Coming Soon Before a Preorder Launch: Hide Sold-Out

There’s a gap most drops don’t plan for: the stretch between when a product exists on your store with zero inventory and when its preorder officially opens. In that window, Shopify’s theme reads the empty inventory and shows the product as sold out — so the audience arriving early to look sees a sold-out signal for something that hasn’t launched. Coming Soon is the feature built for exactly this window: it replaces that sold-out signal with a clear “this is on its way” state.

A licensed apparel brand running an artist-collaboration drop wanted precisely this. They had products staged ahead of a scheduled preorder launch and wanted early visitors — the most engaged part of their audience — to see a Coming Soon signal instead of Shopify’s native sold-out label. This article covers what Coming Soon is, how to set it up before a launch, and how it carries into preorder on drop day.

Shopify’s theme shows a product as sold out whenever it has no inventory and no active selling plan — that display logic lives entirely in your theme. It reads the inventory number, sees zero, and renders the sold-out state. It doesn’t know a preorder is scheduled for the 15th, and it doesn’t read what you’ve set up elsewhere in the admin.

So when you stage products ahead of a drop with inventory at zero, the storefront runs pure inventory logic in parallel with your launch plan. Coming Soon is what brings the two back into line: it takes over the product’s purchase area and shows the signal you actually want for the pre-launch window.

Coming Soon replaces the sold-out / Add-to-Cart button with a non-clickable “Coming Soon” button on a product that isn’t purchasable yet. That button is the feature — it’s the primary element you’re enabling, and it’s what a shopper sees in place of the buy button. On top of it you can optionally add a page or banner message and a badge on the product image (a badge and a ribbon are the same thing). Those extras are layered on the button, not a replacement for it.

Two things Coming Soon does not do, so you reach for the right feature:

• It doesn’t collect emails. Coming Soon is a visual holding state. To capture interest for an upcoming launch, you enable Notify Me / Back in Stock alongside it — Coming Soon holds the product visually, and Notify Me captures the email into a waitlist. They’re two features working together.
• It displays only when the variant is out of stock. If a variant has inventory, Coming Soon doesn’t show for it — which is what makes it the natural fit for the pre-stock window.

Here’s how the three pre-launch states differ, so it’s clear which one to reach for:

If your goal in the pre-launch window is to collect interest, pair Coming Soon with Notify Me: the button holds the product, and Notify Me captures the lead. This is different again from a preorder, which takes the order and the sale before stock physically exists.

Coming Soon has two layers: the template holds what the shopper sees, and the activation decides which products are in the Coming Soon state. Here’s the clean setup.

### 1. Add your products to Coming Soon in Timesact

In the Timesact dashboard, go to the products section and add the items you’re staging for the pre-launch window — and keep each one Active in Shopify (with inventory at zero) so the Coming Soon button renders on the storefront. This is the activation layer — it decides which products show the Coming Soon state.

### 2. Write your Coming Soon template

Go to Settings → Templates → Coming Soon. This is where the customer-facing copy lives: the non-clickable Coming Soon button label, and — if you want them — the optional banner message and the badge on the product image. The template is what actually renders on the storefront, so it’s the layer to get right; without it, there’s nothing for a shopper to see.

### 3. Enable the optional badge

If you’re using the optional badge, enable it so the Coming Soon signal shows wherever a visitor lands first — many arrive on a collection page before they ever reach the product.

### 4. Let support fine-tune your theme

Timesact takes over the purchase button automatically. On your setup call, our support team tailors the Coming Soon signal to your exact theme — button, badge, and messaging reading cleanly together across the product page and the collection grid. It’s a one-time adjustment that carries across every product you add, and it continues to apply when those products switch to preorder on launch day, so you set it up once for the whole campaign. Book a free setup call and they’ll tailor it to your theme.

### 5. Preview on your store

Use the view-on-store preview from the Timesact dashboard to see the Coming Soon button on the product page, and check the collection page too — often the first surface a new visitor hits. This is a preview of the customer experience, so you can confirm the page reads the way you want before the drop.

When your launch date arrives, you move the products from Coming Soon into a preorder rule in Timesact — or set a start date on the preorder rule so the switch happens automatically at a set time. A preorder adds the one layer Coming Soon doesn’t have: the Selling Plan, which is what makes the item purchasable on preorder and sets when the charge lands — in full at checkout, or on a specific future date. You set your preorder wording (button, badge, banner) in the preorder rule’s template — the same template system you used for Coming Soon, so it’s a familiar step rather than a rebuild.

One detail to build in: all campaign timing in Timesact runs in UTC+0 (London time). If your drop is timed to a specific local hour — say 9 a.m. Eastern — convert that to UTC before you set the start date, so the switch lands at the local time you intend. Setting the time explicitly in UTC is all it takes.

That continuity across the sequence is what lets you turn a zero-inventory moment into a revenue window rather than a dead end, from the first early visitor through the live preorder.

Some drops mix new zero-inventory products with prior-season SKUs that still have stock. Coming Soon displays only on the out-of-stock variants, so the in-stock items keep their normal Add-to-Cart button — which is usually what you want. When you’re staging a campaign like this, add every product you intend to hold back to your Coming Soon list so the pre-launch signal is consistent across the collection, then preview the collection page to see the mix the way a shopper will.

The same holds once you’re live with preorders sitting next to in-stock products: a collection can show Coming Soon buttons, preorder buttons, and Add-to-Cart buttons together, and a quick preview confirms the mix reads the way you intend.

Coming Soon gives you control over what your audience sees before a drop is live, and Timesact carries your products from Coming Soon into preorder when launch day arrives. Set it up once, and the right signal shows every time, for every product in the campaign.

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