Moving a Product From Back-in-Stock to Preorder

A product sells out. You put Notify Me on it and a queue builds — 60, 200, sometimes a few thousand people who each raised their hand for one specific variant. Then your supplier confirms a date, and suddenly the right offer isn’t “we’ll tell you when it’s back,” it’s “buy it now, ships in six weeks.”

That’s a good problem. The question it raises is one of sequence: what happens to the people already on the waitlist when the product changes state, and in what order do you make the change so nobody is left holding a signup that never resolves?

The short version: restock emails fire on the restock event, so the order you do things in determines whether that queue gets contacted. Get the sequence right and it’s straightforward.

One thing: inventory reaching the threshold set in your Back in Stock template. When Timesact detects that a variant has crossed it, the email goes out to everyone waiting on that variant.

Two consequences follow from that, and they explain nearly every question merchants ask about this transition:

• The product has to be listed under Back in Stock in Timesact at the moment the stock lands. If it isn’t on that list when inventory arrives, there’s no detection, and no email.
• Restock emails are sent automatically from that trigger rather than dispatched by hand from the dashboard, so “send my waitlist an email now” isn’t a button — it’s a matter of arranging the trigger.

The threshold itself is worth setting deliberately. A low threshold gets the email out as soon as stock lands; a higher one waits until you have enough depth to serve the queue without the first few clicks emptying it. For a product with a long waitlist, a higher threshold is usually the kinder choice.

Here’s the sequence that keeps the queue intact when a waitlisted product becomes a preorder:

1. Decide whether the waitlist should hear from you first. If those subscribers signed up expecting a restock, tell them before you change the product’s state. That’s the step everything else hangs on. 2. Keep the product in Back in Stock until those notifications have gone out. Removing it from the feature ahead of time stops the automated flow for that product and clears pending email queues, so let the sends finish first. 3. Then set the preorder up — templates, Selling Plan, stock-management rule — and take the product off the Back in Stock list if you no longer want new signups on it.

Removing a product from the Back in Stock list doesn’t remove your preorder setup for it. That’s what makes step 3 safe once step 2 has actually completed.

If a product ever disappears from the Back in Stock list after you’ve changed its state, re-add the product or variant to Back in Stock and check the setup. That’s also the answer when a restock happened and the emails didn’t: the product needs to be on the list at the moment inventory crosses the threshold. A common way to re-trigger detection is to set the variant’s inventory to 0, save, then set it back to the correct quantity — provided the product is still included in Back in Stock and meets your template’s threshold.

There’s no native “your item is now available to preorder” email — the restock notification is built around stock arriving, not around a preorder window opening. What works is a documented workaround that uses the same trigger:

1. Update the Back in Stock email wording to say the item is available to preorder rather than back in stock. 2. Set the variant’s inventory positive to trigger the send. 3. Remove the inventory again so the product returns to its preorder state.

The email copy — subject and body — lives in the Notifications tab, not in the template. That’s a distinction worth holding onto, because the template holds the Notify Me button label and the post-signup confirmation message, while the words in the actual email are configured separately. The subject line accepts $productName, which drops the exact product a shopper was waiting for into the subject.

Do this on a product where the whole waitlist should get the same message, and do it once. It’s a deliberate, one-off manoeuvre rather than a routine.

You don’t always have to choose. A product can carry both preorder and back-in-stock, and on the same product page — preorder for people ready to commit now, Notify Me for people who’d rather wait for stock in hand.

Both features work at the variant level, so this can be as granular as your catalogue needs. The setup is a single pass: add the product from the Products tab, configure the preorder — template, Selling Plan, stock rule — then enable Back in Stock on the same product, assign its Back in Stock template, and set the inventory threshold that triggers the email.

This is often the better answer for the transition in this article. Rather than moving a product from one state to the other, you add preorder alongside the waitlist and let the queue convert at its own pace. Running both features across a store is a normal setup, not an edge case.

One thing to set expectations on: each feature follows its own rule rather than handing off to the next. Your preorder stock-management rule already handles the In Stock and Preorder switch on its own as inventory moves, and when preorder and Back in Stock are both enabled in an out-of-stock scenario they appear together. What Timesact doesn’t run is a single sequence that walks a product through In Stock, Preorder and Notify Me in order — you choose which features are enabled, so a phased rollout is something you set up feature by feature.

Whichever route you take, what a shopper sees comes from your templates. The Notify Me button label and the post-signup message live in the Back in Stock template; the preorder button label, badge, banner, and cart label live in the preorder template. Set both if both are live, so the product page reads as one coherent offer rather than two apps sharing a page.

Enable the Timesact App Embed on the theme you’re publishing — Online Store → Themes → Customize → App Embeds — and click Save in the theme editor. The Notify Me form then renders on your product pages alongside your preorder elements.

The stock-management rule on the preorder side is worth a moment too, because it decides what happens to the preorder when the delayed stock finally lands. The rule you pick determines whether the preorder stays live regardless of inventory, caps at your allocation, or steps aside automatically the moment real stock is counted in.

A back-in-stock queue is the most qualified list in your store, and moving a product to preorder doesn’t have to cost you any of it. Keep the product in Back in Stock until its notifications have gone out, set the preorder up afterwards, and consider running both together so the queue converts at its own pace instead of being switched over in one move.

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