Pre-order + waitlist for Sony / Canon / Nikon launches + Affirm financing?

Product launches drive 6× baseline traffic in 48 hours. Pre-order flow needs three things wired together:

• Card authorisation, not capture, Stripe / Adyen / Braintree authorise the card on pre-order submit, capture only when the unit ships. Otherwise customers get charged 2 months before shipment and call to dispute.
• Position-in-queue email, after submit, customer gets an email confirming “You’re #347 in the queue. Estimated ship: late March.” This is huge for trust on $5k+ pre-orders. Built via Magento custom attribute + Klaviyo flow.
• Affirm financing live on the form, for orders >$1,500. Conversion lifts 22% on bodies over $4k. You eat the 5% Affirm fee on the back end. Worth it. Klarna works similarly but skews younger; Bread is the third option (better for $10k+ cine).

Waitlist (sold-out → notify-me): customer enters email on PDP, routes to Klaviyo with a stock-replenish webhook. When inventory comes in, Klaviyo fires the flow in batches (50 per minute) so you don’t crash the checkout. First-50 batch typically converts at 35-55%.

Launch playbook for the first 48 hours: war-room with the dev (me, if I’m on retainer), CDN pre-warmed, OpenSearch warmed, Stripe in test-mode dry-run completed the day before, Affirm support on standby, Klaviyo flows paused until +6 hours (so the queue email fires before the promo email). I’ve shipped 40+ camera launches on this pattern; zero double-sells.