Purple Dot Overview

What is Purple Dot?

Purple Dot is a pre-order management platform. It enables you to easily sell stock before it arrives through creating pre-order experiences.

Purple Dot provides all the tooling required to manage pre-orders including the customer experience (display components), transacting the customer (payments, including 100% pay upfront, split payment with a deposit upfront and rest on ship, or full charge on ship) customer service flows (customer self-service, with internal dashboards and integrations), communications (email) and data (as events, visualizations and downloads).

To set-up a product a pre-order, a Waitlist is created that takes an item from your existing catalog, adds estimated ship dates as a date range along with the number of units you want to pre-sell by SKU or total. Purple Dot then enables customers to pre-order this product (checking out), the pre-order wait experience (self-serve amend, cancel and email updates), and the transition of pre-orders to regular orders when the product arrives in your warehouse.

Why use Purple Dot for pre-orders?

We are the only pre-order solution that is

• fully FTC compliant in charging upfront for pre-orders

• compatible with all major downstream 3PL and warehouse / shopping partners

• always keeps the customer up to date on where their pre-order is at

A small amount of engineering effort is required to get started, and the integration can be done by you or by Purple Dot. See our Getting Started Guide.

Pricing is a flat all-in % transaction fee, depending on your country and with additional volume discounts available. This includes all payment processing fees. There are no additional payment or transaction fees from your eCommerce platform since Purple Dot is transacting the pre-order instead of your eCommerce platform.

How does Purple Dot work?

Once you're up and running with Purple Dot, we automatically adjust your customers' online shopping experience to provide the 3 core value props listed above:

	As separate checkout	As payment provider (Shopify Plus only)
Visual changes in your store	For products that have a Waitlist, a Pre-order button with estimated delivery dates replaces your regular Add to Cart button. Sold Out labels for these products are removed.	Same.
Checkout flow	Clicking the Pre-order button leads into a new checkout flow, that mirrors your brand’s look, feel and existing checkout functionality. This separate checkout is what enables pre-orders to be held outside your system until stock arrives, and the FTC compliant payment flow for pre-orders. Supports single-item, multi-item, and mixed cart flows (where the customer's cart contains both in-stock and pre-order items).	Clicking the Pre-order button leads into your existing checkout flow. To provide FTC compliant payment flow for pre-orders, Purple Dot will be the only payment option available when customer is buying a pre-order.
Emails	Pre-order post-purchase transactional emails, including: confirmation, updated shipping dates, amended or canceled order.	Same.
Customer payment	You can choose to charge the customer in full at checkout, some upfront and the rest later, or all later. Funds are held until pre-orders are exported as ready to fulfil, which enables an FTC compliant payment flow for pre-orders. Customers can cancel for a full refund anytime before ship. See Cancellations. There is an option to release the funds early for an extra charge.	Customer is always charged in full at checkout. Otherwise same.
Pre-order tracking	Pre-orders are held in Purple Dot until you are ready to fulfil (typically when the product(s) arrive at your warehouse), at which point they are exported to your e-commerce platform and fulfilled as regular orders.	An order with "On Hold" against the pre-order line item is created in Shopify as soon as the checkout completes. Once stock arrives and you are ready to fulfil, you can remove this fulfilment hold in Purple Dot or your Shopify portal. Some ERP/3PL do not support these Shopify "On Hold"s - in those cases we integrate with the ERP/3PL directly to ensure only pre-orders that are ready to fulfil flow down to your ERP/3PL.
Cancellations	Pre-order cancellations can be facilitated by the customer via the Purple Dot self-serve embedded in your site or the Purple Dot self-service pre-order management page or by you via your Purple Dot Merchant Portal, at any point before the pre-order is ready to fulfil.	Same.
Refunds	Refunds for returned pre-orders are processed by Purple Dot, and can be issued from the Purple Dot Merchant Portal. Optionally, refunds can also be triggered automatically based on events from your e-commerce platform delivered as webhooks.	Same.
Analytics	Purple Dot integrates seamlessly with your analytics, advertising and CRM tracking libraries. Events like conversions can be forwarded to any client library included on the page.	Same.
Shipping rates	Can use the same rate settings as your in-stock orders, or you can configure pre-order specific rates. You can also choose to ship a pre-order and in-stock order together or separately, or let the customer choose.	Uses the same settings as your in-stock orders.
Cost	A % transaction fee depending on country and with volume discounts available. This includes all payment processing fees. Contact us for pricing.	Same.