Shopify has no pre-order button. What it has is a purchase options system that apps plug into, and a separate inventory setting that lets a sold-out product keep taking orders. Those two get confused constantly, and the difference decides whether you can take a deposit or charge anything later.
Shopify’s own documentation is blunt about it. The Help Center states that to use pre-orders, you need to install a pre-order app from the Shopify App Store. The no-app method most guides describe takes full payment at checkout.
In this guide, you’ll learn what each route can do and where it stops. You’ll also get the payment gateway requirement that rules some stores out before they start, and the one inventory setting behind most overselling on preorder launches.
- Shopify’s Help Center says a pre-order app is required to run actual pre-orders.
- The no-app method is overselling with a ship date in the copy: full payment at checkout, and nothing on the order marks it as a pre-order.
- Deferred payment needs a supported gateway, and it rules out POS, draft orders and B2B entirely.
- Inventory can commit at order or at fulfilment, and picking the wrong one is what oversells a launch.
- Shopify stores the card as a payment mandate, so the balance can be charged later without asking the customer again.
This guide sits alongside our complete guide to preorders in ecommerce, which covers when a preorder is worth running at all.
What Shopify gives you natively
There are two native features related to pre-orders that work in completely different ways.
The first is purchase options, Shopify’s framework for selling something on terms other than pay-now-ship-now. Pre-orders live here, along with subscriptions and try-before-you-buy. The framework handles pricing, delivery timing, inventory commitment, and billing as four separate policies, which is why a pre-order can charge 30% today and the rest in six weeks. Shopify exposes this to apps instead of to you directly, so no screen in your admin builds one.
The second is Continue selling when out of stock, an inventory toggle. It lets a product at zero stock keep accepting orders at full price, immediately, with nothing on the order marking it as anything unusual. Useful for a short wait, with no deposit option and no deferred charge.
Shopify’s purchase options support full, partial or no payment at checkout, with the balance collected later. The Help Center states that using pre-orders requires installing a pre-order app from the App Store, since no admin screen creates one.
Check your payment setup before you pick a method
Deferred payment is the part of pre-orders that depends on your payment stack, and it is worth checking first. Shopify’s developer documentation lists Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Adyen on Shopify, and Stripe for some merchants. The Help Center page states the shorter pair of Shopify Payments or PayPal Express. Either way, a store running only local payment methods cannot defer a charge.
Beyond your payment gateway, several core Shopify features and channels are incompatible with deferred purchase options:
| If your store relies on | Pre-order support |
|---|---|
| Shopify POS | Not supported |
| Draft orders | Not supported |
| B2B on Shopify | Not supported |
| Stores still on checkout.liquid, or cart permalinks | Not supported |
| “Buy X get Y” discounts | Not supported on pre-order items |
| Editing an existing pre-order | The Order Edits API can only remove the item |
Source: Shopify developer documentation on deferred purchase options. Checked October 2026.
How to sell a sold-out product without an app
This is the route worth understanding before you reach for anything else, because it takes about a minute and covers a narrow set of cases properly.
Open the product or variant in your admin and find the Inventory section. Turn on Track quantity (Inventory tracked), which has to be on before the next option appears. Then select Continue selling when out of stock. The product now accepts orders at zero stock.
The rest is copy. Your product page needs to say the item ships later and give a date, because nothing in the interface tells the customer anything has changed. The order confirmation email needs the same, since Shopify will send its standard version otherwise. Because Shopify sends the exact same Order Confirmation template for every purchase, changing the default email text affects your in-stock products too—unless you wrap the pre-order notice in a Liquid conditional tied to a product tag
Two caveats come straight from Shopify’s documentation. The setting has no effect on Shopify POS, where staff can keep selling past zero and get warned at the till instead. Multi-location setups have a second catch: an item still shows as out of stock online when the location that fulfills online orders sits at zero, even with units on the shelf elsewhere.
The customer pays in full at checkout, so a twelve-week wait means twelve weeks holding someone’s money with no deposit option. The order carries no pre-order flag, so it looks identical to in-stock orders in your reports and to whoever packs it. Fit it to short, cheap, low-volume waits, and move on once any of those three stops being true.
How to Set Up Preorders on Shopify with an app
An app’s job is to create the purchase option that Shopify will not let you build by hand, then manage the charge that comes later. The setup follows the same shape whichever app you choose.
Start by deciding the delivery policy, which is how the ship date behaves. Shopify supports three types: as soon as possible, a fixed date, or unknown. A fixed date is the one your product page should be showing, and the one your preorder policy commits you to.
Then set the billing policy. You can charge the full amount upfront, take a partial deposit, or charge zero at checkout and collect the full balance later. Whenever you take a deposit or defer payment, the remaining balance falls due either on a fixed date, a set number of days after checkout, or upon fulfillment. Shopify stores the customer’s card as a payment mandate at this point, which is what lets you collect the balance later without emailing anyone for card details.
Keep in mind that a saved mandate guarantees a way to attempt the charge, not that the charge will always clear. Over an eight-week lead time, cards expire, hit limits, or get cancelled. When a deferred charge fails on its due date, Shopify (or your pre-order app) sends the customer an invoice link to pay the remaining balance manually before you fulfill the order.
One detail catches people out on multi-item carts. An order can only carry one deferred due date. Buy two pre-orders with different dates means the earlier one wins, while a balance due on fulfillment takes precedence over any fixed date.
TA Preorder & Back In Stock handles these as campaign settings instead of API fields, and adds back-in-stock alerts for the variants you leave out of the campaign. It is free with no volume cap, which suits testing the flow before a launch. For a wider comparison, our roundup of preorder apps covers seven options against the same criteria.
The setting that causes overselling
Purchase options include an inventory policy with two values, and the choice between them decides whether a launch can oversell.
Committing inventory at the time of the order deducts stock the moment someone pre-orders. Committing it at fulfilment leaves stock untouched until you ship. The second sounds harmless and is where launches go wrong. Incoming stock stays fully available in Shopify while pre-orders accumulate against it, so the same units sell several times over with no warning anywhere.
Say you have 50 jackets arriving next month and set those 50 units as incoming or available stock. If your campaign commits inventory at fulfilment, the first pre-order leaves all 50 units untouched. You could take 120 pre-orders over the weekend while Shopify still shows 50 in stock—and you will only discover the 70-unit shortfall when the shipment lands at your warehouse
Commit at order time whenever you are pre-selling against a known incoming quantity. Leave commitment until fulfilment only for made-to-order products, where there is no fixed number to oversell in the first place.
How to test it before you launch
Place a real order on the pre-order product from a separate customer account and follow it the whole way through. The product page, the cart, the checkout and the confirmation email should all state the same ship date, and that chain breaks more often than any individual setting does.
Check what the charge looks like on the receipt when you are taking a deposit, since the customer sees a partial amount and needs to understand the rest is coming. Then open the order in your admin and confirm the balance shows with the due date you expected.
Worth doing once before you publicise anything: change the stock level on the product and watch whether the pre-order button behaves the way you set it to. That one check surfaces a misconfigured inventory policy while you can still change it.
Final thoughts
The choice between the two routes is narrower than it looks. If the wait is short, the item is cheap and the volume is small, the inventory toggle plus honest product copy does the job without another subscription. Anything involving a deposit, a long lead time, or a quantity you could oversell needs the purchase options framework, which means an app.
Check the payment gateway question first either way, because it is the one constraint that no app can work around.
Can you do preorders on Shopify without an app?
You can sell a sold-out product using the Continue selling when out of stock setting, which takes full payment at checkout. Shopify’s Help Center states that actual pre-orders, with deferred or partial payment, require a pre-order app.
How do I turn on Continue selling when out of stock?
Open the product or variant, go to the Inventory section, turn on Inventory tracked, then select Continue selling when out of stock. The setting has no effect on Shopify POS orders.
Which payment providers support Shopify preorders?
Shopify’s developer documentation lists Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Adyen on Shopify, and Stripe for some merchants. Local payment methods are not supported for deferred payment.
Can I take a deposit instead of full payment?
Yes, through a pre-order app. The billing policy sets a checkout charge for the deposit, and the balance falls due on a fixed date or a set number of days after checkout.
Why did my preorder launch oversell?
Most often because inventory was set to commit at fulfilment instead of at order time, leaving incoming stock fully available while pre-orders stacked up against it. Switch the campaign to commit inventory when the order is placed.
Last reviewed: October 2026.
