Pre-Orders for Rails of Sheffield
It’s a curious market for the model railway business. For the most part, it is a relatively straightforward process of selling and delivering boxed products to keen customers. It’s highly seasonal with many sales in the last quarter of the year. But with adequate planning, an intelligent choice of platforms and well-configured warehousing and fulfilment, Little Fire Digital have helped top clients Rails of Sheffield master most of their online business. You can read about this project here. There remains, though, one aspect which the site needs which is, at the very least, unusual, pre-orders.
Rails of Sheffield website
Why are Pre-Orders Needed?
It’s an oddity of the market that manufacturers announce the models they will be making in advance. Often they do this years in advance. Sometimes they have no planned arrival dates at all. These forthcoming products are often made in strictly limited numbers.
Plus, they are an enthusiastic and informed lot, model railway buffs. They are always looking a new, unusual or authentic model. Over the years, Rails of Sheffield have introduced exclusive engines
As soon as they are announced, the clients want to be able to order theirs – they want to make sure they will definitely be able to get one of these rarities running on their layout. A pre-order system for any model railway vendor is an essential feature.
Balancing Bespoke Development with Enterprise
Rails of Sheffield sell a lot of trains. They fulfil a lot of orders. To achieve the reliability and consistent site speeds the company needs, we have helped migrate their store from a custom build to Shopify. We have integrated that will PeopleVox for their warehousing and fulfilment needs.
To achieve the consistency and the reliability required, neither Shopify nor PeopleVox allow changes to their core platforms. Nor should they. But still Little Fire Digital needed to allow customers to build orders of pre-order products in a manner which is familiar to them.
Making Pre-Orders Work
But it’s not just about the shopping, given the long lead times, pre-orders require their own terms and conditions. Since pre-order products are normally ‘reserved’ on payment of a deposit, clients need to be able to review what they have on order and what charges for which they may be liable.
It’s not a unique problem – there are several Shopify Pre-Order applications but the client had very specific needs. We tested all the existing applications to see if they would ‘do’ but none quite matched Rails’ requirements. A custom solution was needed.
Using Javascript, Little Fire Digital were able to create a new set of pages which delivered on all these needs in a single set of easy-to-navigate tabs. By integrating with a bespoke application on Microsoft Azure, we were able to integrate Shopify customer logins to allow customers to display their past orders and create new ones. The Azure app notifies PeopleVox when the stock is finally delivered – so these orders are returned to the fulfilment flow. Careful modifications to Shopify templates and the use of tags to identify pre-orders allowed us to build a separate basket and checkout process which takes payments through Braintree.
Lead times can be anything up to five years. Occasionally price changes are inevitable. We have written an automated system to email clients of any price changes and offer them the options to accept or deny those changes.
Refinements are planned. But for the customers this important segment of Rails’ transactions are handled in a transparent and easy to use fashion.
If we can do all this …
Imagine what we could do for you. We’ll look at what you’re trying to achieve (for free) and see if we can think of a solution which will work for you.