Product pages - Allow pre-orders for products

Store Design

Topic summary

Core Tutorial:
This advanced tutorial explains how to enable pre-orders for out-of-stock products by creating an alternate product template and modifying payment settings. The process differs between sectioned themes (post-October 2016) and non-sectioned themes.

Key Steps:

  • Change payment settings to manually capture payment authorization (7-day window for Shopify Payments, longer for third-party gateways)
  • Create a new product template named ‘pre-order’
  • Modify the ‘Add to Cart’ button text to display ‘Pre-Order’
  • Assign the template to specific products
  • Optionally adjust inventory settings to allow purchases at zero stock

Common Issues & Solutions:

  • Missing code: Many users cannot locate the specified code snippets. Solution: Check theme.liquid file or use conditional logic that checks template suffix
  • Dynamic checkout buttons: Must be disabled to prevent conflicts with pre-order functionality
  • ‘Buy Now’ button persists: Disable dynamic checkout in theme customization settings
  • All products show pre-order: The basic tutorial doesn’t distinguish between in-stock and out-of-stock items; requires additional conditional logic to check variant availability
  • Template not appearing: Ensure the section file is properly created and saved

Advanced Solution:
User Alex-Miller shared code that automatically switches between ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Pre-Order’ based on actual stock levels using variant availability checks within JavaScript.

Limitations:

  • Not compatible with dynamic checkout buttons
  • Requires manual template switching per product
  • May not work with Shopify Lite
  • Code varies significantly across themes
Summarized with AI on November 15. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
108

Hi,

I’m using narrative theme and have followed the sectioned theme instructions. I have changed all of my products to the pre order template (after recoding with your guide), I disabled the dynamic checkout buttons, changed the capture setting to manual, turned the quantity to 0, and allowed the product to be sold after selling out and the preorder button still doesn’t appear. Do you have any other suggestions?

Thank you!

-Hana