Limited releases that cannot oversell

Drops

A drop is a scheduled release of a fixed number of units. You give it a launch time, add products with a quantity each and while it is live those products sell only through the drop. Drops come with the online storefront, on the Growth and Business plans.

Why an ordinary product page cannot do this is covered in running a limited release without overselling, and the short version is in the answer on overselling. This page is the reference for what you configure and what the software guarantees.

What you set up

Three switches sit alongside those. Early access gives you a code that lets a chosen few shop before launch. Waiting room holds shoppers in a queue at launch. Sell in the normal shop too is off by default, which is what makes a drop exclusive: while it is live, its products leave the ordinary catalogue and a cart line for one of them is refused unless it came through the drop. There is also a preview link, so you can read an unlaunched drop as a customer will.

The guarantee, precisely

Units are claimed when the shopper adds them to the cart, not when the card clears. The claim is all or nothing: if any line in that add would take a product past what is left, nothing in the add is claimed and the whole add fails. The hold is temporary: a shopper who walks away loses it and the units go back.

What makes this a guarantee rather than a good intention is what happens when things break.

• If the count cannot be confirmed, no sale happens. The shopper is told reservations are temporarily unavailable. Nothing falls back to selling against a number nobody checked.
• If anything goes wrong mid-sale, it lands on selling one too few. Never one too many.

Cancelled and fully refunded orders return their units, and cancelling the drop releases every live hold at once. Editing a quantity mid-run applies the difference rather than resetting the count, and cutting one below what is already sold keeps blocking sales on purpose until the shortfall is covered.

The waitlist, and who presses send

Customers can join a waitlist before launch, which tags them for this specific drop and makes them an audience.

Announcing to that waitlist builds a draft campaign and stops. You open it, read it and send it. The one hands-off path is per-drop auto-announce, which is off until you switch it on: pick an offset of at launch, one, six or twenty-four hours before, optionally attach a storefront discount and scheduling the drop schedules the email too. Turn it off and an unsent announcement is pulled back to a draft rather than fired.

Separately, the drop's own lifecycle raises events as it happens: launch approaching, live, sold out, ended. Those are available as automation triggers.

After it ends

Results attribute orders line by line, not order by order, because a cart can legitimately mix a drop line with an ordinary one. You get units and revenue per line, sell-through against the quantity you set, order count and distinct buyers. Time to sell out appears only where a sold-out event was recorded, so read a blank as "not captured" rather than "never sold out".

Design decisions

• The allocation is a number you set deliberately. Pair it with stock alerts to confirm the bake is covered.
• The per-customer cap counts customers, not people. It is enforced while shopping and again at checkout, but one person determined enough to order as two different customers is beyond what a cap can see.
• Sending is always your decision. Auto-announce is opt-in per drop.