal orders in the near future. 
2. In your Worldpay account, you must have PASS Tokenization enabled. Contact Worldpay to make sure this is enabled in your account. 800-846-4472
3. You must have your Checkout Method set to Authorization, meaning the card is not charged at the time the order goes through, it simply has the funds pre-authorized. Click here to see how you can set this in the system.

Using Backorders / Preorders

To begin using the Backorder functionality, you'll go to Products > Orders and in the Payment Status drop-list, choose Payment Pending and then click the Submit button. You'll see a list of pending orders, and you can click the View link on the far right for the one you want to work with.

Once you have clicked to View an order, it will open it in the Order Details screen. Please note that in the examples below, for privacy reasons, the critical details have been obfuscated.

From the Order Detail view, you will find the area for Payment Status and click the Update button, and the Fulfillment panel will open to the side. You will see all items on the order, and there will be editable fields for the Quantity of each. 

If you charged shipping on the order, you will also see the Shipping amount in an editable field. At this point, if you have all items in stock and if you're ready to ship it, click the Capture button at the bottom.

If you only have part of the order, you can reduce the quantity of the item(s) you're not ready to fulfill, and you can also reduce the shipping to an amount that will cover the item(s) ready to ship. Please note that you will only have the preauthorized Shipping amount to work with if you put some items into Backorder status.

In our example above, the items in the order would normally ship for $10, and we have reduced Quantities for items we're not ready to ship just yet. We have also reduced the shipping to $8, and that will leave only $2 for shipping, no matter what our actual cost is, for the remaining part of the order.

Any time you have selected to only ship part of an order, you'll be able to Capture & Split the order at the bottom of the panel, once you're ready. Doing so will create a new order with the remainder of the items to be shipped, and the current order will be reduced to include only the shipped items and the appropriate Shipping charge.

If you know you won't be able to fulfill the entire order, you also have the option to Capture & Cancel Remaining, which will complete the current order for the quantities and shipping amount you specified, but will cancel the rest of the items.

You also have the option to just Cancel Transaction if you know you can't fulfill any of it and won't be able to in the future. In any case, the system will email the customer to let them know what is being done with the order.

In our example below, we have Captured and Split the order, and once that button has been clicked, the Orders module will display this notification for you:

That new order number will be listed for you, and you will see it in your list of Payment Pending orders.