Eastwood Guitars

Eastwood Guitars, a renowned guitar manufacturer, was able to significantly boost their revenue by implementing pre-order processes. With pre-orders, they were able to secure an additional 20% of store revenue and successfully test and launch new products. Pre-orders also streamlined their deposit collection processes, providing a more efficient and automated system. This case study highlights the benefits of pre-orders for businesses, especially those in the manufacturing industry, and how it can help them optimize their sales and production processes.

Key Insights

• Additional 20% of store revenue from Pre-Orders.
• Successfully test and launch new products using pre-orders.
• Streamlined and automated deposit collection processes.

What have been some of the best outcomes for your business since using pre-orders?

We have always allowed pre-orders through our store, but it had always been a challenge making things clear to the customer up-front and managing it all on our end.

We had also been using a more manual method of collecting Deposits for upcoming products, similar to Kick-starter campaigns. The Pre-Order app has enabled us to streamline all of these processes, making our lives (and our customers’ lives) much easier.

To give a recent example of a great outcome, in December (2022) we announced a relatively niche product that we thought might exist as a one-off run, to fill a small gap in the market. No products were made yet – we simply posted the idea and a digital mock-up.

We put a small batch of them into production thinking this would satisfy the pre-order demand, plus have a few left over to sell afterwards. That batch was sold out by early February, prompting us to double the production and continue pre-selling!

How do pre-orders assist with inventory planning?

For many years now we have been using a crowdfunding-like model for many of our new product releases. This allows us to get a sense of demand for specific new products before we put them into production. For forecasting purposes, this has always worked well for us. However, there is a limitation in Shopify that did not allow us to easily collect a deposit, and then charge a balance later on within the same order.

We were forced to create two separate orders (one for the deposit, then one for the final payment) – which created a lot of extra work having to invoice separately, allocate fulfillment, etc. The partial payments feature from the app eliminates those problems, allowing us to collect a deposit and charge the final balance in the same order.

From an inventory management standpoint, this helps immensely as we’re able to allocate the fulfillment location for each pre-order the second the deposit is placed, and not have to wait for final balances or comb through deposits vs. completed orders.

How have sales grown since offering pre-orders?

This is a little tricky to pin down, as we first started using the app in May of 2020 – the same time our industry saw a large boom in sales. Our website was also overhauled at this same time. But if we did not have an adequate system in place to facilitate pre-orders, then it’s fair to say we will not have seen the same success.

After all, the biggest challenge we faced throughout the pandemic was getting inventory in. Using 2022 as an example, about 20% of all orders on our store were pre-orders, which is obviously quite significant!