About pre-order and Try Before You Buy (TBYB)

Pre-order and TBYB apps enable flexible payments and fulfillments on product variants. This guide describes how these apps work, their requirements, and their limitations.

Anchor to How it worksHow it works

You can create pre-order and TBYB options with sellingPlanGroupCreate mutation.

There's no single API to create a specific pre-order or TBYB option. Instead, a pre-order or TBYB option has configurations for pricing, delivery, inventory, and billing policies. This enables you to build more flexible and extensible apps that support various ways to sell and buy products.

Anchor to Pricing policyPricing policy

The pricingPolicies field defines pricing changes on a given product variant. Pricing policies enable merchants to adjust prices on pre-order and TBYB orders by setting adjustmentType and adjustmentValue. Pricing policies work in conjunction with price lists.

Anchor to Delivery policyDelivery policy

The deliveryPolicy field defines when the order should be fulfilled, from the time that the order is created to the time that it leaves the merchant's possession. The order can be fulfilled as soon as possible (ASAP) or on a specific date (EXACT_TIME). If the fulfillment timeline depends on other conditions, then the fulfillment timeline can be set to unknown (UNKNOWN).

Anchor to Inventory policyInventory policy

The inventoryPolicy field defines whether the inventory is committed when the order is created (ON_SALE) or when the order is fulfilled (ON_FULFILLMENT). This helps merchants manage inventory when there are orders with delayed fulfillments.

Anchor to Billing policyBilling policy

The billingPolicy field defines the intervals of time between the placement of an order and payment collection.

When configuring the billing policy, you can set checkout charges for pre-order or TBYB options to secure customers' commitments to orders before the orders are fulfilled. When you set a checkout charge, a partial amount is charged at checkout, and the remaining balance amount is charged on a specific date (EXACT_TIME) or X days after checkout (TIME_AFTER_CHECKOUT). You can set the checkout charge value to 0 to charge the full amount at checkout.

Shopify will store a customer's payment method so that merchants can collect the remaining balance amount without contacting the customer.

To learn more about policy configuration, refer to Create and manage pre-orders and TBYB.

Anchor to Selling plan categoriesSelling plan categories

The category field represents the selling plan category that's used to filter orders by selling plan category on the order page. The category field supports the following approved categories:

• SUBSCRIPTION

• PRE_ORDER

• TRY_BEFORE_YOU_BUY

  If you want to offer a category that isn't listed above, then set the category field to OTHER, and fill out our request form, where we'll review your request for a new selling plan category.

Anchor to Charging the remaining balanceCharging the remaining balance

A PaymentMandate is the payment method and permission that a customer gives to the merchant to debit money. You can use the orderCreateMandatePayment mutation to use a customer's payment mandate to trigger a payment for the remaining balance on an order or create a payment schedule. You can query vaultedPaymentMethods on the Order object to retrieve the list of available payment mandates.

Orders with a deferred payment will have an attached payment term that indicates when the payment should be made and how. You can query the PaymentTerms object to check the payment terms and when the remaining balance amount is due on a given order. To poll the payment status, you can use the orderPaymentStatus query.

It's your app's responsibility to schedule the charge at the right time and automate any process around payment failures. To learn more about your app's responsibilities, refer to the division of responsibilities between Shopify and apps.

Anchor to Use casesUse cases

The following diagram illustrates how you can create pre-order and TBYB options:

Anchor to Pre-orderPre-order

• A 20% price reduction will be applied on the variant.
• The product will be fulfilled on 2022-07-01.
• The inventory will be updated when the order is created.
• The 10% of the total amount will be charged as a deposit at checkout. The remaining amount will be charged on 2022-07-01, when the product is fulfilled.

Anchor to Try before you buyTry before you buy

• The product will be fulfilled as soon as possible.
• The inventory will be updated when the order is created.
• There's no deposit. The full amount will be charged 14 days after checkout.

Anchor to LimitationsLimitations

The following are known limitations for Subscriptions, pre-orders and TBYB:

• Customers can't use local payment methods for subscriptions, pre-orders and TBYB.
• Subscriptions, pre-orders and TBYB can't be used through Shopify POS.
• Subscriptions, pre-orders and TBYB can't be used on draft orders.
• Subscriptions, pre-orders and TBYB don't support "Buy X get Y" discounts.

• To use pre-order and TBYB options, merchants need to use one of the following payment gateways:
  • Shopify Payments
  • PayPal Express
  • Adyen on Shopify
  • Stripe, which is only available to some merchants
• Each order can only have one deferred payment due date. If an order has multiple products that have different deferred payment due dates, all of the order's deferred payments will be due on the soonest due date.
• The Order Edits API only supports removing a product with a pre-orders or TBYB.
• Pre-order and TBYB options aren't supported on stores with checkouts customized using checkout.liquid.

  Instead, you need to upgrade to Shopify Extensions in Checkout.

• Pre-order and TBYB options don't support cart permalinks.

Anchor to Next stepsNext steps

• Learn about modeling pre-order and TBYB apps.