Purple Dot Overview
Purple Dot is a Waitlist management platform. It enables you to create pre-order experiences so you can sell before you have stock.
Purple Dot provides all of the tooling required to manage Waitlists including the customer experience (display components), transacting the customer (payments, including auto-charge on ship or paid upfront), customer service flows (customer self-service, and internal dashboards and integrations), communications (email) and data (as events, visualizations and downloads).
Waitlists take 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 manages shoppers joining waitlists (checking out), leaving (cancelling), and the transition of pre-orders to regular orders when the product arrives in your warehouse.
After you add the app to your Shopify store, it will guide you through 4 simple Getting Started steps.
The Shopify app enables a 100% pay-later flow by vaulting the customer card at checkout, and auto-charging when you are ready to ship.
No engineering required.
Charged at $0.75 per fulfilled pre-order (first 10 pre-orders free).
Our Platform Integration is best suited for merchants that:
- Use a 3PL or warehouse / shipping partner that does not honour the Shopify’s “On Hold” fulfilment status, or
- Want to charge upfront, or access funds, for pre-orders in an FTC compliant way, or
The Platform Integration provides a checkout that reflects your brand’s look and feel, and activates when a customer's cart contains a pre-order line item. This enables the orders to be held outside until stock arrives, and the FTC compliant payment flow.
Purple Dot charges a flat transaction fee. This includes all payment processing fees. There are no any additional payment or transaction fees via your eCommerce platform for pre-order transactions since Purple Dot is transacting the pre-order.
Text | Shopify App | Platform integration |
|---|---|---|
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 as Shopify App. |
Checkout flow | Clicking the Pre-order button leads into your existing 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 new checkout is what enables pre-orders to be held outside until stock arrives, and compliant payment upfront.
Supports single-item, multi-item, and mixed cart flows (where the customer's cart contains both in-stock and pre-order items). |
Emails | Pre-order post-purchase transactional emails, including: confirmation, updated shipping dates, amended or canceled order. | Same as Shopify App. |
Customer payment | Payment details are vaulted at checkout but customer is not charged until you are ready to fulfil the pre-order. | Customer is charged at checkout and 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. |
Pre-order tracking | 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. | 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. |
Cancellations | Pre-order cancellations are facilitated by both Purple Dot self-serve and your Shopify portal. The customer can cancel using the self-service pre-order management page, or you can cancel via the Shopify merchant portal, at any point before the order is marked as "Fulfilled". | Pre-order cancellations are facilitated by both Purple Dot self-serve embedded in your site and your Purple Dot portal. The customer can cancel using the self-service pre-order management page, or you can cancel using the Purple Dot Merchant Portal, at any point before the pre-order is exported. |
Refunds | Refunds for returned pre-orders are handled in your Shopify store. | 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. |
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 as Shopify App. |
Shipping rates | Uses the same settings as your in-stock orders. | 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. |
Cost | $0.75 for each fulfilled pre-order (first 10 are free) | Transaction fee on pre-orders (includes payment processing), with volume discounts available. Contact for pricing. |
Last modified 3mo ago