How do I run a limited release without overselling?

Run it as a drop. You schedule the release, set how many units each line offers, and ibakepro holds the stock at the moment a customer adds it to their cart rather than when they pay. The release cannot sell past the number you set. Drops come with the online storefront, on the Growth and Business plans.

The oversell happens between the cart and the card

Almost every oversell on a small release comes from the same gap: two people have the last box in their cart, and whoever pays second gets an order you cannot fill. ibakepro closes that gap by moving the decision earlier. Adding to the cart reserves the units immediately, and it does so for every line in that cart at once. If any one line would take it past what is left, the whole reservation is refused, so a mixed cart can never take the item that was available and oversell the one that was not.

A hold does not last forever. If the customer walks away without paying, the units return to the pool on their own, and a cancelled order restocks the release too. Nothing has to be reconciled by hand afterwards.

Who sends the waitlist announcement

Customers can join a waitlist before a drop opens. That waitlist is a customer segment, and the announcement is a normal marketing campaign sent against it. You can schedule it to go out automatically a set time before launch, or leave it as a draft and send it yourself when you are ready.

The announcement goes through the same consent rules as every other marketing email, so waitlist members who have not opted in to marketing are not contacted. A waitlist is a list of interested people, not a licence to email them.

Limits and the waiting room

Each line can carry a per-customer limit. It counts everything that shopper is already holding of that line rather than one add at a time, so adding six boxes three times over does not get past a limit of six. If more people arrive at launch than you want on the checkout at once, they enter a waiting room and are admitted in the order they arrived, in batches, each with a window to finish shopping.

After it closes

You get units and revenue per line, sell-through per line and how long it took to sell out. Everyone who joined the waitlist and missed out is still a segment, so you can go back to them for the next release.

Where this does not apply

• Essentials. Drops ride on the online storefront, which starts at Growth. On Essentials you can still take pre-orders by recording them as orders and sending payment links.
• The allocation is a number you set deliberately. Pair it with stock alerts to confirm the bake is covered before you schedule the release.
• Exclusivity is per product, not per cart. A drop-only product can only be bought through its live drop, but a customer can still add ordinary catalogue items to the same cart.