Setting up pre-orders in Addora, a complete guide for your shop

Setting up pre-orders in Addora

Pre-orders are one of the most powerful features in Addora, but they touch a lot of moving parts: your checkout, your fulfillment workflow, your customer emails, and how individual orders show up inside Shopify.

This guide walks through everything end-to-end so you know exactly what to expect at every stage: what you'll click in Addora, what your customer sees on your storefront, and what happens automatically in your Shopify admin once an order comes in.

If this is your first time setting up pre-orders, plan for about 15 minutes the first time through. You can stop and resume the setup wizard at any point, and every answer is saved as you go.

What pre-orders mean in Addora

Before we get into the wizard, it helps to understand the vocabulary you'll see throughout the app.

Pre-order items are products that aren't ready to ship yet but customers can still buy. They might be waiting on a release date, such as a launch or restock, or they might be drop-shipped from a supplier you haven't received stock from yet.

Supplier items are a specific kind of pre-order. The trigger for "ready to ship" comes from a supplier or warehouse confirming stock has arrived, not from a fixed date.

In-stock items are everything else: the products you can ship today.

A mixed order is a single cart that contains both in-stock items and pre-order or supplier items at the same time.

The pre-order setup wizard exists to teach Addora three things: how to recognise a pre-order item in your catalog, when an item is considered ready to ship, and how mixed orders should behave at checkout.

Once those three are answered, every other piece, including the checkout option your customer sees, the fulfillment holds in Shopify, and reminder emails, falls into place automatically.

Before you start

Make sure these are already in place before you walk through the pre-order setup:

1. Addora is installed and the base Ship Later option is set up. This is the main app onboarding. Once Ship Later is appearing at your checkout for ordinary orders, you're ready for pre-orders.
2. You know which products in your catalog are pre-orders. You don't have to tag them yet, but it helps to know whether you'll use Shopify product tags, which is the simplest option, or product metafields, if you already get this information from a WMS or supplier sync.
3. You have a sense of what triggers "ready to ship". For pre-orders this is usually a date. For supplier items it's usually a metafield your supplier or warehouse system sets on the product. If neither applies, you can release items by hand.

The pre-order setup wizard

You'll find the wizard at Settings → Pre-orders, or by following the prompt on your Addora dashboard if pre-orders aren't set up yet.

The wizard branches based on your answers, so you'll only see the questions that apply to your shop. Most stores see between five and seven steps.

The wizard starts with a short intro page explaining what it'll cover. Click Start setup to begin.

Step 1: Do you have mixed orders?

The first question is the most important one because it shapes everything that follows.

A mixed order is a single cart containing both items you can ship today and items that aren't ready yet.

The two answers are:

Yes, customers can mix in-stock with pre-order or supplier items. Pick this if it's possible, even occasionally, for a customer to add a pre-order item next to an in-stock item in the same basket.

No, my customers only buy one type at a time. Pick this if your store is set up so a customer's cart is either entirely in-stock or entirely pre-order. This is common when pre-order items are on their own landing pages or campaigns.

If you said Yes, you'll get a follow-up question about how those mixed carts should behave. If you said No, we skip the mixed-order question entirely and jump to the next stage.

Step 2: How should mixed orders behave?

This step only appears if you said that customers can mix in-stock items with pre-order or supplier items.

This single answer writes three connected settings behind the scenes: what shipping options the customer sees at checkout, whether Shopify holds the full order or just the unready items, and whether checkout should allow mixing at all.

You have four choices.

Ship in-stock items now, hold pre-order or supplier items until they're ready

This creates two shipments.

Your customer pays once at checkout, you ship the in-stock items immediately on their own fulfillment, and Addora holds the pre-order portion until the release condition is met.

This is usually best for customer experience because they get something fast.

Hold the whole order until everything is ready

This creates one shipment.

It is simpler operationally: there's nothing to fulfill until every item is ready, then the whole order goes out in one go.

The customer waits for the slowest item.

Don't allow mixed orders

If a customer adds an in-stock item to a cart that contains a pre-order item, the Ship Later shipping option disappears at checkout.

This is a soft way of nudging customers to pick one type per order.

Use Ship Later for every cart

Every order, whether mixed or not, runs through Ship Later.

This is for stores where the whole catalog is essentially on a delayed-ship model, such as launch-only stores or made-to-order shops.

Don't worry too much about getting this perfect on the first pass. You can change it later at any time from Settings → Pre-orders → Mode.

Step 3: Which item types do you sell?

Now we figure out what kinds of "not in stock yet" items you actually have.

You can pick one, both, or neither:

Pre-orders are items released by a date. Think product launches, restock days, or scheduled drops.

Supplier items are items released when a supplier confirms stock has arrived. This includes drop-ship products, made-to-order builds, or anything where the trigger is "the warehouse called and said it landed".

If you check both, the wizard adds two extra mini-flows, one per type.

If you check just one, you only see the questions for that type.

If you check neither, the wizard wraps up with a "nothing to set up" screen. Pre-orders stay off and nothing else in your shop changes. You can come back and re-run setup whenever your business changes.

Steps 4 to 7: Configuring each item type

For each item type you ticked in Step 3, the wizard runs a two-question mini-flow:

1. How to recognise that type of product
2. When it should release

Recognising a product

You have two ways to tell Addora which products belong to a given type.

A tag I add to the product

This is recommended for most stores.

Pick a tag. By default, Addora suggests:

• addora-preorder for pre-orders
• addora-supplier for supplier items

Any product in your Shopify catalog with that tag becomes a member of that group.

Adding the tag in Shopify is enough. Addora picks it up automatically. Case doesn't matter.

A Shopify metafield

Choose this if you already manage inventory state via metafields from a WMS, supplier integration, or another app.

The wizard will load all the metafield definitions from your shop, let you pick one from a dropdown, and let you test detection by pasting in a product ID to confirm it's classifying correctly.

There's a small Test detection panel below the configuration form where you can verify before saving.

After you save this step, Addora kicks off a background job to re-classify every product in your catalog using the new rule.

You'll see a small banner telling you the re-classification is running. It usually finishes in a few minutes even for large catalogs, and you can keep going through the wizard while it runs.

When does it release?

This is the most consequential answer because it determines when Addora removes the hold from the customer's fulfillment.

For pre-orders

Your options are:

A release date. You pick a metafield on your products that holds the release date, such as an ISO date or a date/time.

When that date passes, Addora releases the items automatically.

If you don't have a release date metafield yet, you'll define one here. Addora suggests custom.available_at by default.

Items without a release date set stay held until you set one or release them by hand.

I'll release them manually. No automation. Items stay held until you release them yourself from Operations → Orders inside Addora.

This is useful if your release process is irregular or relies on signals Addora can't see.

For supplier items

Your options are:

My supplier confirms stock arrived. Your supplier or warehouse system sets a specific metafield on the product when stock lands.

Any non-empty value counts as "ready". The items release the moment that metafield gets written.

You can either pick the metafield from your shop's existing definitions or type in the namespace and key by hand.

I'll release them manually. Same as above.

If you picked both pre-orders and supplier items in Step 3, you'll go through this configuration twice, once for each type.

Review and finish

The last screen is a review: a list of every question you answered with a short summary of your choice.

Each row has an Edit button if you want to change something.

Click Finish setup to wrap up.

After you finish, the wizard takes you to Settings → Pre-orders, where you can tweak any of these answers at any time from the tabs there.

What your customers see

Once setup is done, the customer experience is mostly invisible.

Pre-orders mostly affect which shipping options appear at checkout and when items actually leave your warehouse.

At checkout

When a customer's cart contains a pre-order or supplier item, they'll see the Ship Later shipping option at checkout.

By default it's labelled Ship Later (Addora) with the description Pay shipping later, but you can rewrite both of those at Settings → Delivery & Checkout to use your own brand voice.

Something like Ship when ready can work well. Description has a 25-character limit, so keep it short.

Whether the customer also sees standard shipping methods next to Ship Later depends on the mixed-order behaviour you picked in Step 2 of the wizard:

• Ship in-stock now, hold the rest or Hold whole order: the customer sees both Ship Later and standard shipping methods. They can choose how their order is treated.
• Don't allow mixed: Ship Later only appears when the cart is all pre-order or supplier items. If they add an in-stock item, Ship Later disappears.
• Use Ship Later for everything: only Ship Later appears, regardless of cart contents.

You can also rearrange whether Ship Later appears first or last in the shipping list from Settings → Delivery & Checkout → Ship Later position.

Most stores put it first.

The optional checkout acknowledgement

If you're on Shopify Plus, you can require customers to explicitly agree to the pre-order timing before they check out.

This is configured at Settings → Delivery & Checkout → Buyer acknowledgement and adds a small modal at checkout that the customer has to confirm.

There are two modes:

Warn mode shows the acknowledgement but doesn't block checkout. This is useful for stores that want customers informed but don't need a hard gate.

Block mode requires customers to tick the agreement box before they can finish checkout. This requires Shopify Plus and setup inside Shopify's Checkout Editor.

There's a dedicated guide at Guides → Checkout UI that walks you through it.

The buyer-facing copy of the modal, including headings, body text, button labels, and the agreement checkbox label, is configured inside Shopify Checkout Editor, not in Addora.

This is so the language can be set per locale and matches your storefront copy exactly.

The order confirmation email

The standard Shopify order confirmation email goes out as usual.

Addora doesn't modify it.

If you want the email to say something specific about pre-order timing, you can customise the order confirmation template inside Shopify at Settings → Notifications → Order confirmation in your Shopify admin.

The Guides → Email Templates guide inside Addora has copy suggestions.

Reminder and update emails from Addora

In addition to Shopify's emails, Addora can send two types of emails on its own.

The first is a gentle reminder email to customers whose orders have been sitting in pre-order limbo for too long.

You configure the trigger window at Settings → Email automations → Reserved-item reminders. The default is 14 days idle.

The email reminds the customer that you still have their order reserved and points them at their orders page.

You can rewrite the subject line, headline, body, call-to-action button, and reply-to address.

There's a Show order list in email toggle if you want to include the specific orders being referenced.

The second is an order hold update email, which fires automatically when something material changes about a customer's pre-order:

• Items they were waiting for are now ready to ship
• The release date for their pre-order has changed

This email is off by default. Turn it on at Settings → Email automations → Order hold updates.

Like the idle reminder, every line of copy is customisable.

Both email types respect the customer's email language preference and use the shop name you've configured.

They don't send if the customer doesn't have an email on the order.

What you see inside Shopify

Once orders start coming in, here's what shows up on the Shopify side.

Order tags

Addora applies tags to orders as they move through the lifecycle.

These are optional and off by default. You turn them on at Settings → Lifecycle & Tags → Order tags.

They're useful for routing inside 3PL apps, Flow automations, or just for filtering in the Shopify orders list.

The tags Addora can write are:

• A tag when the order first enters its "shipping pending" state
• A tag when shipping for the pre-order portion has been paid for
• A tag for the consolidation billing order, if you're using split-payment mode
• A tag when the items are released and ready to ship
• A tag for the shipment-tracking order

Pick the tag names that make sense for your downstream workflows.

Use Shopify-safe characters only: letters, numbers, spaces, hyphens, and underscores.

Fulfillment holds

This is the main mechanism Addora uses to keep pre-order items from shipping prematurely.

When a pre-order line item lands on an order, Addora places a native Shopify fulfillment hold on it.

You'll see this in the Shopify order page as a Hold notice on the fulfillment, attributed to Addora.

The hold stays in place until your release condition triggers. At that point, Addora removes the hold and the fulfillment becomes eligible for shipping.

This means your normal Shopify fulfillment workflow keeps working unchanged.

Your 3PL, warehouse staff, or fulfillment apps see the order, see it's on hold, and ignore it.

The moment the hold lifts, the order shows up in their queue like any other.

Consolidation orders

This applies if you use split-shipment mode.

When you've chosen the ship in-stock now, hold the rest behaviour, Addora creates a second Shopify order, called a consolidation order, once the pre-order portion is ready.

This consolidation order:

• Contains just the pre-order items that became ready
• Belongs to the same customer
• Picks up shipping from your customer's original choices
• Goes through your normal fulfillment workflow

Inside Addora, the original order and its consolidation order are linked together so you can see the full lineage of a customer's purchase.

Lifecycle states inside the Addora admin

When you look at an order inside Addora from Operations → Orders, you'll see a lifecycle label.

The default labels are:

• Shipping Pending
• Dispatching
• Billing Order
• Shipped

You can rename any of these at Settings → Lifecycle & Tags → Order lifecycle labels to match your team's vocabulary.

Day to day with pre-orders

Once setup is done, the day-to-day work happens in two places inside Addora.

Operations → Orders

This is where you spend most of your time.

It lists every order Addora is managing: pending pre-orders, consolidation orders, and everything in between.

You can:

• Filter by status, country, customer, and "held because" criteria
• Click any order to see its full timeline, including when the hold went on, when items came ready, and when shipment moved
• Bulk-select multiple orders and release them at once
• Manually release items that are stuck, overriding any automation
• Manually mark items as ready before their automated trigger fires
• Add orders to Addora's queue manually if they came in before you turned on pre-orders

The top of the page has a quick summary: total pending orders, unique customers, and total value being held.

If you ever feel like an order is stuck or the automation isn't firing, this is where to look first.

Operations → Customer emails

A separate tab lists every notification email Addora has sent on your behalf, including idle reminders and hold-update notifications.

For each email, you see:

• The customer it was sent to
• Which type of email it was
• The current delivery status, such as delivered, accepted, queued, bounced, complained, or failed
• When it was sent

Filter by status to spot any deliverability issues.

A bounce trend might mean your reply-to email address needs attention.

Your Dashboard

The Addora dashboard gives you a single-page overview:

• How many pending orders you have
• How many unique customers are waiting
• Top countries with pending orders
• Top products on pre-order
• How many notifications have gone out recently

Most merchants check this once a day or once a week to spot trends.

Managing individual products

Tagging products in bulk via Shopify product tags is the simplest way to mark items as pre-order or supplier.

But you'll sometimes need to manage individual products: set a release date on a specific item, change its classification, or check what status Addora thinks it's in.

Settings → Pre-orders → Products is where you do this.

The tab has three views:

• Pre-orders: just the products currently classified as pre-order
• Supplier orders: just the products classified as supplier items
• All products: the full catalog with each product's classification visible

For each product row, you can see its title, SKU, current classification, and release date, if applicable.

The release date is editable inline: click it, pick a date in the date picker, and save.

To remove a release date entirely, open the date picker and clear it.

If you reclassify a product or change your detection rule, such as the tag or metafield in the Spotting step, Addora re-runs classification in the background.

A banner at the top of the Products tab tells you when this is in progress.

Tuning your setup later

Almost every answer you gave during the wizard can be changed individually from Settings → Pre-orders.

The section has four sub-tabs.

Mode

Change the mixed-order behaviour, the fulfillment mode, and the checkout display mode.

Setup

Change how products are classified.

You can switch from tags to metafields, switch from metafields to tags, or just change which tag you're using.

Products

Manage individual products as described above.

Hold Release

Change the release triggers, such as release date, supplier metafield, or manual release.

You can enable more than one driver at once. Addora releases the hold as soon as any active driver's condition is met.

Other related settings live in other parts of Settings:

• Delivery & Checkout controls the shipping method name, description, position, and buyer acknowledgement.
• Lifecycle & Tags is where order tags and lifecycle display labels live.
• Fulfilment has two automation toggles: Apply order holds and Auto-fulfil original orders on consolidation. The wizard sets sensible defaults for these. Most stores never need to touch them.
• Email automations is the home for reminder and hold-update email customisation.

A few tips from setup veterans

Start simple, then tighten

Begin with the recommended option in every wizard step and the default tag names.

Once you've run a few real pre-orders through, you'll know what to change.

Test with a real product before launching publicly

Tag one item as a pre-order, set a release date for an hour from now, place a test order against it, and watch what happens in both your Shopify admin and Operations → Orders.

Seeing it end-to-end once is worth a hundred dry-runs.

Don't switch fulfillment modes mid-campaign

If you change between whole order and split per order while you have active pre-orders in flight, the orders that were placed under the old mode keep their old behaviour, but new orders use the new mode.

This is intentional. It stops you from re-orchestrating customer expectations after the sale.

But it does mean a launch can end up with mixed behaviour.

Pick the right mode before you take the first order.

Use the reminder email modestly

It's tempting to send it every week. Don't.

Once every 14 to 21 days is plenty.

Customers who haven't responded to two reminders typically aren't coming back anyway.

If your customers complain about Ship Later being confusing

Add the buyer acknowledgement modal, if you're on Shopify Plus, and customise the description on the shipping method to be more explicit about timing.

For example, Ship when ready, typically 4 to 6 weeks is much clearer than Pay shipping later.

Getting help

If something doesn't behave the way you expect:

• The Guides section in Addora has step-by-step articles for the trickier setups, including checkout UI block, email template customisation, and theme setup.
• For anything else, Guides → Contact Support has our team's contact details and typical response times.

Pre-orders feel like a lot the first time you set them up because they touch checkout, fulfillment, and customer communication all at once.

Once it's live, the system is mostly invisible.

Orders flow in, get held at the right moment, get released at the right moment, and your customers stay informed.

The setup is the hard part. After that, it just runs.