Enable the Timesact App Embed on Your Shopify Theme

The Timesact App Embed is the switch that lets Timesact elements appear on your storefront. It is a theme app extension: Shopify keeps it in the theme editor alongside your other app embeds, and turning it on is what allows the preorder button, the Notify Me sign-up, the Coming Soon state, badges and cart labels to render on your pages.

It is the first step of setup rather than a setting you tune. Everything else — which products are on preorder, what the button says, when the campaign runs — is configured inside the Timesact app. The embed is the connection between that configuration and the pages your shoppers actually load.

Because Shopify scopes app embeds per theme, the embed belongs to the theme it was enabled on. That is worth holding onto, because it explains the two moments this comes up again later: when you publish a new theme, and when you work on a draft.

You can start from either end — the Timesact dashboard walks you there, or you can go to the theme editor directly.

From the Timesact dashboard. Open Timesact in your Shopify admin and click Enable Theme App Extension. That takes you straight to the right screen in your theme editor with the Timesact embed already in view.

From Shopify. Go to Online Store → Themes → Customize, open App embeds in the left panel, and find Timesact in the list.

Then, in both cases:

1. Switch the Timesact embed on.
2. Click Save in the theme editor. This is the step that completes it — the embed takes effect once the theme is saved.
3. Click Check Status back on the Timesact dashboard. The app re-reads your theme, confirms the embed, and marks the Enable Theme App Extension step as completed.

If the theme editor does not offer you a Save, going back through Enable Theme App Extension from the Timesact dashboard returns you to the right screen so you can save from there.

One thing that occasionally reads as a missing piece: when you open the Timesact extension in the theme editor, it may tell you there are no customizable settings. That is expected. Timesact works as a script-style app embed, so the panel has nothing to configure — switching it on and saving is the whole job, and the wording you customise — button labels, messages, templates — lives in the app.

Enabling the embed on the theme you are publishing today covers the store your shoppers see today. Three moments are worth building into your routine:

• Publishing a new theme. A new theme starts with its own app embed settings, so enable Timesact there as part of going live with it — the same way you would move over any other app embed.
• Working on a draft theme. If you are building on a draft and want to see preorder or Notify Me elements while you work, enable the embed on that draft theme too. The embed on your live theme covers the live theme.
• Duplicating a theme. A duplicate usually carries the source theme’s code across, and you still enable the embed on the copy you intend to publish. If support previously added a custom script such as timesact.js for your theme, check that file and its theme reference came over too.

Making the embed part of your theme-launch checklist keeps every one of these a five-second step.

The embed lets Timesact elements render. What those elements say comes from your templates, and both halves are needed for a shopper to see something useful.

The template is where the customer-facing copy lives: the preorder button label, the product-page message, the badge, the cart label, the Notify Me button wording and its post-signup message. So the mental model is: the app decides which products, the template decides what they say, the embed lets it render. On themes that build their product page their own way, our support team maps the elements to your theme’s markup so they land exactly where you want them.

From there, the elements appear where your theme puts the purchase button — the product page first, and depending on your theme and settings, collection cards and other places a product surfaces. Where the preorder button and badge show up goes through those surfaces one by one.

For a store setting Timesact up from scratch, the order that works is:

1. Enable the App Embed on the theme you publish, and save.
2. Add your products in the app — individually, or by collection. Adding by collection is a snapshot: it applies to the products sitting in that collection at the moment you add it. To cover products you put in the collection afterwards, add the collection again.
3. Set the template for the feature you are running, so the button and messages carry your wording.
4. Attach a Selling Plan if you are running preorders — that is the purchase option and the charge timing, and it holds the Shipping Date value that {{shippingDate}} renders from your template — set that value on the plan, since a variable with nothing behind it renders the literal text variable_not_set. Set the stock-management rule too, which is what decides when preorder turns on: Pre-order only when Out of Stock, Pre-order regardless of levels, or Pre-order only when Shopify inventory is available. Campaign start and end dates run in UTC+0.
5. Write your notification emails and set them Live. For Notify Me, the restock alert’s subject and body live in the Notifications tab rather than in the template, and Live is the state that sends it. What decides when it goes out is the Back in stock quantity threshold on the product’s Back in Stock configuration — the minimum inventory level that starts notifying subscribers.

Step one is the one people set up last, because it is the one that happens in the theme editor rather than in the app. Doing it first means every change you make afterwards shows up as you make it — which makes the rest of the setup much easier to see. If you are starting with restock alerts, the Notify Me form setup picks up right where this leaves off.

The App Embed is quick, and it is the foundation everything else renders on. Switch it on, save the theme, click Check Status, and add it to the checklist you run whenever you publish a new theme. Then the rest of your setup is just deciding what you want to sell and what you want it to say.

If you would rather we set it up with you, our support team can walk your theme end to end on a call and get the whole configuration in place.

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