Notify me or pre-order: which one should you switch on?

Check one: can your checkout take a pre-order at all?

A pre-order app works only with some payment providers, the services that charge the shopper's card. Shopify currently lists Shopify Payments and PayPal Express as the payment providers supported for pre-orders. You can see which provider you use under Settings, then Payments, in your Shopify admin.

On any other provider you still have a route. Shopify's help pages name pre-orders as a reason to switch on Continue selling when out of stock, the product setting that keeps a sold-out item buyable. An order placed that way goes through checkout like any other, with every pay button. You give up the deposit option and the pre-order details a pre-order app shows.

The next limit shows up once shoppers reach checkout. On a pre-order set up through a pre-order app, Shopify blocks Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay, plus local payment methods such as Klarna and iDEAL. Local payment methods are the pay-later and bank payment options popular in certain countries. A shopper who normally pays in two taps now types a card number or goes through PayPal, on a phone, to reserve something that has not shipped.

Two smaller limits also apply to pre-orders set up through an app. They sell only on your online store or a custom-built storefront, and not in Shopify POS, the app for selling in a physical shop. Shopify's help page also says pre-orders are not supported on stores with customized checkouts. Shopify has shut down the old way to edit checkout that only Plus stores had, so if your Plus store has checkout changes, test a pre-order before you launch.

None of that affects a notify-me form. The sale it leads to happens later, at an ordinary checkout with every pay button working.

Check two: can you promise a ship date and keep it?

The date on a pre-order page is a promise with a rule attached. You need a reasonable basis for any shipping time you show, such as a date your supplier confirmed. If you do not give a specific shipping date, Shopify says you must have a reasonable basis to expect the order to ship within 30 days. That comes from the US Federal Trade Commission's Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule, and Shopify's pre-order help page repeats the 30 days.

As soon as you know you will miss the date, and before it passes, tell the buyer the new date and that they can cancel for a full refund. An email or a phone call both count. If they cancel, refund them promptly.

A supplier who says "probably March" has not given you a date you can promise. If you guess one to keep the page selling, you spend the wait answering "when will my order ship?" one message at a time. Often you give the refund anyway, weeks later, to a buyer who has lost patience.

A notify-me form does not create a pre-order because the shopper has not placed an order. You still need the appropriate consent before sending marketing emails. If you still want to run the pre-order, the pre-order guide covers the setup.

Check three: how many units are coming, against how many are waiting?

A restock email does not keep anyone's place in line. It goes to everyone waiting on that product once stock is back, and the first buyers take all the new stock.

Say your supplier sends 9 units, and 63 people are waiting on that product. At most 9 of them can buy. The other 54 who click through find a page that says sold out again. Each signup gets one automatic restock email, so they hear about the next restock only if they sign up again.

Sledge sends that email on its own when the product's stock rises above zero. It does not check whether a pre-order is open, so anyone on the list who has since reserved gets it too. So before the units arrive, take pre-orders for the next delivery, export the waiting list, and email those 63 people from your own email tool. Each one who reserves is a sale the sold-out page would have lost.

Sledge shows how many people are waiting on each product beside the stock you hold now, in two admin columns named Subscribers and Available quantity. The count covers the whole product, not each size, and stock your supplier has only promised is not in it. With 63 waiting and only 9 units coming, the answer is to reorder and take pre-orders, not to wait for the restock email. Back in Stock keeps the list, on the Accelerate plan and up, and Pre-order takes orders for the next delivery, on every paid plan.

Getting the form onto a sold-out page is its own short job, and the notify-me setup post covers it. Shopify's free apps can collect the addresses but have no ready-made notify-me form, so read what they can and cannot send before you build anything around them.

Notify me or pre-order, side by side

Can one product run both at once?

Not at the same moment. While a Sledge pre-order is open on a product, Sledge's notify-me form stays hidden there, so the shopper sees one button, not two. Shopify has a similar rule of its own. A product can have several ways to buy it, such as a subscription and a pre-order, but a shopper cannot combine two of them on that same product. So a subscription product cannot also be pre-ordered.

So run them one after the other, not at the same time

1. Run a notify-me form while the restock date is still uncertain, and let the list grow.
2. Switch the product to pre-order when your supplier confirms the expected delivery week. Export the waiting list and email those shoppers before you announce the pre-order anywhere else.
3. Close the pre-order when the stock arrives. The selected sizes stop selling as pre-orders and return to their previous stock settings. On Accelerate or Ultimate, with Back in Stock switched on, the notify-me form returns when the product sells out again.

A deposit helps at step two when the price is high and the wait is long, because paying part now is an easier decision for the shopper. The deposit post works out how much to ask for.