gaseousclay

i've seen quite a few sites doing this and i'm wondering what your thoughts are. I think it's a mixed bag for me. if it was some site with crappy looking designs I wouldn't trust to buy anything, but if the tees themselves looked dope then I would consider doing it, but in the end it just looks like someone who doesn't have the money to print their stuff so they rely on pre-orders to get that money. what are the pros and cons?

 

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Solmu

Generally speaking, I'm not a fan (though not opposed as such either). And like you said, if the site isn't quality to begin with... definitely not.

One of the biggest pros is seeing how much demand there is for a product before you print stock. If you get hardly any pre-orders, you might decide to make it a limited edition and move on to something else

One of the biggest cons is that people are ridiculously impatient, and they don't pay any attention. Even if it's clearly marked as a pre-order, even if at the time of ordering they know it's a pre-order, if you get enough orders you will still get complaints from people about how long it's taking to receive the shirt, where is my shirt, why haven't you sent my shirt, I paid for my shirt where is it, I want I want I want I want, etc. etc.

It can be good for building anticipation. It can be good if you can tie it in to your marketing in a way that makes sense for your brand.

It can be good for offering options you don't ordinarily offer: for example many webcomics do pre-orders of t-shirts, and often they'll offer a complete size range for the preorder (every single size the manufacturer offers - and why not?), but only print on a more normal (S-XL, S-XXL, whatever) size range when they're printing stock.

You could offer a wider variety of colours for pre-order (Black print on your choice of White, Blue, Red shirt) then use that information to decide which colourway to use for the one you print stock of.

It'll give you your bell curve of sizing for this specific design.

It's basically free and valuable market research.

There are plenty of reasons pre-orders are good for the merchant - you just need to make sure they look legitimate to the customer.

Easiest way to do that? Pre-order discount: $3 off if you order before X date.

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gaseousclay

good points. I can see the benefit of pre-orders if you've already established yourself as a company. let's say you have 4-5 designs up for sale and they sell pretty good. you then decide you're going to add 1 new tee per month -- now that your other tees are doing well you can then throw up a pre-order because your customers are confident they'll get their tee. but as you said, the downside is that if you don't get many pre-orders that's a bad sign that it won't sell very well. I was thinking of a higher discount than $3....plus if you throw in free shipping people are getting a deal on top of a deal. I guess I would only buy from a company doing pre-orders if their site looked professional and their designs looked good.

 

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Solmu

Quote: Originally Posted by gaseousclay but as you said, the downside is that if you don't get many pre-orders that's a bad sign that it won't sell very well.

That's not a downside at all, I said that was "one of the biggest pros". Finding out something isn't going to sell before you invest too much money printing an overly large run is a great thing.

Quote: Originally Posted by gaseousclay I was thinking of a higher discount than $3....plus if you throw in free shipping people are getting a deal on top of a deal.

Yeah, $3 was a relatively arbitrary number - I wouldn't want to go below it, but over it depends on your margins, your selling price, etc.

You don't want to offer too much and cheapen your offering, but if your product costs $35 for example then $3 off isn't so impressive.

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thefactionist

I think you definitely should do preorders if you:

A) Have a bunch of friends who would buy your stuff (like I did)

or

B) Have a big enough audience already that they'll buy your stuff.

If you have neither, a preorder is a waste of your time. As regards A, we had a preorder with about a 10% discount (granted, if its a preorder, they don't really have to know it's a discount because they dont know the final sales price) and sold about 35 shirts on preorder.

 

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