August 18, 2024
Shopify don’t have a built-in preorder feature, so read on to learn how you can sell pre-orders and back-orders on Shopify with no coding or complicated setup.
Preorders allow customers to order products before they are released or restocked. Full or partial payment can be collected during checkout, but the order will only ship once it becomes available.
This allows you to avoid lost sales from out-of-stock products, and potentially increase sales through a Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) for limited time or limited quantity products.
Preorders can also be used to gauge demand for specific products (or variants), and allow you to capture revenue early. Forecasting demand like this will help you meet Minimum Order Quantities (MOQs) and ensure you don’t end up with extra stock or out-of-pocket.
This method works great for new product ideas you want to validate before getting them manufactured. Collect the money upfront and remove doubt from the equation.
Did you know there are specific requirements you must meet to sell preorders on Shopify? Make sure you read and understand these before diving too deep into the process:
You can learn more about these requirements in the Shopify Help Center.
To provide preorder functionality to your customers natively, you will need to use a supported Shopify app.
We built Early Bird: Pre-order & Restock as a full-featured, compliant, native pre-order solution for Shopify.
While a lot of apps feel thrown together, with no regard for the customer or merchant experience, this app looks and feels like Shopify.
It also has zero commission fees (which is rare amongst pre-order apps).
It uses native purchase options within Shopify to ensure a seamless experience for your customers. While some other apps might just swap out your “Add to Cart” button text to say “Pre-order now”, Early Bird will reliably show the preorder interface and the purchase options you create, ensuring appropriate tracking and tagging of orders as “Pre-order” or “Back-order”, which makes campaign management and reporting super simple.
You can view the demo store (password is “demo”) to see it in action, or view the Shopify app store listing to find out more information.
One of the great things about this app is it allows you to easily configure both pre-orders and back-orders on your products, even for large catalogs (turning back-orders on for tens of thousands of products only takes a couple of clicks).
More features include partial payments (with auto-capture for the remaining balance on the due date), mixed cart support, full localization and customization for storefront elements, plus a bunch more. It has a 100% free plan too, so it’s super easy to get started with no long-term commitment.
Enough theorizing; let’s get started with the setup guide.
The first step is to install the Early Bird app from the Shopify app store.
After you’ve installed the app, you should see the app dashboard, which shows an overview of your pre-sales, plus some help information and onboarding steps.
You will also see a warning banner with a one-click setup to activate the app embed extension for your Shopify theme. This is a required step to get the Early Bird interface to appear on your store once you’ve setup your preorder products.
Click the Activate app embed button to activate the extension for your theme. You must click Save to publish the change.
Once you’ve saved your theme, you can go back to the app dashboard and you should see the green banner shown below. That’s it for the theme changes! No code editing required.
We’re going to start with back-orders, because they are the simplest, and often most commonly desired form of pre-sales (whether you realize or not).
A back-order is similar to a pre-order. The main difference is that for pre-orders, you know when a product will be stocked, and you may have specific dates, payment plans, discounts etc. planned for your pre-order campaign.
For back-orders, you don’t necessarily have a restock date planned, and you might not plan to restock the item until someone purchases it. However, importantly, you still want to capture the sale, instead of showing an out-of-stock message, or just capturing an email address.
Back-orders generally are applied store-wide (or at least to a larger number of products), as they only become active once a product sells out.
To get started, click on Back-orders in the navigation menu and you should see the Back-order Dashboard.
Click the Configure button in the top right corner to edit your back-order settings.
Here you can choose which products you want Early Bird to continue selling after they sell out. You can do this by either excluding or including specific products from your catalog.
It’s easiest to have this apply to your entire catalog, and exclude any exceptions (especially if you have a large product catalog). Just make sure you are able to fulfil orders for all of the selected products before you keep selling them.
It’s important to set the “Continue selling when out of stock” setting on all of your product variants for this to work. Luckily, Early Bird can do this for us, even if we have thousands of products. Be sure to select the option for Early Bird to automatically manage this setting.
Once you’re happy with your changes, click Save in the top bar and you should see the back-order dashboard again.
From here, you can now click the Activate back-orders button at the top to switch back-orders on for your store.
The app will now load for a minute or so to process your selected products (the more products you selected, the longer this will take, but you can leave the page and come back without interrupting the process).
Once this is complete, you can go to your storefront and find a previously sold out product, and you should see it now being available to purchase as a back-order!
Congratulations! You’ve setup back-orders for your store in record time.
You may have also noticed the message and the badge showing above the new “Add back-order to cart” button. All of this is customizable from within the app, so let’s look at how we can edit this quickly.
In the Early Bird app, click on Display in the navigation menu to open the display settings.
At the top you will see options (and a preview) of the back-order widget. You can edit the labels and messages for back-order products here, including changing the button colors to better match your theme, or draw attention to the Call To Action (CTA).
There are display settings for pre-orders and collection page badges too. Feel free to explore these yourself and set things up how you like. Once you’re done, click Save and you should see the changes appear on your storefront instantly.
Now let’s talk pre-order campaigns.
To get started with pre-orders, click on Pre-orders in the navigation menu From here, click the Create campaign button.
You will see the campaign form with a number of options you can configure. The first half of this form should be familiar (it’s similar to back-orders), and will allow you to choose which product(s) you’d like to include in this campaign.
It’s recommended to choose a single product for each campaign, but you can group multiple together if you prefer.
You can also select how you’d like to sell pre-orders (keep selling forever, or sell a limited amount of stock). Opt into managing the inventory yourself, or ask Early Bird to manage these settings for you.
Another neat option is the ability to set a start and end date for the campaign, which takes care of auto-publishing and auto-pausing the campaign at the desired times for you.
Further down, you’ll have the option to set up your purchase options, either Pay in full, or Pay a deposit (or both!). Configure these as needed, and if setting up partial payments, choose when to auto-collect the remaining balance.
Note: the partial payments feature isn’t available on the free plan. You need to upgrade to a paid plan to get access to this.
Finally, set the fulfillment settings (and the expected fulfillment date if you have one). This will show on the storefront to your customers when viewing the pre-order product.
Once you’re done, click Save to confirm your changes and create the pre-order campaign. Don’t worry, it won’t be live just yet!
After it’s saved, you should see the campaign dashboard, with an option to Publish campaign. When you’re ready, click this button to publish the campaign (or schedule it if you set the start date in the future).
After a minute or so, the campaign will be published and active on your store (much like back-orders). Open the product page to see your new pre-order product available for purchase.
You did it! Pre-orders and back-orders are now active on your Shopify store!
Feel free to setup a bunch more pre-order campaigns, or click around the app to get familiar with the other options and features available.
Once sales start coming in, you’ll be able to track them and see analytics in the various dashboards available throughout the app.
If you get stuck or have any questions with the process, the app has unlimited support available, even on the free plan, so just use the in-app chat bubble to get support.
Pre-orders and back-orders are a powerful sales method which a lot of stores (especially apparel, collectibles, toys and indie maker stores) take advantage of to gauge demand, keep cash flowing, and save time.
I hope this guide helps you start selling preorders on Shopify in a simple, clear and easily digestible way! Best of luck with your store 😊
Shopify pre-orders requirements article: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/purchase-options/pre-orders/setup
Early Bird: Pre-order & Restock app: https://apps.shopify.com/early-bird-pre-order-manager
Early Bird demo store (password “demo”): https://shopside-earlybird.myshopify.com/collections/all
