Best Shopify pre-order app: how to choose

When a product sells out but more is coming, a pre-order lets shoppers buy now and you ship later — you capture the committed sale and often the cash up front instead of losing it. Shopify’s only native option is a bare “continue selling” checkbox that oversells silently, so this is an app job. The thing that separates the good apps from the risky ones isn’t the pre-order button everyone has; it’s what happens when you turn pre-order off. Pick on reversibility, per-variant control, and honest ship-date messaging.

Can Shopify do pre-orders without an app?

Barely. Shopify has a per-variant “Continue selling when out of stock” setting that keeps a product sellable at zero inventory. But on its own it just oversells quietly: the storefront still shows a normal “Add to cart,” there’s no “Pre-order” label, no expected-ship date, and — the part that bites — no automatic switch back to normal selling when stock returns. So you can technically take orders past zero, but the customer doesn’t know it’s a pre-order and you have to remember to undo it later. That’s why pre-order is almost always run with an app.

What actually separates a good pre-order app

Reversibility — this is the one people learn the hard way. Turning a product into a pre-order is easy; turning it cleanly back is where apps differ. The right behavior is per-variant capture of each variant’s exact inventory policy before the change, and an exact restore when you switch pre-order off or stock returns. Apps that simply flip “continue selling” on and walk away leave your products overselling for weeks after they’re genuinely back in stock, which is how you end up selling things you can’t ship. Check the app’s description for how it restores state, not just how it enables pre-order.

Per-variant vs product-level control. Real catalogs sell out one size or one variant at a time. Some apps let you pre-order a single sold-out variant and leave the in-stock ones on normal checkout; others flip the whole product at once. Neither is wrong — know which you need before you commit.

Clear storefront messaging. The shopper should see a “Pre-order” button and an expected-ship line, not a silent oversell. Setting the expectation up front is what keeps pre-orders from turning into “where is my order” tickets later. Note the ship date is messaging you set, not a Shopify-enforced delivery guarantee — write it honestly.

Automation, if you want it. Nicer apps can auto-flip a product to pre-order the moment it hits zero, and flip it back on restock, or let you schedule a launch date so a drop opens as a pre-order on its own. Useful once you’re running more than a few, so you’re not babysitting toggles.

Caps and payment model. Decide whether you need a limit on how many pre-orders you’ll take, and whether you want full payment up front (simplest, most common) or deposits/partial payments (lowers hesitation on big-ticket or far-off items, but not every app supports it). If deposits are a hard requirement, confirm it explicitly.

The apps to look at

There are several dedicated pre-order apps on the App Store — common ones include PreOrder Globo, Preorder Now (Timesact), STOQ, and REZ. They mostly separate on the points above: whether the switch is per-variant and cleanly reversible, whether they add real ship-date messaging, whether they support deposits or partial payments (several of them do — that’s the main thing to check if you need it), and how much automation (auto-toggle, scheduled launches) they include. Run each candidate against the checklist — and pay special attention to the switch-back behavior, because that’s the one that quietly costs you if it’s wrong.

Our pick: Prestock

We build Prestock, so this is the in-house option, told straight. It’s built around the reversibility point above: you flag a sold-out product and every variant keeps selling as a clearly-labeled pre-order with an expected-ship line, and when you turn it off — or on restock — each variant is restored to its exact prior inventory policy, so nothing is left overselling afterward. It operates at the product level — flagging a product flips every one of its variants to keep selling, and on switch-off each variant is restored to its exact prior policy — and it goes live via a theme block without code, and Pro (€19/mo) adds auto-toggle on stockout (and back off on restock) and a scheduled launch date that flips a product to pre-order on the day you set, so it runs without babysitting. There’s a free tier for a small number of products.

Honest limits: Prestock takes full payment up front — it doesn’t do deposits or partial payments today, so if that’s a hard requirement it isn’t your app. And it enables pre-order per product, not per individual variant, so you can’t pre-order only the sold-out variant while leaving the in-stock ones on normal checkout. And as with any pre-order tool, how pre-orders surface on Shopify’s own channels (like the Shop app) is bounded by Shopify’s platform limits, not something any app fully controls.

Next steps

If you’re weighing pre-order against simply alerting people when stock returns, back-in-stock vs pre-order lays out when each wins (often it’s both). To get a pre-order live, how to set up pre-orders on Shopify is the step-by-step, and continue selling when out of stock explains the native checkbox and exactly where it falls short.