How to Set Up Pre-orders on Shopify

When do pre-orders make sense?

Pre-orders make sense in three situations: a product launch where hype peaks before the stock arrives, a restock of something that sold through and still has demand, and a made-to-order item that does not exist until someone buys it. In all three, a shopper wants the product and you cannot ship it yet. A pre-order takes the order anyway instead of losing it.

The launch is the most painful one to get wrong. Hype for a drop is loudest before it ships, the exact day your store has nothing to sell. So the demand scatters: shoppers ready to buy hit a product page that is not live, lose interest, and you spend launch week chasing them back. A pre-order flips that backwards day into your best one, banking the orders while the stock is still being made.

The restock is the quieter case, and the one most stores leak. A bestseller sells through, the page reads "sold out," and every shopper who came for it leaves with no record they were there. You ran the ad, paid for the click, and the moment they hit an empty page the demand was gone. The enemy across all of this is the sale you lose while you are out of stock: a sold-out page slams the door on the shopper most ready to buy. A pre-order keeps the page selling through the gap.

Made-to-order is where pre-orders are the whole point. If you build each item after the order, there is no "in stock" state to wait for, so every sale is a pre-order by nature: the shopper reserves, you make it, you ship. The question is not whether to use pre-orders but how to ask for payment, which is the next chapter.

Should you take full payment or a deposit?

Take full payment when the wait is short or the price is low; take a deposit when the price is high or the ship date is weeks out. The larger and later the commitment, the more full price up front scares the shopper off. The choice is about lowering the bar to reserve without giving away the sale.

Full payment is the simpler path and the right one for plenty of pre-orders. For a $25 item that ships next week, asking for the whole amount today is no friction, and the order is fully captured, so there is no balance to collect later and no second charge to manage.

The deposit earns its keep when full price becomes a wall. Say you are pre-selling a $140 product that ships in six weeks. Asking for the whole $140 today means the shopper parts with the full sum for something they will not hold until next month, and a lot of them close the tab. A 30% deposit asks for $42 now, with the remaining $98 collected on the ship date, so the shopper commits for the price of a holding fee and the order survives a hesitation that full price would have lost.

A deposit also qualifies the demand: a shopper who puts $42 down on a six-week wait is a real buyer, not a window-shopper. The trade is a balance to collect later, a second charge to manage, and availability that depends on your payment setup. Weigh the conversion lift against that overhead for your own price points.

Can Shopify do pre-orders natively?

Shopify can fake a pre-order natively with the "continue selling when out of stock" flag, which keeps a product buyable at zero inventory. But it has no native deposit, no automatic pre-order labeling, and real risk if you forget to switch the flag back off. It is a workaround, not a feature.

Here is what the native flag genuinely gives you. Toggle it on a product or variant, and Shopify keeps accepting orders after inventory hits zero. For the simplest case, a single low-priced item you want to keep buyable through a brief gap, it works, with no app and no extra cost.

The limits are not small. No deposit: native pre-order captures the full amount at checkout, so the full-price wall from the last chapter is your only option. No pre-order labeling: the product page and cart look exactly like a normal in-stock purchase, so a shopper may not realize they are reserving something that ships later, which breeds confused "where is my order" emails. And the flag is a manual switch with no memory.

That last point is the real risk, the sticky note. You flip the flag on, take a few reservations, the stock lands, and you forget to flip it off. Now you are overselling a product that should be back to normal inventory, and you find out from an angry customer, not your own dashboard. Doing this by hand is exactly the workaround pain that costs stores money. The native flag can start a pre-order. It cannot take a deposit, cannot label the reservation, and will not turn itself off.

How do you set up a pre-order with Sledge?

You set up a pre-order with Sledge by opening a product for pre-order, choosing full payment or a deposit, and letting Sledge flip the inventory policy and revert it cleanly when you are done. It runs on Shopify selling plans, so the deposit and the reservation are built into the platform, not bolted on with a manual flag.

The setup, in order:

1. Open the product for pre-order.

Sledge flips the inventory policy to keep the product selling, so the page shows a pre-order button instead of "sold out." Verify: the live product page shows the pre-order button.

2. Choose full payment or a deposit.

For a deposit, set the amount you want paid today through Sledge pre-order, with the balance due on a date you set. Verify: the deposit amount shows at checkout, not just in the admin.

3. Customize the button and note.

The pre-order button text and the ships-on note are yours to set, so the shopper always knows it is a reservation and when it lands. Verify: the note renders on the product page and in the cart.

4. Close the campaign when the drop ships.

When the drop ships, close the campaign. Sledge then restores the inventory policy on exactly the variants it changed, so nothing you set by hand gets clobbered and nothing it touched stays switched on. Put the close on the calendar beside the ship date, and the whole drop resets in one action. Verify: after closing, the product is back to normal inventory behavior.

Gap flag, stated plainly: the deposit is the one part that is not available everywhere. Partial payments run on Shopify selling plans through Shopify Payments and PayPal where those gateways support partial capture, and that support depends on your country. Where your gateway and region do not allow a deposit, you can still take full payment up front, with the inventory auto-flip intact. Check your gateway before you build a deposit offer; the rest works regardless.

The piece that shrinks the native risk is the memory. The native flag leaves you reconstructing which products and variants you touched, weeks later, from nothing. Sledge records them, so undoing a thirty-variant drop is one action instead of thirty and you cannot miss one. That is workaround versus feature.

How do you pre-sell a bundle?

You pre-sell a bundle by packaging the launch as one curated set, opening it for pre-order, and taking a deposit on the whole box, without the bundle falsely reading "sold out" because one item is still in production. This is the launch play, and natively it breaks in a specific way.

A Shopify bundle reads its availability from the lowest stock among its items, so the moment one product in the set hits zero, whether genuinely out or simply on pre-order, the entire bundle shows "out of stock." The curated drop you wanted to pre-sell, the tee, the cap, the tote in one box, reads sold out on day one because one item is not made yet. The native fix is a stack of per-child SKU hacks and inventory babysitting, fragile and easy to get wrong.

Sledge runs the bundle through its own engine, so a pre-order item in the set does not drag the whole box to "sold out." The pre-order bundle stays open while its other items are actually in stock; when one genuinely hits zero, Shopify's cart and checkout hold the line. The pre-order state shows on the set, and you skip the per-child "keep selling when empty" toggles entirely. The launch goes live as a curated box while the stock is still being made.

The deposit on a bundle works like a single product, scaled to the box: a $120 set reserved for a fraction now, with the balance on the ship date, so the full price does not become the wall that loses the launch. The same gap flag applies, with full payment as the fallback. For the deeper walkthrough, see pre-order and the bundles guide.

How do you promote a pre-order?

You promote a pre-order by making the reservation feel like getting in early, not waiting in line: a clear ships-on date, a visible pre-order label, and a reason to reserve now. It is mostly about removing doubt, because a shopper reserving something that does not exist yet needs to trust that it is coming and that they will be told when.

Lead with the ship date, every time. The biggest reason a pre-order shopper hesitates is not knowing when the product lands, so put the date where they cannot miss it: on the product page, in the cart, and in the confirmation. Sledge lets you customize the pre-order note for exactly this, so "ships in March" travels with the order. A reservation with a clear date reads as confidence; one without reads as a gamble.

Frame the pre-order as access, not a wait. A drop sold before it ships is a chance to get the thing first, before it sells through again, so the shopper is not settling for a delay, they are securing the product the next wave will miss. For a restock this is especially strong, because the shopper already knows the item sells out, so "reserve it now" is a real reason, not a manufactured one.

For a launch, the pre-order is the campaign. The hype window is the pre-order window, so point your launch traffic at the pre-order page and let the deposit lower the bar at peak interest. To capture shoppers not ready to commit money, pair the pre-order with Back in Stock so the ones who do not pre-order still get an email the moment it lands. One path reserves the order, the other recovers the interest, and between them very little demand walks away.