3 min read
Pre-orders
Where to find it: Products, then Pre-orders. What to do: create a campaign and add the products of your launch. What you’ll see: the last 30 days of pre-orders and their revenue, every product taking pre-orders with how many are left under its limit, and every campaign with its orders and revenue.
One product, or a campaign
- One product: open the product, then the Pre-order & launch card. Leave Pre-order campaign on None, switch pre-order on and set the ship date, limit, button and payment.
- A campaign: one set of rules for many products, for example “Lofree launch” for three keyboards. Change the ship date once and every product in it follows.
A product joins a campaign from the campaign page (Products card, Browse) or from its own Pre-order campaign picker. A product is in one campaign at a time.
What a campaign sets
- Shipping and limit: an expected ship date, or “ships in N days”; and how many units of each variant may be sold beyond stock. Leave the limit blank for no limit.
- Payment: charge in full, a fixed deposit per unit, or a percentage deposit. The balance is asked for later, as with a single pre-order product (Settings, Payments, Pre-orders).
- A product’s own settings win. In the product’s Pre-order & launch card, tick Keep this product’s own for the ship date, limit, button label, payment or note, and fill them in there.
In a campaign, a product sells as a pre-order when its stock runs out. While it has stock it sells normally, at its usual price.
Rules
- Pre-order discount: a percent or an amount off while the product sells as a pre-order.
- Markets: where the campaign applies. None ticked means every market.
- Stock locations: whose stock decides “sold out”. None ticked means every location that ships online orders.
- Sales channels: Online store covers the cart and checkout. Social and AI agents show sold-out campaign items as “pre-order” in the Meta, Google and ChatGPT feeds.
- Pre-orders and in-stock items in one cart:
- Allow, ship in-stock items now: the order is split; in-stock items ship first.
- Allow, ship everything together: every parcel of the order shows as waiting for the pre-order. Pack them all once the pre-order stock arrives.
- Don’t allow: the cart refuses the mix and shows your message (set it in Content).
- An item sells out while it is in a cart: turn it into a pre-order at checkout, or stop the checkout with “out of stock”.
The cart and checkout check every rule on the server, whatever the page showed.
Content and design
The Storefront card has two tabs, with a live preview of the product button, the cart line and the order beside them.
- Content: the button text, the badge, the note under the button, the cart line text, the note
kept on the order, and the message for a refused mixed cart. Notes may use
{ship_date}and{ship_month}. Blank fields use the product’s note, then the store’s (Settings, Payments). - Design: the button and badge colours. Blank uses your theme’s colours.
Pausing and deleting
A paused campaign is kept; its products sell by their own pre-order settings meanwhile. Deleting a campaign takes its products out of it; past orders keep their lines and revenue.
From Shopify
The Shopify import turns each pre-order purchase option (a selling plan group named like “Pre-order”) into a campaign with its products. Set its ship date, payment and rules here after the import; a later import keeps your changes.