Pre-selling Items

We sometimes sell a product (with full disclosure) that will not be ready to ship for 2-3 weeks from the date of the sale.

I can see the setting to set the date of availability as a future date. I can see the setting to make the item unavailable (out of stock) and I can see where you can set the quantity.

What I can't seem to discover is how to offer the item for sale, but easily filter orders that have items which are not yet available.

Is there something for this situation? Thanks all.

Check in admin -> configuration -> stock -> allow checkout and set to true

Thanks for the info. I had found that before, I think I was not clear in my previous post.

In my trials, if I set a quantity of "0" the item shows as "SOLD OUT" in the store and you cannot order it. This is good, I have items which are sold out and will not be coming back into stock but which I would like to continue to show off (the store is for collectibles... it shows people "what they missed out on" so to speak).

If I set the item as "out of stock" with an expected date in the future... it does not show in the store. This is even when I have the "allow checkout" set to true. When you go back to edit the item, it has a red message at the top about it being disabled.

So... what I really want to do is:

- Load an item
- Provide an "in stock" or "expected" quantity (200 let's say)
- Provide the expected date
- On the product page, indicate that it is available for order, but not expected to ship until my expected date.
- Allow people to check out when they have that item in their basket
- Display some kind of message when they check out like "one of the items you have selected is currently out of stock but is expected on XX/XX/2006. All items in your order will ship together after that date."
- Store keeps tracking inventory and if my "expected quantity" (200) drops to 0, it is shown as "sold out" and not allowed to be in the cart.
- When the item arrives, I can set the "expected" date to some time in the past and the message stops appearing to my customers.
- However, the store has tracked sales of the quantity I loaded and keeps me in check against my new re-stock order.

Then also, on the admin side - I don't see a way to easily filter orders that have items which are out of stock into a "backordered" status for instance so we know we do not have to fulfill them at this time.

So sometimes I have a package in transit to me by ground freight. I have the tracking code, I know it's going to get to me very soon. I'd like to start selling those items that day and put an available date of 10 days in the future so my customers understand the product will not ship right away. However, I also do not want to oversell beyond what I know I am about to get in - so I want that inventory management piece too.

And then on the back end, I would like it to be easy to differentiate what is ready to ship right now based on what is in stock and what is not. Without a lot of manual effort if possible.