How to set up pre-orders on Shopify (sell past sold-out)

Shopify can absolutely keep selling a product after its stock hits zero — but it will never tell the shopper they’re placing a pre-order. The native setting takes the money and sets no expectation, which is how pre-orders turn into refund requests. Here’s exactly what Shopify does and doesn’t do, how to set up a pre-order today, and how to run them without the manual resetting.

Does Shopify have pre-orders built in?

Not really. What Shopify has is a single inventory checkbox — “Continue selling when out of stock” — on each variant, in the variant’s Inventory section (it’s only available when Shopify is tracking the quantity). Shopify’s own documentation even lists pre-orders as a reason to use it. But all the box does is let a variant be bought past zero: with it off, a tracked variant at zero shows a disabled “Sold out” button; with it on, the button simply reverts to an ordinary “Add to cart”. That’s the whole native feature.

What it is missing is everything the shopper sees:

• No pre-order label. The button still says “Add to cart”, identical to an in-stock product.
• No ship-date or expectation. Nothing communicates “this ships when it arrives.”
• No automation. It doesn’t switch on when a product sells out, or off when it restocks — you do that by hand.

So the capability to take the order exists; the experience that makes it a pre-order does not.

How to set up a pre-order on Shopify manually

You can run a basic pre-order today with no app:

1. Make sure the product’s inventory is tracked — the checkbox only appears when Shopify is tracking quantity.
2. Go to Products, open the product, and open the variant you want to pre-sell.
3. Under Inventory, tick “Continue selling when out of stock”.
4. Repeat for every variant — each size and colour is separate. With a lot of variants, use the bulk editor (Products → select the products → Edit → add the “Continue selling when out of stock” column) rather than clicking through each one.
5. Edit the product description to say, in words, that the item is a pre-order and roughly when it ships — because nothing on the page will say it for you.

That’s it — the product now takes orders at zero stock. The weakness is step 5: a description line is the only signal the shopper gets, and most won’t read it. Changing the actual button to read “Pre-order” means editing your theme’s Liquid code, which is more than most merchants will take on.

The risks nobody mentions

Starting a pre-order is easy. The problems show up later:

• Shopper confusion → refunds. Someone who believed the item was in stock discovers a delay they were never told about. That’s a support ticket at best, a chargeback at worst.
• The reset. When stock lands, you must untick “Continue selling” on every variant. Forget one and you keep overselling it. Across a catalogue of sizes and colours, this is the step that quietly fails.
• No cap. Native continue-selling has no limit — a viral product can take thousands of pre-orders you can’t fulfil.

The native checkbox is fine for one deliberate SKU you watch closely. It stops scaling the moment pre-orders are a routine part of how you sell.

How to run pre-orders properly

A good pre-order does three things the native setting can’t:

• Tells the shopper. The storefront button becomes a clear “Pre-order” instead of a silent “Add to cart”, so expectations are set before checkout.
• Is reversible to the exact prior state. Before enabling, it records each variant’s existing inventory policy, so disabling the pre-order restores precisely what was there — no guessing, no leftover continue-selling flags.
• Runs itself. It can flip a product to pre-order the instant it hits zero and back on restock, so you’re not toggling checkboxes across variants by hand.

That turns pre-orders from a risky manual chore into a dependable way to keep capturing demand the day a product sells out, instead of losing it to an “out of stock” page.

The fix: Prestock

Prestock does exactly this on Shopify. Pick a sold-out product and enable pre-order in one click — it flips the variants to keep selling, swaps the storefront button to “Pre-order”, and captures each variant’s exact prior policy so turning it off restores the original state to the letter. On the paid tier (€19/mo) it auto-enables pre-order the moment a product hits zero (and disables on restock), and lets you schedule a product to go on pre-order from a future launch date.

It’s honest about its edges: the free plan covers one pre-order product, and Prestock changes only the inventory policy it captured — it writes nothing it can’t cleanly undo.

If you’re tired of losing the sale every time something sells out — or of hand-resetting checkboxes when stock lands — pre-orders are the fix, and Prestock makes them one click and fully reversible. For the shoppers who won’t pre-pay, a back-in-stock alert (Restockwell) recovers the sale when the product returns — the two work well side by side.