What are the requirements for pre-orders on Shopify?

Official requirements for Pre-orders on Shopify

Preorders are currently only available to merchants using Shopify Payments or Paypal Express. To sell products using preorders, you must comply with the laws of the jurisdiction of your business and your customers, the Shopify Terms of Service, the Shopify Acceptable Use Policy, and the Shopify Payments Terms of Service for the country where your business operates.

To use pre-orders on your store, review the following requirements and restrictions:

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.
Preorders aren't supported on stores with customized checkouts.
Customers can't purchase pre-orders by using the following accelerated checkouts: Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Meta Pay.
Customers can't use local payment methods such as Klarna, mollie iDEAL, and Sofort to purchase pre-orders.
Preorder products are only supported on the Online Store and Custom Storefront sales channels.
You can set up multiple purchase options on a product, but customers can’t combine different purchase options on the same product in a single checkout. For example, customers can’t pre-order a subscription product. A t-shirt for pre-order can't also be purchased as a try-before-you-buy order.
Buy X get Y discounts aren't supported by pre-orders.

If an order has multiple products with different deferred payment due dates, then all of the order's deferred payments are due on the soonest due date. For example, if your customer places an order with a t-shirt that has a payment due date of June 3, and a book that has a payment due date of June 7, then both payment due dates are actually due on June 3.

Learn more in Shopify's official pre-order FAQ page.

Lesser-known limitations not mentioned in Shopify's Documentation

While setting up pre-orders, be aware of these important technical limitations that aren't widely documented:

Theme & User Experience Issues

Quick view and Quick add to cart features won't recognize pre-orders. These will process the item as a regular in-stock purchase, potentially causing confusion for your customers. We recommend hiding the quick add to cart button and redirect the quick view button to the actual product page.
Sticky add-to-cart bars often conflict with pre-order functionality. Typically only one add-to-cart button (either the sticky bar or the product page button) will correctly process the pre-order, so you may need to temporarily hide your sticky bar for pre-order products. If you need help with this, please reach out to us - support@shopside.com.au.
Many theme customizations that modify the checkout flow may interfere with Shopify's pre-order functionality. E.g. For some themes when you add a pre-order item to the cart, it'll display "Required parameter missing". This is usually a theme incompatibility issue and you can reach out to us for assistance.
If you run into the issues above and urgently need to capture pre-orders for your sold-out products, we recommend using our backorder feature in the meantime. It's a simplified version of pre-order that serves as a workaround for most themes and Shopify limitations.

App Compatibility Issues

Most upsell and cross-sell apps don't properly support Shopify pre-orders. It's recommended to exclude your pre-order products from these apps temporarily if possible. Otherwise, it will either recognise the pre-order item as a normal in-stock purchase.
They might also show additional line items for the pre-order item at checkout. The additional info should only be displayed to you in the order admin. This is often due to another app (usually an upsell app) or it could be part of your theme. If you're using an upsell app like UpCart, there should be a setting in the app to hide these text. Otherwise, if it's part of your theme, you'll need a theme edit to filter these out.
Product bundles often have compatibility issues with pre-order items. See our help article here for potential workarounds.
Inventory management & Fulfillment software may not correctly track pre-ordered items that are part of a mixed cart.

Customer Communication Considerations

Shopify does not have a native pre-order progress update email. You can use our pre-order campaign's pre-order update email template to communicate early arrivals or delayed shipping.