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:

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.

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