Selling What You Don't Have Yet
Pre-selling a product before it is built sounds easy. Take the orders now. Deliver when stock arrives. The hard part hides one level down. When demand runs ahead of supply, you have to decide who gets the next unit. That decision is not a detail. It is the whole game.
This is sharpest for scarce, high-value goods. Think of a premium e-bike brand. The bikes are serial-numbered. They sell in seasonal pre-order waves. Supply is tight on purpose. Every unit that comes off the line already has several buyers waiting for it.
First-Come-First-Served Is a Policy You Didn't Choose
Here is the trap. Most systems allocate stock in the order the paperwork was confirmed. Whoever clicked "confirm" first gets the unit. That feels fair and neutral. For a scarce pre-ordered product, it is neither. It is a policy nobody actually decided. And it quietly causes channel conflict, because a key dealer can lose a unit to a faster clerk somewhere else.
Standard Odoo inventory reservation works this way by default. It reserves stock in order. That is fine for products you can restock quickly. It does not encode business priority. It has no view on which customer, channel, or region should come first when there is not enough to go around.
Make Allocation a Decision, Not a Side Effect
The fix is to turn allocation into an explicit policy the business controls. For one of our customers, a premium consumer-hardware brand in the e-bike market, we built exactly that. Priority rules decide who gets the next available unit. Stock reserved against a credit-blocked account is released automatically, so it does not sit frozen behind an account that cannot pay. Seasonal toggles switch the behaviour between pre-order waves and normal selling.
Now allocation is a choice, not an accident. The business decides who comes first, on purpose, with rules it can see and adjust. Nobody wins a scarce unit just by being quick on the confirm button.
If you sell more demand than you can supply, allocation is a strategy, and it deserves to be treated like one. Majorbird builds these rules into Odoo so the system enforces your priorities instead of undoing them. If you are pre-selling scarce stock, let's talk.