The Impact of Pre-Order System on Perceived Product Quality and Exclusivity: A Study on Ayumi's Homemade Mie Kocok

Home-based culinary micro-enterprises in Indonesia have increasingly adopted digital pre-order systems as an operational mechanism to align production with confirmed demand, preserve ingredient quality, and manage limited production capacity. Despite their growing prevalence, the consumer behavioral consequences of pre-order systems particularly their effects on perceived product quality and perceived exclusivity remain empirically underexplored, especially within the context of traditional home-based food businesses in emerging markets (Rai et al., 2023; Pillai et al., 2022). This study investigated the impact of the pre-order system on perceived product quality and perceived exclusivity among consumers of Ayumi's Homemade, a family-operated Mie Kocok micro-enterprise in Cikarang, West Java, Indonesia. Drawing upon signaling theory and scarcity theory as complementary theoretical foundations, two hypotheses were advanced: H1, that the pre-order system exerts a positive effect on perceived product quality; and H2, that the pre-order system exerts a positive effect on perceived exclusivity. A quantitative cross-sectional survey design was employed, with data collected from 108 respondents who had purchased through the pre-order system, selected via purposive sampling. Data collection was conducted through a self-administered online questionnaire distributed via Google Forms, and analysis was performed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) via SmartPLS 4.0 (Hair et al., 2019). The results confirmed both hypotheses: the pre-order system exerted a highly significant positive effect on perceived product quality (β = 0.962, T = 39.728, p = 0.000), explaining 92.6% of its variance, and a significant positive effect on perceived exclusivity (β = 0.625, T = 9.405, p = 0.000), explaining 39.1% of its variance. These findings extend consumer behavior literature in the digital MSME food sector and offer actionable strategic guidance for home-based culinary entrepreneurs leveraging pre-order systems as instruments of perceived value creation and competitive differentiation.