If you want to learn about the different types of preorder campaigns and how to set them up on Shopify, this blog article is for you.

In the Part 1 and Part 2 blog articles, we covered what you need to do before capturing waitlist and running pre-orders, and the basic workaround to set them up on Shopify without any paid apps - since Shopify doesn't have any built-in pre-order functionality.

Today we're going to look at:

1. When you'd need a Shopify pre-order app
2. The different ways to run pre-orders and which type of campaign suits you best
3. How to transition smoothly from waitlist to pre-orders through our Early Bird app (we're Aussie founded btw!!)
4. Then we'll setup a waitlist & coming soon pre-order campaign together

We'll also learn about advanced pre-order features like partial payment, sending shipping update emails, and sending waitlist emails with your customer experience in mind.

You can watch our video version of this article, if you prefer:

Why use an app when you can set this up manually?

Why:

For some product categories, your business model might need more than just changing the add to cart button text. You might need a Shopify pre-order app that does preorders the official way (using Shopify's Selling Plans API) if you're:

1. Handling a high volume of pre-orders as business as usual
2. Shipping pre-orders beyond 30 days
3. Letting customers place a deposit first, and capture the deferred payment beyond 7 days
4. Gauging inventory demand by specific variants, not just by products
5. Wanting to have more control over who, how, and when you email your waitlist instead of blasting everyone all at once

These are some of the common reasons why you'd want to use a Built for Shopify pre-order app, so you won't be flagged by Shopify and have your account put on hold for taking payments without fulfilling orders for a long period of time.

Want to avoid your Shopify account being put on hold after pre-order transactions? Check out our article on why it happens and how to fix it.‍

Limitations:

Shopify has some restrictions around pre-orders that many merchants don't realise, although they do list them in their official FAQs:

Pre-orders currently don't work with:

• Shop Pay, Apple Pay, or Google Pay (accelerated checkouts)
• Doesn't work with BNPL services like Klarna or Afterpay, but you can use pre-order or deposit apps like Early Bird for partial payments
• Pre-orders don't work with subscriptions or Buy X Get Y discounts
• Also don't work with external sales channels like Google or social media shops

That's why Early Bird also has the backorder feature as a workaround - which is a simplified version of pre-orders for situations like these.

The manual approach works great for simple scenarios - for when you're just starting out, selling a few products, taking payment upfront and shipping within 30 days.

But if you want to let customers place a deposit first as a reservation, and also provide them with a great end-to-end pre-order customer experience, this is where an app like Early Bird will help you take it to the next level.

The most common pre-order approaches

When I onboard new Shopify merchants, the first question I ask is: 'How do pre-orders fit into your business operations?" Because the way you run pre-orders can be quite different based on your business model, not just your product category.

Let's look at two fashion brands as examples. One is a high-end and made-to-order brand, running pre-orders as business as usual, and it's deeply embedded into their day-to-day operations. The other fashion brand is a streetwear label that only runs pre-orders every now and then, for new designs or seasonal drops. Same industry, but they have completely different approach to running pre-orders.
 
Another example based on catalogue size would be a bookstore with thousands of SKUs. Stores like this are often better off just running backorders, while a store selling just a few hero products would be better off running dedicated preorder campaigns.

This is why preorders can be as simple or as complex as you'd like it to be. We've spent a lot of time talking to merchants from 7-8 figures Shopify brands to small local businesses over the past year to understand how pre-orders fit into different businesses models across all types, sizes and verticals.

Scenario 1: Keep selling pre-orders until the campaign ends

This is the first option you'll see when you setup a pre-order campaign in the Early Bird app.

Regardless of stock levels, whether inventory level is above 0, at 0, or negative, your customers can pre-order these products.

The goal is to sell as many pre-orders as possible, to validate actual demand through sales, not just waitlist sign-ups. Typically you want to do this before you place a manufacturing order, so you can meet higher MOQs, to reduce your cost per unit or the cost of raw materials.

This approach works best for:

Made-to-Order Items:

• Jewellery, high-end fashion, art, and hand-crafted items
• Because you don't start production until you have orders
• And there's no real "stock level" since everything is made on demand

Also suits:

New Product Launches (especially for established brands):

• Since you're an established brand, your customers are more willing to wait for the long lead time
• Of course, even better if you have product demand, not just brand loyalty
• You can test demand and see if there's enough interest before committing to larger production runs for better MOQ pricing

Scenario 2: Only sell pre-orders while in-stock

This is the second option you can run as an Early Bird pre-order campaign - where customers can only pre-order while inventory is above zero.

In simpler terms, you're selling pre-orders in limited quantities.

This works for two scenarios:

• You might be a new brand with limited capital who don't want to run pre-orders BEFORE you place a manufacturing order
• Or you might be an established brand who want to create scarcity with limited edition drops.

If you're a new brand, you can expect about 1-5% of your waitlist sign-ups will convert into pre-orders. If you're an established brand, you can expect anywhere between 20% to 50% for your waitlist conversion rate, and 14% for your back in stock conversion rate.

Obviously this varies by product category and price point.

Scenario 3: Only sell pre-orders while out of stock

The third option in the Early Bird pre-order campaign set up lets you run backorders just like pre-orders - i.e. customers can only pre-order products while inventory level is at zero or below.

Our backorder feature utilises Shopify's "Continue selling when out of stock" feature and when you enable it, it lets your customers place an order for sold out products.

Sometimes we have merchants who have a large catalogue and want to let customers purchase any sold out products (more so a restock, not necessarily a new product launch), so this is why Early Bird has this feature.

As you can see, pre-orders are not a one-size-fits-all type of thing. If you want to get lots of pre-sales and keep your customers happy, the timeline, communication, and payment options should all be tailored based on your business model and product category.

We're always happy to help if you send us an email at support@shopside.com.au.

What about Waitlist sign-ups?!

Combine them together

When I was doing market research before launching the Early Bird app, I noticed many brands were either just capturing waitlist, back in stock sign-ups, or just running pre-orders and backorders.

It shouldn't be one or the other - the better approach is to combine them together as part of your customer journey.

Which is why I've made this 3-part content series about how to setup a Coming Soon campaign.

1. You start with waitlists when you're unsure about demand or the fulfillment timing
2. The sign-ups are your leading indicator, they are an expression of interest, but doesn't reflect true demand yet
3. When you are happy with the volume of sign-ups, or when you know the fulfillment timing, then you can open up pre-orders
4. You have an email list ready to be notified. Less reliance on using ads to reach your customers since you own this email list

For high-ticket items, you can use partial payment to capture a commitment to buy, so it's a lower barrier for customers, or ideally you should capture full payment upfront which is better for your cash flow so you can invest in other business aspects earlier.

Either way, pre-orders is what reflects the actual demand.

If you're already capturing waitlists or back in stock sign-ups:

Make sure you're:

1. Capturing consent to send customers marketing emails
2. Letting customers sign-up for specific variants, not just at the product level
3. Not blasting the email to everyone all at once, avoid sending people to a sold out product page again.

Otherwise you're missing out on the opportunity to grow your mailing list, and wasting the traffic you've driven to your product pages.

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Early Bird set up walkthrough

Time to walk through setting up a Coming Soon campaign through our Early Bird app, from start to finish. Throughout this article, I'll use my test development store to show you what customers will see on the storefront, and what you'll manage in the app admin.
Campaign Creation

Installing the Early Bird app

You can install Early Bird with just two clicks - Press app embed, then Save, and you're good to go.

Create a new pre-order campaign

We have a main dashboard for viewing ALL pre-order campaigns, and a dashboard for each specific campaign to compare product performance.

As mentioned, you'll see the three pre-order options we covered above.

Stock limit

If you have different stock levels for each product or variant, you can manually manage it yourself, otherwise you can authorize Early Bird to automatically apply the same numbers across your campaign.

Continue selling when out of stock

This is Shopify's native functionality to let customers purchasing product even when it's at 0 or negative inventory.

Depending on your pre-order approach, the Early Bird app can either enable it for unlimited pre-orders, or disable it so you can sell in limited quantities.

Duration

This is where you decide when to open up preorders.

• You can schedule a future start date for a Coming Soon campaign, it'll show an unclickable "Coming Soon" button until you're ready to run preorders
• You can select the current date and run pre-orders right away
• You can set an end date and the page will revert to selling as normal add to cart afterwards
• You can even sell ongoing pre-orders with no campaign end date, Commonly used for made to order items

Select your products and variants

You can choose up to either 250 products, or 250 products AND variants in total for each pre-order campaign.

Purchase options

If your customers are happy to pay in full upfront, that's great, if not, you can lower the barrier by letting them place a $ or % deposit first, or a $0 as a reservation. Then you can capture the deferred payment on a set date, or after X number of days if you're running ongoing pre-orders, so you don't have to worry about updating the payment due date for each customer.

Early Bird app's pre-order discount feature

Our discount functionality is separate from Shopify's discount codes, so you can stack discounts if you want to. However, this is not recommended since discounting in general will eat into your margins, and double discounting will only cheapen your brand value and efforts.

We usually recommend looking at incentives that are value-add without hurting your margins, such as:

• Priority shipping for people who have pre-ordered
• Extending their warranty periods
• Or only offering partial payments during the pre-order period

Fulfillment

This is important because what you choose here will be shown to customers on the product page, in cart and at checkout. This section is where you assign the default order status to your pre-orders in the Shopify admin as well.

If you choose a specific date as your Expected fulfillment date

Two things will happen:

1. Customers will see the date you've selected on the product page, in cart and at checkout
2. Early Bird will signal to Shopify to assign your pre-order with the "Scheduled" status

The Scheduled status signals to Shopify and its banking partners that your delayed fulfillment is intentional, which will prevent them from flagging and putting your account on hold, even if you ship beyond 30 days.

See also: What are the differences between the Shopify order statuses "Scheduled" vs "Unfulfilled" vs "On Hold"?

If you choose As soon as possible

It'll display ASAP on your product page, in cart and at checkout. By default, your pre-order status will be Unfulfilled, which is what every normal in-stock order has.

If you're not using a pre-order app, and you're shipping beyond 30 days, that's when it waves a red flag to Shopify as they'll think your customers have bought normal in-stock items but you haven't shipped anything to them yet.

So if you're not ready to use a pre-order app just yet, my recommendations to different people who've asked about this on Reddit - is to document everything, so if the Shopify staff reaches out, you have evidence to show them that you're running pre-orders (just without an app).

If you choose Not Sure as your Expected Fulfillment date

Your pre-orders will be put On Hold and it won't show any fulfillment info throughout the customer journey.

You can customise the text on your product page in Early Bird's Display settings, or create an override and only customise it for a specific campaign.

In the Localization settings, you'll be able to customise the ASAP and On Hold (Unknown) text that's shown in cart and at checkout.

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Shopify Coming Soon pre-order campaign example

For our Coming Soon campaign set up example, let's pretend we're going to sell an electric bike.

Campaign type

Let's put "Q4 2025 - JANSNO Electric Bike Pre-orders", and pretend the shipping date will be in mid November.

We plan to only stock 20 of these bikes, so let's choose "Only sell pre-orders while in stock". We plan to stock 10 bikes for each variant, so we can let Early Bird automatically update the number for us.

We don't want to oversell, so we can authorize Early Bird to disable "Continue selling when out of stock".

Scheduling a Coming Soon campaign

At the time of recording the video it was mid September, so to stay consistent, in this article we'll also use the same date and time.

First, schedule a start date to run pre-orders in late October, just over 30 days. By setting a future start date, your 'Pre-order Now' button will automatically become a 'Coming Soon' button until we arrive on that scheduled date. Or if you bring that date forward.

Purchase options

For payments, we can offer both options at the same time, so let's try that. Entice them to pay in full with a small 10% discount, let them know they'll get priority shipping, or they can pay a $0 deposit just for a reservation now, and pay the rest at a later date.

It's also possible to capture the deferred payment upon fulfillment, we have a Shopify Flow template for that, you can email us and we'll help guide your setup.

Adding Products

We add both of the variants - Yellow & Gray.

Expected Fulfillment Date

We'll set it to be in mid November. Since we've selected a specific date, the pre-order will be assigned the Scheduled status in the admin, and the date will be displayed to customers on your product page, in cart, and at checkout.

All you need to do next is just Schedule/Publish the campaign and that's it for pre-orders!

Customization

If you want, you can also customise the badges shown on your Collection and Product pages in your Localisation settings.

You can change them to say Coming Soon instead of Pre-order, just keep in mind this setting is applied storewide across all your campaigns.

Product Page with just pre-orders

This is what your customers will see on the product page:

• The badge says Pre-order by default, unless you customise the text to say Coming Soon
• A 'Coming Soon' button that's unclickable, for now
• You can see clear messaging here about when pre-orders will open

Next, let's go activate the Back in stock feature and add the waitlist sign-up widget on the product page as well.

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Setting up Back-in-stock (Waitlist) sign ups

In Early Bird's Back in stock settings, you can either enable it across your entire catalog, or for selected products only.

You can send the emails automatically or manually, but the key feature here you can control who to get notified first, how many of them, and when they will get notified.

A smart sending example

If you have 500 people on the waitlist but you're only stocking 20 bikes (let's keep it simple and pretend they're happy with any variants), Iyou can send to the first 100 signups, wait an hour, then send to the next 100, and so on. This way those who've signed up the earliest will get first access, and you're not sending people to a sold out page.

Customer experience is an important part of running pre-orders.

Once you've added the product, go back to the product page, and you'll now see a 'Notify Me' button underneath the Coming Soon button.

What our Shopify merchants like about this setup is their customers can sign up for the product in general, or just specific variants. If you sell apparel, your customers likely won't care about the other sizes.

So if someone only wants the Large Black hoodie, they won't get emails about the Small white one coming back in stock.

Our form widget also helps you capture marketing consent, so you're growing your mailing list while building your waitlist at the same time.

Sending the emails to waitlist

When you're ready to open up pre-orders, it's time to notify your waitlist.

1. First, you visit the Email Templates section from Early Bird's left side app menu and check if that's the email you want to send. This template is used across all of your restock notifications.
2. Then go back to the Back in stock feature, click into the specific product, double check all the smart sending settings, and simply click Send restock notifications
3. You'll see the metrics for each part of the funnel, and can break down the performance by variants. All these will help you validate demand and do your inventory forecast better.

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Pre-orders going live

To open up pre-orders, you either wait for the scheduled start date, or you can move the start date forward in the campaign settings.

The Coming Soon button on your product page will then change to Pre-order Now.

For the badges on your collection and product pages, if you've customised the text, make sure you change it back to Pre-order in the Display or Localisation settings.

Orders in the Shopify Admin

When a pre-order comes in, it will show up both in your Shopify Order Admin along with all other normal orders, or you can view just the pre-orders on the Early Bird campaign dashboard.

All the info is there, from pre-order revenue, to payment status and fulfillment status.

Editing the pre-order campaign

To make changes while your pre-order campaign is running, like extend the pre-orders, or update the fulfillment date -  you'll need to pause it first, update the changes, then publish it again. Payment options though, can be changed without pausing.

If you bring forward or postpone the fulfillment date, a banner will pop up on your Early Bird campaign dashboard after you exit the settings. You can either one-click email all the customers who've bought products in this campaign, and if you'd like to update the order status from Scheduled to Unfulfilled.

If you're using a 3PL, most of them will only recognise orders with Unfulfilled status, so this is where the bulk order status feature comes in handy.

See also: How to set up Shopify pre-orders with multiple locations and 3PL fulfillment?

Before you notify customers about the shipment update, you'll get to review the email first, edit the template if needed, before you send it to all relevant customers with one-click.

Shipping delays are often a matter of when it will happen, not if, so you'll likely have to use this feature. Transparency is key to running pre-orders, so if you do end up having shipping delays, don't shy away from letting your customers know - they've placed a pre-order, they know it'll take longer than normal orders, you just need to give them the peace of mind that the shipment is on its way. Most of the time they'll be understanding.

Based on the merchants we've worked with, on average we see less than 0.5% of pre-order cancellations.

Customers pre-orders self-cancellation

Speaking of pre-order cancellations, Early Bird has an app extension where customers can login to their accounts and initiate pre-order cancellation on their end. Not that we want this to happen to you, but in case it does, we've designed to make it easier for you to approve it, instead of going back and forth through emails, your Shopify admin, go look for the order, and only then you start the cancellation process.

Wrapping up - Next Steps

So that's it! This is how you set up a Coming Soon campaign capturing waitlist sign-ups before you run pre-orders.

Where do you go from here?

One thing we emphasise a lot on, is all the tech you have, all the apps, they're only as good as how you execute everything.

Your brand, product demand, your customer experience, and most importantly your marketing and distribution will determine the results.

If you're new to running pre-orders:

Check out our Part 1 article to learn about the fundamentals of preorders.

If you're already running pre-orders:

• You can audit your current process against what we went through today
• Look for opportunities to improve your pre-order customer experience

If you're ready to try Early Bird:

• We have a generous free plan for you to try at your own pace
• We have a blog and help centre that guides you on topics like a free pre-order policy template, how do you handle mixed cart orders, how to enable split shipping in checkout, how to edit order confirmation email etc.
• We're alwqys available for questions - we want you to feel we're your growth partner, not just an app expense.

Any questions, let me know in the comments, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, or email us at support@shopside.com.au.