How Shopify Preorders Work With Your Inventory

When a product runs out, Timesact keeps it buyable by replacing the sold-out button with a preorder button, so the sale still happens instead of hitting a dead end. You keep taking orders while the item is at zero, and the customer sees a clear preorder message at the point of purchase.

The part that trips people up is the relationship between Timesact and your Shopify stock numbers. Preorders don’t ignore your inventory — they sit on top of it. Once you understand how the two connect, you can sell through a stockout, keep selling while a purchase order is in transit, and know exactly what your numbers will look like when the new stock lands. This guide walks through that relationship the way we’d explain it on a setup call, using the questions merchants actually ask us.

No. Timesact sets “Continue selling when out of stock” automatically for the products and variants you put on preorder — it is not a manual step you do in Shopify. The one thing to confirm is that Shopify inventory tracking is on for the product, because that’s what lets Timesact watch the stock level and know when to show the preorder button.

This is a common point of confusion, so it’s worth being direct about it: you do not toggle the continue-selling checkbox yourself, and you don’t need to flip your products to “sell when out of stock” by hand. You set the preorder rule in Timesact, and the app handles the underlying Shopify flag for you.

Set an inventory-based preorder rule, and the product stays buyable at zero without you touching stock levels each day. Timesact watches the Shopify inventory count and turns the preorder state on and off against it, so the button flips to preorder when you’re out and back to a normal Add to Cart when stock returns.

There are three stock-management modes to choose from:

For a product where stock is on its way, “preorder only when out of stock” is the usual pick: customers buy normally while you have units, and the moment you sell through, the same page starts taking preorders instead of showing sold out. This is also the setup stores use to keep selling an item that’s temporarily out of stock rather than losing the demand.

If the product isn’t in Shopify yet because you want to see how many sell before you commit to a production run, add it to Shopify with inventory tracking on and zero stock, then set it to preorder. The orders that come in are your real demand signal — a practical way to gauge interest before you place the order.

When your purchase order lands, add the entire new quantity to Shopify — Shopify’s positive and negative inventory cancel out for you. If you started at 0 and took 10 preorders, your inventory reads -10; add the 100 units from your PO and your available stock settles at 90. The 10 you already sold are accounted for, and the remaining 90 are ready for normal sales.

Because the rule is inventory-based, adding stock also flips the button back on its own. Once the count is positive again, the product shows a standard Add to Cart, and it will return to preorder automatically the next time it sells out. You don’t have to switch anything manually between cycles — the stock level drives the state.

Yes — set a preorder limit per variant, and once that many units are sold, the variant returns to its standard sold-out state. If you can only produce 100 of an item, you cap the variant at 100, and the 101st shopper sees sold out instead of another preorder going through.

One thing to keep in mind: the limit is a cutoff, not a trigger. Timesact transitions preorder on and off based on your inventory rule or a date window — there’s no “switch off automatically after X sales and do something else” behavior beyond returning the variant to sold out at the cap. If you want a hard ceiling on a production run, the per-variant limit is the tool; if you want the preorder to run for a set period, use a date-based window instead.

A working preorder is three layers, and it’s worth naming all three so nothing renders blank:

• Template — what the customer sees. Create or assign a template with your preorder button label, badge text, any banner message, and the cart label. This is where the customer-facing copy lives; without it, an activated preorder has nothing to display. You can drop dynamic variables like {{shippingDate}} into that copy — just set the shipping date on its Selling Plan, because an unset variable renders the literal text variable_not_set rather than a blank or a guess.
• Activation — when preorder turns on. This is your inventory rule (one of the three modes above) or a date window. If you use a date window, set it in UTC+0 (London time), not your local time — a “midnight” launch is midnight in London unless you account for the offset.
• Selling Plan — the purchase option and charge timing. The Selling Plan makes the item purchasable on preorder and decides when the charge lands: in full at checkout, or on a specific future date. Its Name is the label your customer carries through the cart, checkout, and order confirmation.

Finally, enable the Timesact App Embed in your theme to switch everything on. Preorder settings apply at the variant level, so on a multi-variant product you can put one size on preorder and leave the rest selling normally.

The throughline is simple: your Shopify inventory stays the source of truth, and Timesact reads it to decide when to sell an item as a preorder. Set the stock rule once, add full quantities when your POs arrive, and the same product page moves between normal sales and preorder on its own — so a stockout becomes another sale instead of a lost one.

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