5. Pre-Orders: Stop Guessing How Much to Make

Every producer knows the two ways to get it wrong. Make too little and you turn people away. Make too much and you feed it to the chooks.

Pre-orders are the feature that removes most of that guessing.

How a pre-order actually runs

A buyer reserves what they want before they come. You get the request, and you decide: every request is yours to accept or decline.

• A request arrives in your pre-order inbox, and the clock is real: you have 48 hours to respond, or the request cancels itself.
• You accept, with a note if you want one ("ready after 8am"), or decline with a reason. The buyer will have suggested a collection date and time. You confirm it or propose a different one. Declining is normal. A polite no is better than a maybe.
• You mark it ready when it is.
• They collect and read out a spoken four-digit code, and you mark the order collected, which closes it. If the order was paid in the app, the card was charged when you confirmed it. If it was Pay at collection, you take the money at the gate.

The code is worth understanding, because it is doing quiet work: it means the handover is verified without you keeping a list, and neither of you has to remember a name.

Two things worth knowing about what the buyer sees when they send that request. Their estimated total is provisional. The app tells them "Final amount depends on what the seller can fulfil", so adjusting a request is expected, not awkward. And a buyer can be offered Pay at collection ("No card needed now, pay the seller directly when you collect"), which means pre-orders work even before you have set up in-app payment.

Deposits, and charging the rest once you've weighed it

If you sell meat, produce or anything else priced after weighing, the awkward bit has always been that you cannot know the price until you have already cut it.

So: take a deposit up front, weigh the thing, then charge the balance to the card they have already saved.

This solves a specific and expensive problem. A half lamb that someone does not collect is not like unsold zucchini. The work is done and the stock is cut. A deposit turns a maybe into a booking, and it does it without you having to ask anyone for money at the gate.

Two habits that make pre-orders work

1. Answer quickly. The 48-hour auto-cancel exists because a request that sits for two days is a customer who has bought bread somewhere else, and after 48 hours the app cancels it for you. Even a decline, sent fast, keeps them.
2. Only offer what you can reliably make. Pre-orders are a promise. Offer the four things you always nail, not the twelve you sometimes manage.

You can also pause pre-orders on their own without closing your stall: the "Accept pre-orders" toggle on Manage stall. Useful for the week you are away, or when you are already at capacity.

What this changes

You stop producing to a guess and start producing to a number. That is the whole thing.

The knock-on effects: less waste, no dawn panic about quantities, and the strange comfort of knowing before you start that today is already worth doing.

Ready to put it into practice? Your stall is free to start at sidestall.au.

Next in this series: your stall page, and the one link worth sharing.