How to Create a Pre-Order Product

Looking to pre-sell a course or community? Make your product available for pre-order to allow students to purchase it in advance of the release date!

New to pre-selling? Make sure to check out our Guide to Pre-Selling

About This Feature

Thinkific has a unique publish state called pre-order that gives you the option to sell your course or community without allowing students immediate access to your content. When you are ready to launch your product, you can simply update the publish state to give students access to your content!

Offering products for pre-order is a great way to validate the demand for your course or community before investing resources into creating all of the content. It also works well for products that you are currently working on, and want to display as upcoming features!

Here are a few ways you can use the pre-order publish option:

Use it to pre-sell your course or community
Use it as a lead capture - this works great for both paid and free products, as students can enroll without accessing any content yet
Extend your customers the chance to "sample" a piece of the content you have to offer, by giving them a glimpse of what the finished product will look like
...and much more!

How It Works

Pre-order is a publish state available in your course or community settings. Once a product has been published as a pre-order, the following will apply:

Students can purchase your product
Students cannot access any of your product content
On product pages that include your course or community card, a fully customizable Pre-order label will display
On the Student Dashboard, students will see Coming soon

The Publish state can be changed at anytime. You can publish the full version of your product to give students access to your content, or unpublish if you no longer want to sell the product.

Important Considerations

This feature is available on all Thinkific plans
Pre-order requires site theme version 1.13.0 or higher. If you are not on an updated theme, the pre-order publish state will not be available within your settings.
It is not possible to set Bundles or Memberships to pre-order. However courses or communities in a pre-order publish state can be included within a bundle or a memberships.
Digital Downloads and Coaching & Webinars cannot be set to pre-order.
If you have set an enrollment duration in your pricing settings for your pre-order product, it will start counting from the day the product is purchased by your student.

How to Publish Your Product for Pre-Order

Make sure to price your product before continuing if you want students to pay for your pre-order! Note that if you set an enrollment duration, this will start from the moment the product is purchased even if it is in a pre-order state.

Publish Your Course for Pre-order

From your Admin Dashboard, go to Products
Select Courses
Click on the desired Draft course
Click the Publish button then click Set to preorder
Click Set to preorder

Publish Your Community for Pre-order

From your Admin Dashboard, go to Products
Select Communities
Locate your community, click the ellipses (3 dot icon) and select Edit
Click the Publish button then click Set to preorder
Click Set to preorder

Student Perspective

When your product is in the pre-order publish state, students will see several indicators on your product pages and within their Student Dashboard letting them know.

Product Pages

On your site product pages, a pre-order label will automatically be created and added to your course or community cards. The location in which these cards will appear depends on whether you have created a pre-order community or a pre-order course. Learn more about Product Cards here.

You'll see it displayed on various section types and pages including:

For more information, check out the articles below that explain the landing page layout for each product type:

Student Dashboard

On the Student Dashboard, which a student will see as soon as they log in to your site, the pre-order product will display Coming soon.

Unlike a fully published product, students will not be able to click on the course or community card to enter the Course Player, view lessons, or join the community.

Customize Your Pre-Order Label

You have the option to fully customize your pre-order text! Learn how here: How to Customize Your Pre-Order Label

Next Steps

Once you are ready to release all of your course or community content, check out these articles:

In this article: