A pre-order lets customers buy a product before it's available to ship. The brand collects payment (or a deposit) at order time and commits to fulfillment at a future date — typically when production completes or inventory arrives at the warehouse.

Why brands run pre-orders

Demand validation: testing whether a new product has real market interest before committing to a full production run.
Working capital relief: customer payments fund the production order rather than tying up the brand's cash.
Bridging stockouts: capturing demand from customers who would otherwise leave when a hero SKU sells out, by pre-selling the next inbound shipment.
Launch hype: creating scarcity and urgency around new product drops, especially in fashion, sneakers, and limited-edition categories.

Pre-order vs. backorder

Pre-order: for products that have not yet been produced or launched. Future delivery date is communicated upfront, and the customer is buying with eyes open.
Backorder: for existing products that have temporarily sold out. The customer is buying an existing SKU with a delay rather than a new one.

Both involve collecting payment for inventory not yet available, but the customer expectation and operational discipline required differ. Pre-orders are typically planned campaigns; backorders are reactive responses to stockouts.

How to run a pre-order well

Communicate the ship date prominently. Not at checkout — on the product page, in the cart, in the order confirmation, and in every subsequent email. Customers who don't realize they pre-ordered are the ones who file chargebacks.
Hold a realistic Capable to Promise (CTP) view of your production schedule. Pre-orders work when promise dates are accurate; they fail when production slips and customers find out via silence.
Send proactive update emails when the schedule changes. A 2-week delay communicated 4 weeks in advance is acceptable. The same delay communicated the day before the original ship date is a refund event.
Decide on payment timing intentionally. Charge-now is simplest but creates the largest customer-trust burden. Charge-at-ship reduces refund pressure but creates payment failure risk on long pre-order windows.
Cap pre-order quantity if production is constrained. Selling more pre-orders than capacity creates a CTP failure and a wave of refunds.

Common pre-order failure modes

Date promises that the production schedule can't keep. The biggest single source of pre-order chargebacks.
Silent delays. Customers will absorb a slipped date if told in advance; they will not absorb one they discover after it's missed.
Pre-orders mixed into the regular catalog without distinction. Customers expect items in their cart to ship in a few days; surprising them with a 6-week wait at checkout creates abandonment and chargebacks.
No cap on pre-order volume. Selling 5,000 units of a 3,000-unit production run guarantees a refund event.

The parts of a pre-order that break most often are the ones nobody assigned an owner to — flagging orders whose promised date has slipped, sending the update email before the customer notices, un-tagging the SKU once the shipment lands — and those are exactly the rule-based triggers Shopify automation handles better than a person remembering to check a spreadsheet. On the demand side, a pre-order campaign is also a cheap way to test whether a new product justifies real acquisition spend: running it through the same paid and email channels used for customer acquisition tells you, before the production run is locked in, whether the audience you'd be acquiring at scale actually wants the product.

The configuration choices this page treats as decisions — charge-now versus charge-at-ship, capping quantity against the production run, keeping pre-order SKUs visually distinct at checkout — are the actual Shopify settings covered step by step in configuring Shopify for advance orders.