Wholesale Handler
Open the ordering window before you advertise it
This is the setting that silently blocks pre-orders. An order profile can cap how far ahead a customer may order - a maximum lead time that suits weekly trade, often a fortnight or a month. A customer on that profile cannot pick a date beyond it, so a turkey pre-order in September is impossible against a 14-day cap and the customer sees a closed date rather than an explanation.
Raise or clear the cap on every profile whose customers you want pre-ordering, and do it before the email goes out. Otherwise the first thing your announcement produces is a phone call saying the date will not click.
Put the product on sale for its season only
Seasonal availability works in the negative. Rather than opening a product for a range of dates, you mark it unavailable for the ranges it should not be sold in, with a reason and a note your customers see.
That inversion matters for a pre-order, because the product has to be orderable now and deliverable later. A Christmas ham on sale from September with an unavailability window covering January onwards is orderable today for a December date, and closes itself afterwards without you remembering to withdraw it.
Leave the end date open when you do not know it. An open-ended window runs until further notice, which is the right state for weather and for a crop whose finish date is a guess.
Put the cutoff where production commits
For weekly trade the cutoff protects the delivery. For a pre-order it protects the commitment you have to make in advance - the birds ordered, the trees netted, the chocolate tempered. That date is usually weeks before delivery and has nothing to do with the delivery day itself.
Set it where your own money goes out. After it passes, the production schedule shows a green lock against the date, which is your signal that the totals are final and safe to buy against. An amber lock means orders can still move.
A pre-order is a commitment, not a payment
Wholesale Handler records what each customer has committed to. It does not take a deposit, hold a card or track a prepayment, so the money arrives on the invoice after delivery like any other order.
For trade customers that is usually the right shape - they are accounts you know, not the public. If your risk is a customer walking away from fifty trees in December, the lever is who you let pre-order, not a deposit the system cannot collect.
