Setting up pre-orders

After you set up pre-orders, your customers can pre-order and pay for products before they're ready to ship. To display information about your pre-orders, you must be using a pre-order app. If you have a pre-order app installed, then pre-order information becomes available in the following areas of your Shopify admin:

• Product page
• Orders list

Requirements and restrictions

To use pre-orders on your store, review the following requirements and restrictions:

• You must have a reasonable basis for saying that a product can be shipped within a certain time.
• If no date is clearly specified, then you must have a reasonable belief that the product will ship within 30 days of purchase.
• If you’re unable to ship within the promised time, then you must provide a revised shipment date and explain the customer’s right to cancel or obtain a refund.
• Preorders aren't supported on stores with customized checkouts.
• Customers can't purchase pre-orders by using the following accelerated checkouts: Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Meta Pay.
• Customers can't use local payment methods such as Klarna, mollie iDEAL, and Sofort to purchase pre-orders.
• Preorder products are only supported on the Online Store and Custom Storefront sales channels.
• You can set up multiple purchase options on a product, but customers can’t combine different purchase options on the same product in a single checkout. For example, customers can’t pre-order a subscription product. A t-shirt for pre-order can't also be purchased as a try-before-you-buy order.
• Buy X get Y discounts aren't supported by pre-orders.

Using pre-orders in the Shopify admin

Before you complete any of the setup steps in your Shopify admin, you need to complete the setup in the pre-order app that you installed in your Shopify admin from the Shopify App Store.

If you have completed the setup in your pre-order app, then review the following sections for any additional steps that are relevant to your business.

Preorder products

If a product or any of its variants have the pre-order purchase option set up, then the pre-order app displays pre-order details on the product page's product description.

You can choose to limit a product to only having the purchase option available, or you can activate both the purchase option, and one-time purchase.

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Products.
2. Click the product that you want to manage the purchase option of.
3. Do one of the following:
   • To sell the product as a purchase option only, select Only display this product with these purchase options.
   • To sell the product as one-time purchases as well as with purchase options, deselect Only show this product with these purchase options.

Customer checkout experience

During checkout, pre-order apps display pre-order information to the customer. For example, if you decide to collect a partial deposit for pre-orders, then the deposit amount due at checkout is displayed in the order summary, as well as the remaining amount due at a later date.

During the Payment step of the checkout, your customer needs to confirm that they understand that they're purchasing a product with a purchase option. They can't complete their purchase without agreeing to this.

Note

If an order has multiple products with different deferred payment due dates, then all of the order's deferred payments are due on the soonest due date. For example, if your customer places an order with a t-shirt that has a payment due date of June 3, and a book that has a payment due date of June 7, then both payment due dates are actually due on June 3.