Mission Mercantile

MissionMercantile, a high-end leather goods retailer, found success in implementing a pre-order system to manage their inventory and customer demand. Pre-orders have resulted in an additional 20% of store revenue for MissionMercantile and improved communication with customers by providing back-in-stock dates for popular products. Pre-orders also allow them to keep selling both popular and specialty products, making it a versatile tool for managing their business. Through pre-orders, MissionMercantile has been able to improve their bottom line and offer a better shopping experience for their customers.

Key Insights

• Additional 20% of store revenue from Pre-Orders.
• Improved customer communication with back-in-stock dates.
• Pre-Orders enable merchant to keep selling both popular and specialty products.

How have sales grown since offering pre-orders?

We started Pre-Orders in 2019 because we make our own products. We hand craft every one of them and we wanted to expand the business because we had quite a few people enquiring about back-in-stock dates. So we leaned into that further and went down the pre-order route. 

It turned out that Pre-Orders became one of the biggest reasons why we were able to triple in size in 2020, because if we did run out of stock we could allow people to order and get their product. Pretty quickly, it didn’t take too long to become about 20% of our sales.

We’ve continued to refine and tweak how we use the app, and we’re doing several hundred thousands dollars a year for us and it has become a key part of our business.

Our products that can be personalized are advertised as made-to-order and customers pre-pay for the product in full.

We’re making products all the time and with pre-order we’re able to better communicate to our customers back-in-stock dates based on pre-order demand planning. Pre-Orders work great because they can help you keep selling not only your most popular products, but also the less popular products that select customers still want to purchase.

One thing that we found was very very important was setting customers expectations on when they’ll be receiving their product. We display lead times right under the buy now button, and I don’t think we’d be nearly as successful if we left it open ended, without customers knowing when they could expect to get the product.

After I installed the app, pre-orders slowly started rolling-in. But, it wasn’t until after a few months I looked back and realized exactly how many people were placing pre-orders.

I had no idea when I first installed the pre-order manager it would account for 20% of our sales, If I did I would have done it several years before that.