Hoping someone has come across this use case and has an elegant solution.
One of my clients uses a pre-order app on their own store to allow customers to place pre-orders, and we don’t want to lose this functionality.
To do this, they need the “continue selling when out of stock” box checked to allow the pre-order.
The issue is that they also have 30+ retailers through Shopify Collective. And no pre-order data flows through. Even if we have negative inventory.
So if the box is checked, it reads on the retailer side as “available” and ready to ship. So the retailers are overselling a lot / have to wait for the restock and no one on their end ever knew the product is now on Pre-order.
If it would even show on the retailer side as out of stock that would be something.
Has anyone tried to run both pre-orders and collective, and come up with a smooth way to manage this?
The Collective ↔ pre-order conflict happens because Collective passes raw inventory + sellable state, with no “this product accepts oversell as pre-order” signal. Once you flip “continue selling when out of stock,” the retailers just see infinite stock and oversell.
A few angles depending on how clean you want it:
Channel-level publishing. Tag the pre-order products and use a sales channel filter so they’re published to Online Store but not to the Collective channel. Retailers never see them. Easiest if pre-orders are a small slice of the catalog and clearly separable.
Duplicate product. Keep the in-stock version published to Collective, create a separate “pre-order” version (different handle, OS only). Clunky in admin but the inventory math stays clean per channel and you don’t have to fight Collective’s publish-by-product model.
Drop the OOS-checkbox pattern entirely. If you can move to pre-order via a Cart Validation Function or a pre-order app that uses a tag or metafield rather than the “continue selling” toggle, variant inventory stays at its real count, retailers get accurate stock, and pre-order eligibility is a separate flag. More dev work but it removes the architectural pinch.
Worth asking Shopify Collective support whether negative inventory propagation is on their roadmap, last I checked it was a known gap not a bug. If it’s still not on the radar, planning around it (option 1 or 3) is safer than waiting.
How big is the pre-order portion of catalog? Determines whether channel-split or migrating off the toggle is the right tradeoff.