Templates and Selling Plans in Timesact

The first time you open Timesact, you’ll see two panels that sound like they do the same thing: templates and selling plans. They don’t. They sit at different layers of your store, and once you understand which is which, the rest of the setup falls into place in about five minutes.

Here’s the short version we wish every new merchant had pinned to their monitor:

• Templates control what your customers see on the product page. Button label, badge, message text, font, alignment, ribbon style. Anything visual.
• Selling plans control what Shopify records when an order is placed. The plan name shows up in the cart, in checkout, and on the order itself. The plan description renders below the pre-order button on the product page.

Templates are styling and copy. Selling plans are the transaction shape. Both have to be set for a clean pre-order — but they answer different questions, and you set them up in different places inside the Timesact admin.

The rest of this guide walks through that mental model in the order you’d actually use it, with the specific places to click and the decisions to make at each step.

Before you touch settings, write down two short pieces of copy for the product you’re enabling:

1. The button promise. What does pressing this button get the shopper? “Pre-order — ships Friday June 13.” “Reserve yours — ships in 4 weeks.” This is the visual contract on the product page.
2. The order receipt label. What does this look like in the cart and the post-purchase order summary? “Pre-order — summer drop.” “Made-to-order — 4-week lead time.” This is what the shopper sees at checkout and what shows up on the Shopify order in your admin.

These two pieces of copy map directly onto the two settings. Your button promise belongs in a template. Your order receipt label belongs in a selling plan. Writing them out first means you stop guessing which field is which when you’re inside the admin.

If you sell products with materially different shipping windows — a coming-soon summer collection versus a back-in-stock winter restock, say — write a separate pair of copy lines for each. You’ll create one selling plan per shipping window.

Templates live under Templates in the Timesact admin sidebar. You can use the default template or create a custom one. For most stores, one custom template per visual style is plenty: one for full-payment pre-orders, one for charge-later pre-orders, one for coming-soon products. You don’t need a template per product.

Inside a template, the fields you’ll spend time on are:

• Button label. What replaces “Add to Cart.” Keep it short — “Pre-Order,” “Reserve,” “Notify Me” — and matched to the pre-order type.
• Message — below button. The line of text that renders directly under the pre-order button. This is where a shipping window like “Ships by June 13” or a short reassurance like “Charged today, ships when ready” belongs. Set text alignment, weight, and color here.
• Badge. The small label on the product card and the product page hero — “Pre-Order,” “Coming Soon,” “Back in Stock” — that signals the state at a glance.

Save the template, and every product you assign it to picks up the same visual treatment. Edit the template once, and every product page using it updates together. That’s the whole point of templates — write it once, render it everywhere.

For a refresher on how the pre-order button slots into a standard Shopify product page, our step-by-step guide to replacing the Add to Cart button with a Pre-Order button covers the product-page end of the setup in detail.

Selling plans live under Selling Plans in the Timesact admin. A selling plan tells Shopify “this purchase is a pre-order with these terms” and writes that into the order data.

The fields that matter most:

• Selling plan name. Visible in the cart, at checkout, and on the Shopify order in your admin. Make it descriptive — “Pre-order — June 13 ship date” rather than “Plan 1.” The clearer the name, the easier your operations team has it when the order lands in Shopify.
• Selling plan description. Renders on the product page directly below the pre-order button — the same area the template’s message field lives in. Use this for terms that belong with the transaction: “Charged at checkout. Ships June 13.” If your template message already covers the shipping date, keep the selling plan description focused on payment terms or a short legal note. Avoid duplicating the same sentence in both fields.
• Payment terms. Choose between full payment at checkout or a charge on a specific later date. The choice is per selling plan, and Shopify handles the actual charging.

If you sell multiple products with different ship dates or different payment terms, create one selling plan per combination. Three pre-order products all shipping in July, full payment at checkout? One selling plan. A separate run shipping in September with a charge-on-a-specific-future-date option? A second selling plan. The names you write here are what your team will scan when they’re processing orders in Shopify.

For more on when to use charge-later versus full-payment-at-checkout, our guide to partial payments on pre-orders walks through the trade-offs.

With both pieces ready, the product-level setup takes under a minute. In Timesact, open the product, choose the template you want for its visual treatment, and pick the selling plan that matches its payment terms and ship date. Save, and the product is set.

The trigger settings at the top of the product configuration decide when the pre-order is active:

• Pre-order regardless of inventory level — the pre-order button shows whether or not you have stock. Useful for coming-soon products and made-to-order items.
• Pre-order only when out of stock — the pre-order button replaces Add to Cart only when Shopify reports the product as out of stock. Useful for catalog items where you want to capture demand during a stockout and switch back to normal selling when inventory returns.

Both modes work with whichever template and selling plan you’ve assigned. Once you save, open the product on your storefront in a fresh tab and confirm the button, badge, and messages render the way your two short copy lines said they should.

Once both layers are set, here’s the trip the experience takes:

• On the product page, the shopper sees the template at work: the pre-order button label, the badge, the message below the button. They also see the selling plan description rendered just below — payment terms and the order-side reassurance.
• When they add to cart and move to checkout, the selling plan name travels with the line item, so they see “Pre-order — June 13 ship date” in the cart summary and on the Shopify order receipt.
• In your Shopify admin, the order shows the same selling plan name as a tag-like marker on the line item. Your fulfillment team can filter by it, your ESP can read it from Shopify, and your accountant can identify pre-order revenue separately from in-stock sales.

That separation — visual layer in the template, transaction layer in the selling plan — is the design behind why you set both. Once you have the model in your head, the next product you set up is two minutes of work.

If you’re still narrowing down which pre-order features your store needs, our feature-by-feature guide to choosing a pre-order app is a useful next read before you build out more templates.

Templates and selling plans are the two levers Timesact gives you, and they reward a few minutes of upfront thinking. Write the two copy lines, set the template, set the selling plan, assign both to the product. When you’re ready to install Timesact or want a hand walking through your first setup together, we are here.

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