This thread is created to discuss more in details a potential feature that’s come up during concept testing of shop front updates. At the moment it is not planned for further analysis or development, but it would be good to keep track of it and investigate in which cases this is needed.
If anyone has further insights or thoughts on this, please share 
I will quote here the very good intro from @tschumilas:
OFN Canada has a number of hubs (wholesale cut flower hubs) where shopping is VERY brisk when the store opens. (Remember COVID? - like that, but all the time.) And so shoppers miss out on product with limited supply. First these hubs set up ‘premium’ order cycles, where buyers paid more, and opened these shops earlier. But in a year, all the buyers opted to be in the ‘premium’ buyer groups - so this didn’t help. We have set up various (rather labourous) systems outside of OFN where buyers can ‘reserve’ or ‘pre order’ product, but this just burdens hub managers who have to manually enter pre-order orders. The current situation is that buyers place many (often at least 3) orders per shop. They shop quick to get a limited product in their cart, and then checkout to secure it. Then they start a new orders….. Managing multiple orders per customer per order cycle takes hub managers more time.
Multiple orders per order cycle would be ok, if there was a way to merge the orders. Then it wouldn’t matter that a customer places 3, 5, 10… separate orders. Or, another solution is permitting buyers to edit orders. Then, a customer can login in, secure their first few product choices and checkout. Then login again, and add to that order ….. The tricky bit here though, is that customers will just load up their first order with everything the might possibly want, and then delete the items they don’t want, late in the order cycle, when no one else has the opportunity to buy (kind of like hoarding). So - for ‘customer can edit orders’ to work in this scenerio, the hub needs to be able to give permission to ‘add’ to order and not permission to ‘delete’ from order. Add and delete permissions need to be autonomous.