Which Payment Methods Work With Shopify Preorders

A preorder is an ordinary Shopify order with one extra thing attached: a Selling Plan. The plan is the purchase option the item is bought under, and its Billing Policy is what decides whether the shopper pays in full now or puts down part of it and pays the balance later.

That attachment is also what decides which payment methods appear. A Selling Plan purchase is a different kind of transaction from a one-off sale — a deposit today and a balance in six weeks means Shopify has to be able to hold the shopper’s payment method and charge it again later. Methods that can do that carry a preorder. Methods built to settle once, at the moment of checkout, are outside that flow.

So the practical question is not “does my gateway work with Shopify” — it does — but “does my gateway carry a Selling Plan”. Those are different lists, and knowing which one you are on before you launch a campaign is worth five minutes.

Partial payments run on Shopify Payments and PayPal Express. If your campaign takes a deposit at checkout and the balance on a later date, those are the two methods that carry it, and that is a Shopify platform boundary rather than a Timesact setting.

One thing that surprises people: a payment method can be live and working in your normal Shopify checkout and still sit outside preorder Selling Plan purchases. The two are decided separately, so the method list your shoppers see on a preorder product is worth a look before a launch rather than after.

If you sell across Shopify Markets, the same principle applies per market: Shopify Payments needs to be available in a market for Selling Plan purchase options to render for shoppers there.

The billing decision lives on the Selling Plan assigned to the variant, under Settings → Selling Plan, in the Billing Policy:

• Full amount — the shopper pays the whole price at checkout. Shopify captures it then, and the funds land on your normal payout schedule regardless of when you ship.
• Partial payment — an Upfront payment at checkout, set as an amount or a percentage, and a Final payment for the balance, taken on a date you set. Setting the upfront amount to 0 is a valid version of this: the shopper completes checkout without being charged, and Shopify collects the full amount on the final payment date.

Shopify asks the shopper for payment details at checkout even when the amount due is zero, because it stores the method securely so it can take the balance when it is due. Set an explicit Final payment date — Shopify requires one on the plan — and Shopify attempts the balance charge on that date. Dates in Timesact run on UTC+0 (London time) rather than your store’s local time, so pick the date against that clock. If a charge needs another attempt, the order sits in your Shopify admin where you can use Collect payment or send the customer an invoice.

Three layers sit underneath all of this, because the payment setup only shows up on a page that renders. Add the product variants to Timesact and assign the Selling Plan and a template to them — the template holds the customer-facing copy: the button label, the product-page message, the cart label, and it applies to the variants it is assigned to. Set the stock-management rule that decides when the preorder turns on: Pre-order only when Out of Stock, Pre-order regardless of levels, or Pre-order only when Shopify inventory is available. And enable the App Embed on the theme you publish, under Online Store → Themes → Customize → App Embeds, clicking Save in the theme editor. The plan’s Selling Plan Name field is the wording shoppers read on cart line items, at checkout and in past order details, so it is worth writing as a sentence a customer would want to see. The separate Plan Name field is internal and is never shown to them.

For the mechanics of a deposit campaign end to end, how the deposit and the balance actually land goes through the sequence in detail.

Plenty of stores run on a gateway that Selling Plans do not cover, or need a discount type the Selling Plan flow does not carry, and preorders are still open to them. That is what the Legacy Flow is for: it runs preorders without the Timesact Selling Plan.

What stays the same: the badge, the button, the product-page message and the cart label all work as they do normally, and the pricing is identical either way.

What changes: the preorder is charged in full at checkout, so deposits and balance-later campaigns are not part of this flow, and preorder orders arrive as Unfulfilled rather than Scheduled or On Hold. Once a store is on the Legacy Flow, products you add later default to it too.

It is also the route some stores take deliberately for discounts — migrating does not switch preorder discounts off, and in some cases it is what makes a particular discount type work on a preorder. If you are weighing that up, how Shopify discount codes reach a preorder line item covers the discount side.

Support sets the Legacy Flow up — send us your store and what you need the checkout to do, and we will tell you which flow gets you there.

The order that saves time is: decide what the checkout has to do, pick the flow that does it, then build the campaign on top. A store taking deposits builds on Shopify Payments or PayPal Express and the Selling Plan flow. A store whose gateway or discount needs sit elsewhere runs full payment at checkout on the Legacy Flow. Both take preorders, and on either one the shopper sees the Timesact badge, the button, the product-page message and the cart label.

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