Shopify Preorder: How to Set It Up and What It Breaks

Shopify handles preorder through purchase options — the same machinery behind subscriptions and Try Before You Buy. There are two deferred types: pre-order, which commits inventory and charges a deposit with the balance later, and Try Before You Buy, which ships first and charges after a set period.

The part that surprises people: you still need an app. Shopify's own documentation is blunt about it — to display information about pre-orders, you must use a pre-order app. The purchase-options framework is native; the storefront experience is not.

Once the app is configured, the product-level control sits in your admin under Products, then the product, then the purchase-option display setting — a checkbox labelled "Only display this product with these purchase options".

There is a cruder free route, which is to tick "continue selling when out of stock" and relabel the button in your theme. That takes money for stock you do not have, with no deposit logic, no deferred billing and no record that the order is a preorder. For a single drop it survives. As a system it does not.

Read this section before you plan the campaign, because any one of these can sink it.

Accelerated checkout stops working. Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay cannot be used for preorders. For a lot of stores that is the majority of mobile conversion, switched off on exactly the product you are promoting hardest.

Local payment methods stop working too, including Klarna and mollie iDEAL | Wero. If a market of yours runs on a local method, preorder removes it there.

The rest of the list:

• Not supported on stores with customized checkouts.
• Online Store and Custom Storefront only — preorder is not supported on other sales channels, and not on Shopify POS.
• Gateway-restricted: Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Adyen on Shopify, or Stripe, which Shopify says is available only to some merchants.
• Not on draft orders or B2B.
• Subscriptions cannot be preordered, and a customer cannot combine different purchase options for one product in a single checkout.
• Buy X get Y discounts are not supported, and neither is Shop Promise.
• Cart permalinks are not supported, which breaks some ad and email flows.
• Order editing is limited to removing a product from the order.

None of this makes preorder a bad idea. It does mean the honest version of the question is not "can we do preorder" but "can we afford to lose accelerated checkout on this product for six weeks".

Three billing shapes, and the choice is mostly a cash-flow and risk decision.

• Charge in full at checkout. Simplest. You hold the customer's money and the obligation that comes with it.
• Deposit now, balance later. Shopify calls the amount taken at checkout the checkout charge. The customer's payment method is stored so you can collect the remainder without contacting them again.
• Bill on fulfillment. The balance is charged when the order ships.

Two details that catch people out. An order can carry only one deferred payment due date — if the cart holds items with different dates, the earliest wins, and a due-on-fulfillment term takes precedence over a specific date. And the app is responsible for scheduling the charge and handling failures, so a card that declines three months after checkout is your problem to chase, not Shopify's.

Shopify does not publish a maximum deferral period. That is not the same as there being no risk: the longer the gap, the more cards expire, and a deposit model with a long tail needs someone watching the failed-payment queue. If payments themselves are already misbehaving, start with Shopify payments not working before layering preorder on top.

Inventory is where preorder quietly goes wrong, and the setting that decides it is when stock gets committed.

Shopify supports committing inventory when the order is created or when the order is fulfilled. Commit at creation and your available count drops immediately, which protects you from overselling but makes the product look out of stock to everyone else. Commit at fulfillment and the product stays sellable, which is usually what you want for a preorder — and is also how you end up with 400 orders against 300 units.

The free "continue selling when out of stock" route has no concept of this at all. It simply keeps selling. Any cap you want has to live somewhere else, which is the single most common reason a preorder drop oversells.

Fulfillment timing has three settings: as soon as possible, an exact date, or unknown when the timing depends on something else. Pick the one that matches what you actually know, because the next section is about what happens when the date you promised turns out to be wrong.

If your counts are already drifting before any of this, fix that first — see Shopify inventory not syncing.

Three words that get used interchangeably and mean different things operationally.

• Preorder — the product exists or will exist, and has never been on sale here. You are selling ahead of launch.
• Backorder — the product is established and sells normally, but you are out of stock and taking orders against incoming supply.
• Presale — usually a timing and access play: early window, limited allocation, often for existing customers.

The distinction matters because the customer's expectation differs in each case, and so does the right inventory setting. A backorder against a confirmed purchase order can commit stock at creation with a credible date. A preorder for something still in production usually cannot, and should say so rather than inventing a date.

It also matters for what you write on the page. A shopper who has bought the item before reads "temporarily out of stock, ships 14 March" very differently from "preorder now" on something that has never shipped.

Preorder is one of the few Shopify features with consumer-law expectations attached, and Shopify states them directly.

You need a reasonable basis for any shipping timeframe you advertise. If you do not specify a date at all, Shopify's guidance is that you need a reasonable belief the product will ship within 30 days of purchase.

If you miss the date you promised, you are expected to give the customer a revised date and explain their cancellation and refund rights. That is not a nice-to-have; it is the part that turns a delayed drop into chargebacks when it is handled badly.

Practically, that means three things before launch: a ship-date estimate you can defend, a written preorder policy covering delays and cancellations, and someone who will actually send the revised-date email rather than hoping the stock lands. Stores that get burned by preorder almost always get burned on this, not on the setup.

Rules differ by market, and this is general guidance rather than legal advice — if you are selling into the EU or UK, check the withdrawal and cancellation rules that apply to you.

Most stores can run a first preorder themselves with an app and an afternoon. Bring in help when:

• Losing Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay on the product would cost more than the preorder earns, and you need someone to model that before committing.
• You run a customized checkout, which rules out preorder until that is resolved.
• You need a deposit model with balance collection, failed-payment handling and a reconciliation process that finance will accept.
• You need a hard cap on units, which the native settings will not give you on their own.
• Preorder has to coexist with subscriptions, B2B or POS, all of which it does not support.
• A drop oversold and you are deciding who gets refunded.

The useful first question for anyone you hire is which gateway you are on and whether your checkout is customized. If they do not ask that in the first ten minutes, they have not done this before.

Not sure what kind of help you need? Read what kind of Shopify expert do I need, or see Shopify expert cost for ranges. For checkout and payment configuration work, browse Shopify checkout customization experts and Shopify payment gateway experts.