Shopify Pre-Orders: Native vs App, Payments and Ship Dates

Can Shopify Do Pre-Orders? Yes, Two Ways

Shopify documents the two on different pages: its inventory help names pre-orders as a reason to keep selling at zero stock, and its purchase-options pages describe the pre-order option you set up through an app. The difference is what the shopper sees: one keeps the sale open, the other turns it into a pre-order with its own checkout rules.

Shopify Help Center: Selling when out of stock; Pre-orders; Setting up pre-orders — read September 25, 2026.

Continue selling when out of stock: the built-in route

Shopify's help page on the setting gives the reasons plainly. You might let customers buy out-of-stock items because "You have products available for preorder" or because "You have stock coming soon and you want to continue selling before it arrives." That is the whole mechanism: Continue selling when out of stock keeps the product buyable after its count reaches zero.

Two conditions come with it. You can select the option only when Inventory tracked is turned on, and it doesn't apply to orders placed from Shopify POS — there, staff can keep selling when available inventory reaches zero and below, and POS warns them before they sell an item that isn't available.

Whether you should switch it on at all, and for which products, is its own decision — our answer to should you let Shopify sell when out of stock walks through it.

The pre-order purchase option: what the app adds

Shopify's purchase-options page lists three: subscriptions, preorders and try-before-you-buy. It defines a preorder as a sale where "customers can purchase or reserve items that aren't ready for fulfillment yet, but that you will fulfill at a later date." Where you set it up is the part people miss:

Once the app is set up, you choose whether the product sells only as a pre-order (Only display this product with these purchase options) or also as an ordinary one-time purchase. At the Payment step of checkout, the customer must confirm they understand they're buying a product with a purchase option — they can't complete the purchase without agreeing.

No page we have found names a Shopify-built pre-order app. Shopify's Pre-orders and Setting up pre-orders pages, read on September 25, 2026, send you to the App Store, and the App Store's pre-order category lists third-party apps. Nor have we found a pre-order button that Shopify or its themes add without an app: the same setup page says displaying pre-order information takes one.

For readers asking whether Shopify has "native" pre-orders, the honest answer sits one layer down. In Shopify's developer documentation a pre-order is a selling plan in the PRE_ORDER category, and "There's no single API to create a specific pre-order or TBYB option" — the app assembles it from pricing, delivery, inventory and billing policies. So the settings you get depend on the app you install.

What Pre-Orders Don't Support: Checkouts, Payment Methods, Channels

This is the trade-off setup tutorials tend to skip. Every limit below comes from Shopify's pre-order setup page, and the first two land at checkout, the step where the pre-order gets paid for. If many of your orders go through Shop Pay, Apple Pay or Google Pay, weigh that before moving a best-seller to the app route.

Shopify Help Center, Setting up pre-orders — Requirements and restrictions, read September 25, 2026.

Which gateways? Shopify's two pages give two answers

The two official pages don't give the same list, so here are both rather than one picked quietly. The Help Center's Pre-orders page, read on September 25, 2026: "Pre-orders are currently only available to merchants using Shopify Payments or Paypal Express."

Shopify's developer documentation for building pre-orders, read the same day, says merchants "need to use one of the following payment gateways: Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Adyen on Shopify, Stripe, which is only available to some merchants." The first page is written for merchants, the second for the developers who build pre-order apps.

If you're weighing that last move, our gateway guide covers how to change payment provider safely.

When Do You Charge? Full Payment, Deposit or Pay Later

Shopify's pre-order page puts the whole choice in one sentence: "Depending on the pre-order options that you offer, you can collect full, partial, or no payment at the time the customer places their order." Collecting payments stores your customer's payment method, which is what lets you fulfill and collect the remaining payment at a later date.

• Full payment. The customer pays everything at checkout; there is no balance to collect.
• A deposit. Part of the price at checkout, the balance on a date or a set number of days later.
• No payment at checkout. The payment method is stored and you charge when you're ready.

Taking a deposit and charging the balance later

Under the hood, the app sets a billing policy on the selling plan. Shopify's developer documentation describes it: when you set a checkout charge, "a partial amount is charged at checkout, and the remaining balance amount is charged on a specific date (EXACT_TIME) or X days after checkout (TIME_AFTER_CHECKOUT)." Its worked example charges 10% of the total as a deposit and the rest when the product is fulfilled — an illustration, not a recommended share.

One constraint holds whichever app you choose: each order can have only one deferred payment due date. That is why the mixed-cart rules below exist.

If your gateway rules the pre-order app out, a deposit can still come from elsewhere: the deposit apps compared in our partial payments guide add a deposit option at checkout without Shopify's pre-order purchase option.

Several pre-orders in one cart: which date wins

Because an order carries one deferred due date, Shopify resolves carts with several pre-orders by three rules. The examples are Shopify's own:

Shopify Help Center, Setting up pre-orders — Multiple due dates and deposits, read September 25, 2026.

If your store runs Payment Customization Functions, Shopify says they only affect the non-pre-order products in a mixed cart; the pre-order items follow the rules in this table.

Charging the balance early, and why customers must know

Stock sometimes lands ahead of plan. Shopify lets you bring the balance forward: you can send the customer an invoice, or enter their credit or debit card details to charge them. How invoices go out from the admin is covered in can Shopify send an invoice to a customer. The catch is in the next line of the same page:

Don't count on Shopify to warn the customer for you. Its deferred-payments page says "Payment reminders aren't sent for orders with purchase options such as subscriptions, preorders, or try before you buy." Send your own note before any balance charge, early or on time.

How Long Can You Hold a Card Payment? 7 Days on Shopify Payments

If you're tempted to skip the app and authorize the card at checkout, then capture when stock arrives, the authorization has its own clock. "Shopify Payments provides an authorization period of 7 days." The other clocks around a delayed charge, from Shopify's payment pages:

Shopify Help Center: Payment authorization; Shop Cash authorizations, captures and pre-orders — read September 25, 2026.

The practical reading: authorize now, capture later fits only a wait shorter than the 7-day window on a standard Shopify Payments store. For anything longer, the app's deposit or pay-later option is the tool built for it, because it stores the customer's payment method rather than leaning on an authorization.

Which Pre-Order Setup Fits Your Store?

The verdict at the top of the page answers by one situation. Real launches mix several — a new product with a deposit on a gateway the Help Center doesn't list, or a restock six weeks out. These five answers combine them into a route and a short setup plan: what to install, which setting to change and the line to put in your policy.

Choosing a Pre-Order App: Five Questions, Five Options

Shopify's pages leave several decisions to the app, and those are where apps differ. Ask these five before you install:

1. Does it set the product up as Shopify's pre-order purchase option? Shopify's pre-order pages — the payment choices, the checkout confirmation and the limits above — describe pre-orders set up in an app and managed in the admin.
2. When does it reserve stock? Shopify says inventory for a pre-order is reserved at the time of sale or at fulfillment, and some apps let you choose; if yours doesn't say, the developer has the answer.
3. Which payment options does it offer? Full, partial or no payment at checkout, with the balance on a date or a number of days later, keeping in mind each order carries one deferred due date.
4. What happens if you uninstall it? The app's pre-order data, except customer payment information, is deleted 48 hours after you uninstall; if the app has a backup mechanism, you can restore the data later.
5. Does a refund reach the app? After a refund on the Orders page you might need to cancel the order in the pre-order app as well, so ask how the app keeps the two in step.

The table shows only what each listing publishes — rating, review count and paid-plan prices — so use the five questions to tell the apps apart. It is a snapshot of five apps, not a ranking and not the whole category.

Ratings, review counts and prices read on each app's Shopify App Store listing on September 25, 2026; all five also list a free trial, and Globo and Essent list a free plan. Ratings and prices change, so confirm on the listing. More apps: the App Store's pre-orders category.

How to Switch Pre-Orders On

Steps one and two apply to everyone. Step three is the whole Continue selling route; steps four to seven are the app route; step eight is for both. Shopify's screen-by-screen instructions live on its Setting up pre-orders page — the checklist is the order to work in and what to verify.

If you'd rather watch both routes on screen, PreProduct — one of the five apps in the table above — recorded a July 2025 walkthrough with a chapter on the no-app setting and a chapter on setting up an app. It illustrates the steps; it isn't a recommendation, and every limit and payment rule on this page comes from Shopify's documentation.

Stock and Fulfillment Holds After a Pre-Order Sells

Two things change in the admin once pre-orders arrive. The first is stock: "Inventory for a pre-order is reserved either at the time of sale or fulfillment," and some apps let you pick which. In Shopify's developer documentation the same switch is the inventory policy, ON_SALE or ON_FULFILLMENT.

The second is holds. A system hold is placed on orders with a selling plan that requires future fulfillment at an unscheduled date, and Shopify says of the Unknown delivery date hold: "This hold is usually applied to pre-orders." You can add your own holds too — up to 10 manual holds per fulfillment.

When a pre-order shares an order with in-stock items, the order status depends on how the fulfillments sit:

Shopify Help Center, Holding fulfillments — Order status table (three of its scenarios), read September 25, 2026.

If you put an unfulfilled pre-order on hold yourself, Shopify's instruction is to make sure the customer is told the status of their pre-order.

How Long Can a Pre-Order Wait? Shopify's Rule, US, UK and EU

Two layers apply to a pre-order promise: Shopify's requirement, which covers its pre-order purchase option (the app route), and consumer law where you and your customers are, which covers both routes. The practical move comes first: state the delivery time in the listing, because each default below applies only when no time was stated or agreed. This page quotes the rules; which law governs a given sale is a question for your own adviser.

Shopify Help Center (Setting up pre-orders); eCFR, 16 CFR Part 435; legislation.gov.uk, Consumer Rights Act 2015, s.28; EUR-Lex, Directive 2011/83/EU — read September 25, 2026. A summary of the texts, not legal advice.

Shopify's requirement: a reasonable basis for your date

This is not a statute. It is a condition Shopify sets for pre-orders set up through a pre-order app, under Requirements and restrictions on its setup page:

Read it as a writing instruction for the product page: a stated date must be one you can defend, and the delay message needs two parts — the new date and the right to cancel or get a refund.

United States: the FTC's mail and internet order rule

The US rule is 16 CFR Part 435, and it works in four steps:

1. The deadline. If no time is clearly and conspicuously stated, shipping is due "within thirty (30) days after receipt of a properly completed order from the buyer." When the buyer applies to you for credit to pay, you have 50 days instead.
2. The delay notice. If you can't ship in time, you must offer the buyer, "clearly and conspicuously and without prior demand," the choice to consent to the delay or to cancel and receive a prompt refund.
3. Automatic cancellation. If the revised ship date you offer is more than 30 days past the original deadline, or you can't give one, the offer must also tell the buyer the order will be deemed canceled unless you ship within 30 days of the original deadline with no cancellation received, or the buyer consents to the delay within that time. With a revised date 30 days or less past the original deadline, a buyer who doesn't reply is deemed to have consented to the delay.
4. The refund clock. A prompt refund means within 7 working days, except for credit sales where you yourself are the creditor, which get one billing cycle. A card from a third-party issuer falls under the 7 working days.

The rule doesn't apply to four kinds of order: subscriptions for serial delivery after the first shipment, seeds and growing plants, C.O.D. orders, and transactions under the FTC's negative option rule.

UK and EU: 30 days unless you agreed on a date

In the UK, section 28(3) of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires delivery "(a) without undue delay, and (b) in any event, not more than 30 days after the day on which the contract is entered into" — the default when you and the consumer haven't agreed another time. Where the Act's conditions for a missed delivery are met, "the consumer may treat the contract as at an end."

In the EU, Article 18 of the Consumer Rights Directive reads: "Unless the parties have agreed otherwise on the time of delivery, the trader shall deliver the goods … without undue delay, but not later than 30 days from the conclusion of the contract."

Miss it and the consumer calls on you to deliver "within an additional period of time appropriate to the circumstances"; if that passes too, they may terminate, and you must "reimburse all sums paid under the contract" without undue delay. Where you refused to deliver, or the date was essential, the customer may terminate straight away.

Do Pre-Orders Raise Your Shopify Payments Reserve Risk?

Shopify Payments explains why the wait matters to it. Among the factors on its reserves page: "Industries with extended delivery timelines: Higher risk due to potential delays or disruptions in fulfilling orders. For example, event organizers, custom orders, and pre-orders."

The page describes two shapes, and its numbers are examples rather than standard terms: a fixed amount reserve, where $1000.00 USD might be held for 120 days, and a percentage-based reserve, where 10% of each transaction is held for the following 120 days.

If a reserve arrives, the email decides your options. You appeal by replying within the stated timeframe, but "Some reserves can't be appealed" — when the email lists requirements instead of inviting an appeal, meeting them is the route. What happens after that is covered in why Shopify Payments hasn't released your reserve.

The chargeback side of pre-orders, an unexpected early charge, is covered in charging the balance early.

Editing, Canceling and Refunding a Pre-Order

Shopify lets you edit an order with pre-order products, within limits. You can:

• increase or decrease the pre-order item quantity;
• add, adjust or remove a discount on a pre-order item;
• remove a pre-order product;
• add a one-time purchase item.

What you can't do is add a new pre-order product when editing an order.

Canceling follows fulfillment. You can cancel a partially paid pre-order that hasn't been fulfilled; once it's fulfilled you can't cancel the order, but you can issue full and partial refunds for the fulfilled items.

If the customer cancels, you might still need to refund the order manually, and a message on the order tells you when. The general rules for canceling in the admin are in can you cancel a Shopify order.

The Bottom Line

Pre-orders on Shopify come down to three decisions, made in order: the route, the moment you charge, and the date you promise.

Frequently Asked Questions