Core Question:
Why can’t Shopify’s native features handle pre-orders without third-party apps when enabling “Continue selling when out of stock” allows purchases of unavailable items?
Native Shopify Capability:
Merchants can create pre-order products by enabling “Continue selling when out of stock” in Products → Inventory
Customers can purchase items at zero stock through standard checkout
Pre-order terms must be communicated through product titles and descriptions
Key Limitation:
The checkout button always displays “Add to cart” with no automatic pre-order labeling or badges
No built-in visual indicators distinguish pre-orders from regular products
Customers depend entirely on reading product descriptions to understand pre-order status
Button text replacement (“Pre-Order” instead of “Add to cart”)
Visual badges on product images
Rich-text pre-order messaging
Inventory-based display modes (Always/Out of stock/Below threshold)
The discussion clarifies that Shopify technically supports pre-order transactions natively, but lacks automated customer-facing indicators that apps provide.
Summarized with AI on November 3.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
If I were to create a product called Item 1 - Pre-Order, and put in the description that it is a pre-order that will ship in X months, and check the box for “continue selling when out of stock”, people could place orders for this item even when it’s sold out. I’m not using automatic fulfillment or anything like that. Why couldn’t that be used to take pre-orders? Is there something in Shopify’s system that would eventually kick the order back if it wasn’t fulfilled for X months or what? I don’t understand the difference between this and using an app. Please let me know.
Your approach works perfectly - you can create a product like “Item 1 - Pre-Order,” add clear pre-order terms in the description, and enable Continue selling when out of stock in Products → Inventory so customers can purchase even when stock hits zero. Shopify processes these orders through standard checkout without any restrictions. Here’s the official inventory guide for reference.
The main trade-off is that the button always says “Add to cart” and there’s no automatic badge or pre-order label - customers rely entirely on your product title and description to understand it’s a pre-order.
Because Shopify doesn’t automatically change the button text or display a badge, an app like K1 PreOrder can automate that (I’m the founder of K1 PreOrder) with automatic button replacement showing “Pre-order” text, visual badges on product images, rich text pre-order messages, and inventory-based display modes (Always / Out of stock / Below threshold). If this is relevant, here’s the K1 PreOrder listing.