Pre-order eCommerce system

Solving retail challenges

A solution to a complex pre-ordering system for seasonal products

Taking FoxyCart pre-order capabilities to a highly customized level

Learn how Quo Agency helped Outdoor developing an eCommerce system that would allow their customers to pre-order now, being charged a fixed initial payment, and have the remainder amount authorized on their cards for it to be automatically collected months later when the product ships nearby the season.

Outdoor’s business strategy and product nature requires them to work with pre-orders. By default, no out of the box system would fit their needs, mainly because of the time limit of less than a month that most card companies allow retailers to pre-authorize a purchase amount, meanwhile Outdoor will charge the second installment several months after. Additional challenges came to the equation in the field of shipping costs and taxes calculation: Outdoor required to include these into the total cost, after being estimated based on the customer address. However, the initial installment was to be fixed, so shipping costs and taxes were to be passed on to the next payment and the card to get such an amount authorized via a FoxyCart one-term subscription. That meant, once more, that non traditional out of the box solutions would do.

Our Work

First, Quo Agency developed, onto a headless eCommerce platform, a system dividing the purchased amount into one initial fixed payment and a second installment when the product gets shipped months after. Second, Quo integrated a complex shipping and taxes calculator engine that would authorize the amount in the card and then charge it automatically with the second installment. Thirdly, Quo’s pre-ordering system would work seamlessly with a customly developed referrals program that would provide customers with discount codes, and referrals with sales commissions -taking future second payments into account-. Product comparison, transactional email, custom bills, API integrations with third party apps, referrals and influencers codes tracking, and customers reviews are among the other features Quo worked with.

Related services

Headless eCommerce

Webflow

HTML Development

eCommerce

Web apps

User Interface & Experience Design

Headless eCommerce integration

FoxyCart was employed to convey the store with key features that are impossible to achieve -all in parallel- with non headless eCommerce approaches: custom taxes and shipping costs calculation, custom checkout user experience, special custom codes, a particular referrals codes tracking system, and of course a special pre-ordering system.

Referrals account and codes follow up

Quo implemented a system allowing the store staff to generate products URLs that relates to referrals working with the brand. Customers using the referral links would see the discounted price. After purchase, referrals are able to login to a dashboard dedicated to them, at which they can track their used codes status.

Customer reviews custom workflow

A special system was put in place that automated the process of gathering reviews by the store staff, getting the invites sent to customers via a customized transactional email workflow. The emails would link to review forms detecting the user, then making it easier for them to submit their opinions. Then the reviews would get available for being pushed via API to a CMS collection.

A quite unique discount codes system

Outdoor required an initial sales moment for discounts over the retailer pricing, plus a secondary line of discount codes related to referrals. All of which would seamlessly integrate in the checkout to make it possible that the first customer payment would be still flat, and the second payment would internalize it together with the shipping and taxes management particularities.

API automation Webflow/Foxy/Memberstack

Outdoors initial stage would require iterating fast with their users interface, for which Webflow was considered an adequate fit prior to jumping towards a headless CMS system. Quo then developed API integrations that would make seamless the experience of customers and referrals to login to their dashboards. Also, users would automatically be signed in to FoxyCart for being able to proceed to checkout as logged users (SSO). Memberstack was employed to achieve that harmonious login experience that covered two different environments. Referral codes usage, sales, discounts, second installments successfully processed, and orders status, were synchronized between the platforms in real time for users to be able to check their information at their dashboards.