It is not always practical for in-store sales to get a 100% down-payment for pre-orders or special orders, especially if we don't know exactly when the game is coming in.
But, if we can get 10%, 25%, etc as a down-payment, we are have a much higher percentage of people who will return to pick up their purchases. It's the Game-Stop model applied to board games.
To me this would require:
- set the item to pre-order
- set the % of price needed to do the downpayment
- if known, set the number of items available to be pre-ordered.
- customer must have an account set up in CC
- their pre-order is linked to their account
- when they pre-order, we charge them for the assigned percentage as a regular transaction. the pre-order takes qty 1 off the items available.
- on release day, we can look at their account and call up the pre-order. they pay the remaining amount and take the product home.
agreed - we often don't want to charge anything for a preorder if it's a product we want to have a lot of anyway. Lowering the barrier for the customer makes it more likely that they will use it and come back to us when it comes in.
This would be cool, but you could already do this now by creating a variant for reserved or pre-order then set the price to what ever you want the deposit to be. It would require you to split you preorders between full prepays and partial prepays but if you want to implement now you could do it. This is how we do rentals.