Can Shopify Store Credits be used to purchase pre-orders on Shopify?

Understanding Store Credit Limitations for Pre-Orders on Shopify

Shopify Store Credit is only available as a payment method for regular purchases on your online store when customers are logged in through customer accounts. It is a new feature, and not supported by Shopify to use for pre-orders or deferred purchases yet.

Deferred purchases include pre-orders (be it pay in full or partial pay), subscriptions, try-before-you-buy, and product rentals.

Store Credit only works for one payment that's non-recurring or deferred. A pay in full pre-order is still considered as a deferred payment.

As with gift cards and bundles for pre-orders, this isn't something we (or any other app) can control unfortunately, so it's up to Shopify to add support for these features. We have been told in the past that they were working on adding gift card support for pre-orders, so hopefully they will include store credit for pre-orders in the future!

Alternative Solutions for Using Store Credit to Purchase Pre-Orders on Shopify

We've digged into Shopify and found some potential workarounds, but they all happen during post-purchase. This means your customers won't know about them, unless you put this info prominently in the product description, in your store policies, in your marketing communications (e.g. email newsletter), or wait until customers reach out to you.

None of these are ideal (and very manual), but we wanted to let you know anyway. In case you do want to try and see if it suits you:

Manual Adjustment and Refund Process

1. Allow the customer to place a preorder using a standard payment method (Shopify Payments or PayPal)
2. Manually refund the amount equivalent to their store credit after the order is placed.
3. Deduct the store credit from their account balance.

Issue a Discount Code

1. Convert the store credit into a discount code that the customer can use at checkout.
2. Ensure the discount code is applicable to the preorders products.

Applying to sold-out products which customers have purchased before

Interestingly, when we were testing in our development store, if it's an item a customer had purchased before, when they login to Customer Account and click "Buy Again", Shopify allows using Store Credit to add to cart. (But only for a preorder item that's paid in full.)

So if a customer wants to use Store Credit to purchase a product they've previously bought before but not currently in-stock, this method could potentially serve as a workaround.

Using Back-Orders to set up Pre-orders on Shopify with Store Credits

Since Shopify doesn't support using store credits to purchase pre-orders, you can use back-orders instead. But it'll work only if the back-order is paid in full (again, due to Store Credit not compatible with deferred payments.)

You can capture back-orders manually by going into each product's settings and enabling "Continue Selling When Out of Stock". You'll have to do this for every product.

This will allow your customers to place a purchase with their store credits after logging into their customer accounts.

If you're looking for automated back-order management (e.g. To enable it across your entire catalog or toggle back-orders on automatically when out of stock, our Early Bird app has a "Back-Order" feature that avoids the Shopify's Store Credit limitations, with monthly usage refreshed even on our Free Plan.

If you're receiving requests from customers wanting to use Store Credit to purchase pre-orders frequently, you might want to consider whether back-orders are a better fit for your needs.