Using the Early Bird Manage Order Extension

When offering pre-orders or back-orders on Shopify, there are a number of requirements and restrictions which must be met. Included in these are the following:

  • You must have a reasonable basis for saying that a product can be shipped within a certain time.
  • If no date is clearly specified, then you must have a reasonable belief that the product will ship within 30 days of purchase.
  • If you’re unable to ship within the promised time, then you must provide a revised shipment date and explain the customer’s right to cancel or obtain a refund.

Early Bird provides a simple checkout extension to ensure you meet these requirements, and to give customers a way to manage and cancel their pre-order themselves.

Adding the Extension to your Checkout

To add the extension to your order status page, complete the following steps (skip to step 8 if clicking the Activate extension button on the Early Bird dashboard):

  1. Log into your Shopify admin
  2. Click on Online Store > Themes
  3. Click the Customize button next to your published theme
  4. Within the theme customizer, change the template from Home page to Checkout and new customer accounts
  5. From the checkout customizer, change the template again from Checkout to Order status
  6. Click the Sections icon on the side bar to see the section blocks added to the order status page
  7. Click the + Add app block button at the bottom of the sections
  8. Select the Early Bird Manage Order extension to add it to the page (ensure you're still on the Sections tab on the side)
  9. Click the back arrow to see the newly added section
  10. Drag and drop the section to position it appropriately
  11. Click Save to publish changes to your checkout

Customers will now be able to cancel their own pre-orders or back-orders as per the Shopify requirements.

Note: If you are still using the deprecated "Additional scripts" section of your checkout settings, you won't be able to publish this extension. You will need to swap to the new order status page for the checkout extension to appear. Keep in mind that outdated checkout scripts will stop working when doing this!

Note: If an order contains a pre-order or back-order product, in addition to a regular product, the extension will instead show a message indicating that they should contact you to organize a cancellation, as they might not want the whole order cancelled. The same goes for orders which have already begun fulfillment.