A backorder occurs when a customer places an order for a product that is currently out of stock but will be available for fulfillment at a future date. Rather than canceling the order or losing the sale entirely, the merchant accepts the order with a commitment to ship when inventory arrives. Backordering allows brands to capture demand and revenue even when stock is temporarily unavailable - and signals to the customer that the product is worth waiting for.
For Shopify brands, enabling backorders is a configuration decision in the inventory settings: marking a product as available for purchase when stock reaches zero, and communicating the expected fulfillment date clearly on the product page and in order confirmation emails. The communication is critical - customers who backorder without being told about the delay are significantly more likely to cancel or file a dispute when the shipment takes longer than a standard order.
A backorder is for existing products that have temporarily sold out. A pre-order is for products that have not yet been manufactured or launched, with a future delivery date communicated at the time of purchase. Both involve collecting payment (or a deposit) for inventory not yet available, but pre-orders are typically planned and marketed in advance, while backorders are reactive responses to demand exceeding supply.
Managing backorders requires accurate visibility into incoming inventory timing. If a purchase order is delayed by a supplier, backorder customers need to be proactively communicated with and given the option to wait or cancel. Failing to do this - letting backorders sit without updates - generates customer service escalations, negative reviews, and chargebacks that damage both revenue and brand reputation. Connecting inventory management systems to customer communication workflows in Klaviyo, so that backorder customers receive automated updates when shipment dates change, is the most scalable way to manage this. The relationship between backorders and SKU management is direct: brands with tight demand forecasting have fewer unplanned stockouts and therefore fewer reactive backorder situations to manage.
The accurate incoming-inventory timing that backorder communication depends on usually breaks down when Shopify's stock counts aren't synced with the systems that actually know purchase order status — brands connecting ERP integration get PO timelines flowing into Shopify automatically instead of relying on someone manually checking a supplier email before updating a backorder date. On the fulfillment side, backorders that ship in partial batches need shipping and fulfillment workflows built to split an order without creating duplicate shipping charges or confusing tracking emails, which is easy to get wrong in a generic checkout configuration.
Reducing how often a backorder situation happens in the first place is a demand-forecasting problem more than a checkout-configuration one, and the planning practices that keep stockouts rare enough for backordering to stay the exception rather than the routine are covered in mastering Shopify inventory forecasting.
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