Where Your Preorder Button and Badge Show Up on Shopify

When a product is on preorder, the Add to Cart button is replaced by a preorder button, and you can add a badge on the product image, a message near the button, and a label that carries into the cart. Every one of those elements is copy you control — none of it is fixed text baked into the app.

That’s the key idea to hold onto: the preorder button and badge are two layers working together. One layer decides where the elements can appear on your store; the other holds the words the customer reads. Once you know which layer does what, it’s easy to get your preorder signal showing exactly where you want it. Here’s how the pieces fit.

The preorder button appears on the product page in place of Add to Cart, the badge (also called a ribbon — same thing) appears on both product pages and collection pages, and the cart label appears in the cart. Together they give a shopper a consistent preorder signal from browse to checkout.

Because preorder settings apply per variant, the button and badge follow the variant that’s actually on preorder — you can show a preorder button on one size and a normal Add to Cart on the rest of the same product.

Two things switch the preorder button and badge on: the App Embed activates Timesact in your theme, and the template supplies the copy that renders. The App Embed lives in your Shopify theme customizer under the App Embeds tab — enabling it is what makes Timesact’s elements part of your live storefront.

Think of it as activation, not a check to run afterward: you enable the App Embed as a setup step, the same way you’d enable any theme feature you want live. With the embed on and a template assigned, your preorder button, badge, and cart label render on the storefront.

All the customer-facing preorder wording lives in one place — the template — so you write it once and it renders consistently. A template holds:

• The preorder button label (for example, “Preorder now”).
• The badge / ribbon text shown on product and collection pages.
• The message or banner near the button.
• The cart label that appears in the cart.
• A countdown and dynamic variables like {{shippingDate}} if you want them.

If you use a dynamic variable such as {{shippingDate}}, set the shipping date on its Selling Plan — an unset variable renders the literal text variable_not_set instead of a date. Writing this copy is also your chance to make the preorder read as intentional rather than a fallback, which is a big part of building preorder product pages that convert rather than confuse. If your goal is specifically to swap the main call-to-action, the mechanics of replacing Add to Cart with a preorder button walk through that single element in more detail.

Alongside the template, the item’s Selling Plan carries its own on-page message and the plan Name your customer sees in the cart and at checkout — so the product page shows your template message and the Selling Plan’s commitment line, while the cart carries the Selling Plan Name plus your cart label.

A preorder button lets customers buy now for later; a Coming Soon button does not — it’s a non-clickable button that replaces Add to Cart on a product that isn’t purchasable yet. If you’re pointing at an upcoming drop where you don’t want to take money yet, that’s a Coming Soon button rather than a preorder button, and the two are configured separately. Reach for preorder when you want the sale now; reach for Coming Soon when you want the anticipation without checkout.

The preorder button and badge render on your product and collection pages once the App Embed and template are in place. Some themes also have their own custom areas — a quick-view popup, a homepage featured section, a sticky add-to-cart bar — and those are built differently from theme to theme.

If you want the preorder button or badge to show in one of those custom areas too, our support team can fine-tune the placement for your specific theme so it matches the rest of your store. It’s a quick adjustment on our side, and a good one to mention on a setup call if a custom section is central to how customers browse your catalog.

The pattern is worth remembering: the App Embed activates Timesact, and the template holds every word your customer reads — button label, badge, message, and cart label — across your product and collection pages. Set those two layers up once and your preorder signal reads clearly from the first browse to the cart.

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