Launching a First Collection on Pre-Orders Only

You have four pieces, a launch date, and no warehouse full of stock. The plan is simple: open the store, take pre-orders, charge customers in full at checkout, produce against confirmed demand, and ship when the goods land. Every product page on the store is a pre-order page. There is no in-stock fallback to fall back to.

That shape is common for first collections, capsule drops, and brand launches where the founders are funding production with the orders themselves. The setup has to do three things cleanly:

• Let every product accept a pre-order.
• Cap how many pre-orders each size can take, so you don’t oversell what you can actually produce.
• Charge the full amount at checkout, so the cash is there when manufacturing starts.

The good news: this is a small, well-defined setup. The whole catalog uses the same pre-order rules. Once you have one product configured correctly, you copy the same pattern to the others and the storefront is ready.

Three decisions shape the rest of the setup. Make them once, on paper, before opening any settings.

1. Inventory cap per size. Decide how many units of each size you can produce in this first run. If you can make 25 size S, 25 size M, 25 size L, and 25 size XL of a given piece, that is the cap you’ll enter in Shopify inventory. The pre-order setup will respect those numbers and stop accepting orders once a size sells out.

2. Payment timing. For a first collection funded by orders, full payment at checkout is the cleanest choice. The cash is in your account immediately, the customer commitment is real, and there is no follow-up charge to manage weeks later. Charging on a specific future date through a Selling Plan is also supported, but it adds an extra step that a first launch usually doesn’t need.

3. Expected shipping window. Pick the language you’ll use on the product page and in the order confirmation. “Ships in early September” or “Ships within 4 weeks of order” both work — the point is to pick one phrasing and use it consistently across every product, the cart, and the confirmation email.

With those three decisions made, the admin setup is the easy part.

Open your Shopify admin, go to Products, and open the first product in your collection. For each variant — each size — set the inventory quantity to the cap you decided on. Make sure “Track quantity” is enabled and “Continue selling when out of stock” is turned off. That second setting is the one that tells Shopify to stop accepting orders for a variant once its inventory hits zero.

This step matters because Timesact’s pre-order rule for a capped launch is “pre-order only when Shopify inventory is available.” The cap lives in Shopify; Timesact reads it. When a customer pre-orders a size M and Shopify inventory drops from 25 to 24, the next customer sees a pre-order button on size M with 24 units left. When inventory hits zero, the pre-order button disappears for that size and the variant shows as sold out.

Repeat the inventory step for every product in the collection. This is the only data entry that scales with catalog size, and for four products it’s a five-minute task.

Activating Timesact is a single toggle in your theme editor’s App Embeds panel — enable it as part of setup and the pre-order button, the badges, and the cart label will render on your product pages.

Inside the Timesact admin, the per-product configuration has one important detail worth knowing in advance. When you have a product with sizes and you want every size to be on pre-order, select each variant individually and apply the pre-order settings to it. Selecting the parent product applies the rule as a bulk edit across all variants — that path works, but it treats the action as a fresh configuration pass and is easier to get wrong on a first attempt. Variant-by-variant on a four-product catalog is fast and the result is exactly what you want.

For each variant, pick the pre-order only when Shopify inventory is available rule, set the billing policy to full amount at checkout, and attach the pre-order Selling Plan. Save. The variant now shows a pre-order button on the product page and will count down the inventory cap as orders come in.

Our five-minute setup tutorial walks through the same screens with screenshots if you want a visual reference alongside this article.

Pre-order copy lives in Timesact’s message templates. Open Settings → Templates and edit the pre-order template. The fields you’ll fill in:

• Button label. “Pre-Order” works well for a launch. Keep it short and unambiguous.
• Product page badge. A short phrase like “Pre-Order — ships in [shipping window]” gives the customer the timeline at a glance.
• Cart label. This is the line that appears next to the item in the cart. Use the same shipping-window phrasing you put on the badge. Consistency between badge, cart, and confirmation email is what makes the experience feel intentional.

One detail worth knowing: the Selling Plan attached to your pre-orders also has a name field that surfaces in the cart, and Shopify does not let that field be blank. If you don’t want it to display a duplicate of your cart label, set the Selling Plan name to a single character like a dash. The cart will then show your template’s cart label once, cleanly, with no echo from the Selling Plan name.

Edit the template once, and every product in your collection picks up the same copy. When you launch your second collection later, you can either reuse this template or duplicate it and adjust the shipping window.

When a customer lands on a product page, they see a clean pre-order layout: the price, the size selector, a pre-order button in place of Add to Cart, and the badge with your shipping-window phrasing. They pick a size, click pre-order, and the item drops into the cart with the same shipping-window label next to it. They check out with Shopify’s standard checkout flow and pay in full.

After checkout, Shopify sends its order confirmation email with the pre-order label inserted next to the line item — so the customer’s confirmation makes it clear they have placed a pre-order, not an in-stock order. If you want a second, branded pre-order email from Timesact on top of Shopify’s confirmation, that’s an option you can enable separately; for a first launch, leaning on Shopify’s confirmation alone keeps the inbox clean and the message simple.

When stock runs out for a size, the product page shows that size as sold out and the pre-order button disappears for it. The other sizes keep selling until they hit their own caps. Nothing oversells.

In your Shopify admin, every pre-order arrives as a normal order with a clear pre-order tag, a Selling Plan attached to the line item, and the inventory decrement applied automatically. You can filter the Orders page by the pre-order tag to see exactly which orders are part of the launch. When the goods are ready to ship, you fulfill those orders the same way you’d fulfill any Shopify order — Shopify sends the shipping confirmation as part of its fulfillment flow.

For reporting on the launch — units sold per size, revenue, conversion rate — Shopify Analytics and GA4 are where those numbers live. Timesact keeps the pre-order flow running on the storefront; the analytics layer is your usual Shopify reporting stack.

If you want a sense of which Timesact plan fits a launch of this size, our plan-comparison guide is a quick reference.

A first-collection launch on pre-orders is one of the cleaner setups in Shopify — small catalog, one rule across every product, full payment at checkout, inventory caps doing the gatekeeping. When you’re ready to install Timesact or want a hand walking through your launch setup together, we’re here.

Install Timesact on Shopify

Book a free setup call