Articles on: Timesact V2

Inventory and Fulfillment

How a pre-order is fulfilled, when its inventory is reserved, and how out-of-stock items stay buyable. These are reusable pre-order building blocks, for the overview see How Pre-Orders Work. You set these under Feature settings.


Deferred fulfillment


A pre-order is placed now but fulfilled later. The shipping date you set travels with the order and is shown to the customer, so they know when to expect the item. When your stock arrives, you fulfill the order like any normal order. Nothing ships until you fulfill it.


Inventory Policy: On Sale vs On Fulfillment


This controls when a pre-order counts against your inventory.


  • On Sale — inventory is reserved when the order is placed. Use it when each pre-order should immediately reduce the stock you are counting on, so your numbers reflect commitments as they come in.
  • On Fulfillment — inventory is reserved when the order is fulfilled. Use it when you do not want pre-orders touching inventory until you actually ship.


Scenario: you are pre-selling a product that has not been manufactured yet. On Fulfillment keeps your inventory untouched until the goods arrive and you fulfill the orders.


If a pre-order variant later shows Sold Out or won't add to cart, another app or a manual change may have switched Continue selling back off, see Testing and Troubleshooting.


Continue selling


For the out-of-stock stock modes, a variant at 0 inventory would normally be unbuyable in Shopify. The Continue selling auto-enable toggle handles this: when the pre-order activates, Timesact switches that variant to Shopify's "Continue selling when out of stock" setting so customers can still place the pre-order, and reverts it when the pre-order deactivates.


  • Without it: an out-of-stock pre-order variant can show Sold Out and block the sale even though you intended it to be a pre-order.
  • With it: the variant stays buyable while it is a pre-order, and returns to normal Shopify behaviour afterward.


One prerequisite: this only works if the variant has Track quantity enabled in Shopify. Shopify's "Continue selling when out of stock" setting only applies to variants whose inventory is tracked. If Track quantity is off, Shopify already treats the variant as always available, so it never registers as out of stock and the out-of-stock pre-order modes have nothing to react to. So for these modes, keep Track quantity on for the variant.


Scenario: a variant is set to pre-order when out of stock. It sells down to 0. With Continue selling on, shoppers keep seeing the Pre-Order button and can reserve it. Turn the pre-order off later and the variant goes back to standard Shopify behaviour.


What this means for your storefront and feeds


Because Continue selling keeps the variant buyable, Shopify treats it as available, and "available" is what your theme writes into the page's product data and what sales channels read from your Shopify product feed. So while a pre-order is active, your product's structured data and channels like Google Merchant Center describe the item as in stock, even though its inventory is at 0. This is Shopify's normal signal for anything a shopper can buy, and it does not change the Pre-Order button, the pre-order tag, or how the order is fulfilled.


Timesact does not set or change your theme's structured data or your Google feed. If you need those channels to describe pre-orders differently (for example as "preorder" rather than "in stock"), that is set on the Shopify product-feed side, not in Timesact.
Pre-order behaviour itself only applies on the Online Store, see How Pre-Orders Work for how pre-orders behave on the Shop App and other channels.



Updated on: 07/13/2026

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