Preorders When Your Stock Sits in More Than One Location

Timesact reads the total available inventory across all your active Shopify locations for a variant, then applies the stock-management rule you chose for it. It is one number, summed across every location, rather than a per-warehouse view.

That single sentence explains most of what multi-location merchants notice. A variant sitting at 0 in your main warehouse but holding 40 units in a secondary location reads as in stock, because the total is 40. If your rule is “preorder only when out of stock,” preorder does not turn on — the stock exists somewhere, even if it is somewhere that never ships these orders.

Worth knowing before you plan around it, because the fix is a setting rather than a workaround.

The stock-management rule on each variant decides when the preorder button appears, and each one behaves differently once more than one location is involved:

The middle rule is the one that answers the multi-location question directly.

If a secondary location holds stock you never fulfil preorders from, set that variant’s Stock Management to Preorder regardless of stock level. That rule stops using the inventory number as the trigger at all, so the preorder button stays live no matter what any location’s count says.

Worth being precise about what this does: it isn’t a location filter. Timesact has no per-location setting in the current version — the rule simply takes inventory out of the decision, which gets you the outcome you wanted when a warehouse you don’t ship from was the thing holding the campaign closed.

This is the supported route for the common case — a European warehouse serving one market while your main site sells from another, or a retail location whose stock was never meant to feed online orders. You are telling Timesact to stop using the inventory number as the trigger, and to present the item as a preorder for the window you want.

Once the rule no longer depends on inventory, the cap comes from the preorder limit rather than from stock. Open the variant in Timesact and click Edit, then in Stock Management turn off Unlimited Inventory, enter a Product Quantity — the number of units you are willing to accept on this variant — and click Save. Preorders on that variant stop cleanly once the number is reached.

That combination is the practical shape of a multi-location preorder: the rule decides that it is on, and the per-variant preorder limit decides how many you take. If you would rather preorder track your real stock instead, the relationship between preorder and your inventory covers the inventory-driven route.

Two things in this area belong to Shopify, and knowing which is which saves time.

Fulfilment location configuration. Which location an order is assigned to, your location priority list, and how stock is allocated are all Shopify settings. Timesact reads the inventory Shopify reports; it does not route orders to a location or move stock between them.

Continue selling when out of stock. For a shopper to add a sold-out variant to the cart at all, this Shopify setting has to be on for that variant — and it is a single setting on the variant that applies to every location and market it sells in. Timesact keeps it in sync for variants running on Preorder only when out of stock or Preorder regardless of stock level — switching it on while the variant is on preorder, and off again when the variant leaves that state. On Preorder only when Shopify inventory is available, leave the setting off for those variants, so Shopify’s own count carries the campaign and moves the variant to Sold Out at zero. Because Shopify has no per-location version of it, availability scoped to one location alone isn’t something the stock settings can express on their own. If that is what you need, send support your store link and we’ll go through the options that fit your setup.

The preorder itself sits on three pieces, whichever rule you land on:

• A preorder template assigned to the variant — the customer-facing copy, carrying the button label, badge, message and cart label.
• The stock-management rule above, which decides when preorder turns on.
• A Selling Plan assigned to the variant — the purchase option that makes the item buyable on preorder, holding the charge timing and the shipping date you commit to.

Then enable the Timesact App Embed on the theme you are publishing, under Online Store → Themes → Customize → App Embeds, and click Save in the theme editor — the embed takes effect once the theme is saved. The embed is set per theme, so enable it on the theme your storefront is actually running.

Campaign dates run on UTC+0, London time, rather than your local timezone — worth a glance when your locations sit in different regions.

Every Online Store order containing a preorder item is tagged Pre-order, and an order mixing preorder and in-stock items also carries Partial Pre-order, so mixed orders arrive with both. Those order tags travel as ordinary Shopify order data, which makes them the reliable handle when your warehouse tooling needs to recognise preorder orders — they read the same regardless of which location Shopify assigns the order to.

Multi-location stock only complicates a preorder while the rule is still doing the deciding. Pick the rule that matches what you want — combined-total tracking, or a campaign that runs regardless of counts — set your cap with the preorder limit, and let Shopify keep doing the fulfilment routing it already does. One decision per variant, made once, and the warehouse map stops being something your storefront has to think about.

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