Shopify Preorder Deposits: When the Balance Gets Charged

Yes. A Timesact preorder can split the product price into an amount charged at checkout and a remaining balance charged on a date you choose. The customer pays the deposit now, Shopify securely stores their payment method, and the balance is collected on the final payment date set on the Selling Plan.

That split is what most merchants mean when they ask about partial payments on preorders. It is one setting with two halves, and almost every question that follows — when the money lands, how to move the date, what to do when you ship early — is really a question about the second half. This article follows the money through time, from checkout to collection.

The Selling Plan’s Billing Policy is where charge timing lives, and it offers two options: Full amount or Partial payment. Partial payment splits into an Upfront payment — an amount or a percentage taken at checkout — and a Final payment, the balance taken later. Between them they produce three shapes:

The middle row surprises people. Setting the upfront amount to 0% is a complete, supported setup: the shopper finishes checkout without being charged, and Shopify takes the whole amount on the date you set. Shopify still asks for payment details at that checkout, because it needs to store the method to collect the balance when it comes due — that is Shopify holding the card, not charging it.

Partial payments run through Shopify Payments and PayPal Express, which are the gateways that support the stored-method step the split depends on.

The final payment date lives on the Selling Plan, not on the template, and Shopify requires one whenever partial payment is switched on. You set it as a specific calendar date on the plan, so every order placed on that Selling Plan collects on that same day.

Two dates commonly get tangled here, so it is worth separating them cleanly. The final payment date is when the balance is collected. The preorder end date is when the campaign closes on your storefront. They are independent settings and they answer different questions. A campaign that opens in August, closes when your stock lands on 15 October, and charges the balance the same day is configured as an end date of 15 October and a final payment date of 15 October — two settings that happen to share a value.

All campaign timing runs on UTC+0, London time, rather than your local timezone. Worth a glance when you are lining a collection date up against a dispatch day.

Three separate fields carry the payment story to the shopper, and each renders in its own place:

• The Selling Plan Option is the payment-option line on the product page — “Partial payment: 25% deposit” — and it appears on partial-payment plans.
• The Selling Plan Description is the commitment message on the product page, directly under the preorder button. This is where a sentence like “Ships 15 October. 25% is charged today, the balance on 15 October” belongs.
• The Selling Plan Name is the field that travels. It is what the customer reads on the cart line, at checkout, in Shopify’s order-confirmation email, and in their order history later. Something like “Pre-order — ships 15 October” carries the whole way through.

The Timesact template separately owns the storefront furniture: the preorder button label, the badge, and the cart label. Between the template and the Selling Plan, a customer who is about to pay a deposit can see what they are paying now and what is coming.

At checkout Shopify shows the breakdown itself — the amount due today and the remaining balance scheduled for collection later — so the terms are in front of the customer at the moment they commit.

The payment split only does its job once the preorder itself is running, which takes three pieces on the variant. Assign a preorder template for the customer-facing copy. Set the stock-management rule that decides when preorder turns on — preorder only when out of stock, preorder regardless of stock levels, or preorder only when Shopify inventory is available. Assign the Selling Plan that carries the Billing Policy you just configured.

Then enable the Timesact App Embed on the theme you are publishing, under Online Store → Themes → Customize → App Embeds, and click Save in the theme editor — the embed takes effect once the theme is saved. The embed is set per theme, so enable it on the theme your storefront is actually running. On preorder products, also hide the native dynamic checkout buttons — Buy it Now and Shop Pay — so every purchase runs through the preorder flow and carries the payment split you configured. That is a small theme adjustment our support team sets up for you, and your in-stock products keep those buttons as normal.

Shopify collects the balance on the date you set, using the payment method it stored at checkout. Collection is Shopify’s side of the flow rather than Timesact’s — the Selling Plan holds the schedule, and Shopify’s payment system acts on it.

Because Shopify stores the payment method for as long as a balance remains on the Selling Plan, the date is not bound to a short authorization window. Merchants routinely set collection weeks or months out, which is what makes a long production lead time workable.

Everything after checkout happens in Shopify Orders, and you have more control there than the scheduled date suggests.

Collect the balance early. If the goods are ready ahead of schedule, open the order and use Collect payment to take the remaining amount whenever you like. This is the mechanism behind a pattern a lot of merchants use deliberately: set the final payment date generously far out — six months, a year — and then collect on your own timing as each batch actually ships. The scheduled date becomes a backstop rather than a deadline.

Send the customer a payment link. Send invoice emails the customer a secure link to pay the balance themselves, which is useful when you would rather they complete it at their own pace.

Check where an individual order stands. Each order shows the amount paid and any outstanding balance. Balances are tracked per order inside Shopify rather than in a combined Timesact summary, so reviewing outstanding deposits means looking at the relevant partially-paid orders in Shopify.

Revenue reporting on all of this — how deposits and balances show up across a period — comes from Shopify Analytics and any analytics tools you already run, which is where the numbers live.

The partial-payment split applies to the product price. Shipping is calculated and collected by Shopify through your own shipping configuration rather than being divided across the two payments.

The split is also a straight division of the price: a deposit is a portion of what is owed, not a credit worth more than it costs. A $99 deposit counts as $99 toward the total.

Downstream, every Online Store order containing a preorder item is tagged Pre-order, and an order that mixes preorder and in-stock items also carries Partial Pre-order, so mixed orders arrive with both. Worth knowing while you are working on deposits: Partial Pre-order describes a mixed cart, not a partial payment. The order tags are how your other systems recognise these orders, and they mean what they say about the cart’s contents rather than its payment schedule.

A deposit preorder is two decisions, and both are worth making on purpose: how much you take at checkout, and when the balance comes due. Set the upfront share to something that reflects the commitment you are asking for, put the final payment date beyond the ship date you are confident about, and let Collect payment bring it forward when a batch is ready early. Your customer sees the split at checkout, you see the outstanding balance on the order, and the money arrives on a schedule you chose rather than one you inherited.

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