V2 General Guide
New to Timesact? This is your quick tour: where everything lives, and how to set up your first pre-order (or any other functionality). No technical know-how needed.
Ready-made templates
Everything in Timesact is set up in a customer experience template: one reusable setup that can run one functionality or several at once, and that you apply to as many products as you like.
You don't have to start from a blank page. On the Experiences page, the Recommended section has ready-made customer experience templates you can use straight away. Click Use template on one to start from it, or click Create Customer Experience to build your own.
Where everything lives
The menu on the left has five areas:
- Experiences — create and manage your customer experience templates.
- Products — see which products have a customer experience template attached, and add more.
- Notifications — set up the emails your customers receive.
- Analytics — see how your pre-orders and back-in-stock signups are doing.
- Billing & Account — your plan, usage, and integrations.
Plans, usage and limits
Your plan sets how many pre-orders Timesact handles in a period, and it is all in Billing & Account.
- Usage counts orders, not items. An order with five pre-order items counts once, and the number of products you keep on pre-order makes no difference. Fulfilling an order does not return a slot, so a figure like 63/250 reads as 63 pre-orders taken out of 250, not 63 waiting to ship.
- Timesact emails you when your orders reach 50%, 70% and 100% of your plan's monthly limit. On a paid plan billed monthly, orders above the limit are billed as extra orders, and on a yearly plan everything keeps working. On the FREE plan, everything keeps working for 24 hours after you reach the limit, then the functionality pauses and your theme's own button comes back until the order count resets on the 1st or you change plan. Checkout is never blocked, and nothing in your setup is deleted. For current plans and prices, see the Timesact listing on the Shopify App Store.
- Nothing moves you up a plan automatically. Pick the plan in Billing & Account and approve the charge in Shopify, which handles the billing and any proration.
- Plan usage messages can go to Slack as well, in Billing & Account → Integrations under Subscription alerts. The address the app emails is under Store settings. These are about your plan only, the alerts for pre-orders and back-in-stock sign-ups come with the add-on.
Inside a customer experience template
When you open one, its menu starts with Functionality, then splits into two parts:
- Admin: everything that works behind the scenes: each functionality's detailed settings, where it applies (countries and locations), its emails, and tag automation.
- Storefront: everything your shoppers see: how it looks on the product page, the collection page and the cart, and the translations of your storefront text.
A simple way to remember it: Storefront is how it looks, Admin is how it works.
The functionality you can use
Timesact is built around two main ones, the ones most stores come for:
- Pre-order — let customers buy a product before it's available, so you lock in sales and cash ahead of a launch or a restock. This is Timesact's flagship functionality.
- Back in Stock — let customers sign up to be emailed the moment a sold-out item returns, so you recover demand you would otherwise lose.
Master these two first, they cover the vast majority of what stores need. The other seven are supporting functionality you can layer on top to round out the experience.
There are nine, grouped into five types, plus the storewide Wishlist. Inside a customer experience template, click Add functionality to pick from the first four types, one functionality per type. Hide Sold Out and Wishlist are storewide: each starts from its own template on the Experiences page.
Type | Functionality | What it does |
|---|---|---|
Purchase | Pre-order (main functionality) | Let customers buy a product before it's available. |
Purchase | Backorder | Let customers order items that are temporarily out of stock. |
Purchase | Made to Order | Let customers order custom-made products. |
Notification | Back in Stock (main functionality) | Let customers sign up to be emailed when an item returns. |
Notification | Notify Me | Let customers sign up to be told when an item is available. |
Notification | Waitlist | Let customers join a waitlist for an out-of-stock item. |
Availability | Show off an upcoming product before it launches. | |
Urgency | Show a low-stock message to nudge customers to buy. | |
Storewide | Hide Sold Out | Hide products across the store when every tracked variant is sold out. |
Storewide | Let customers save product variants and come back to them later. |
You can turn on more than one functionality in the same customer experience template (for example the two main ones together, or Pre-order alongside Waitlist and Low Stock). Each one shows up at the right moment, depending on the item's stock and the dates you set.
Set up your first customer experience template
- Go to Experiences and click Create Customer Experience. Give it a Title (and an optional Description), then click Create.
- On the Functionality tab, click Add functionality and choose one. Pre-order is a good place to start.
From here the menu splits into two halves: the Storefront side is everything shoppers see on your store, and the Admin side is the behind-the-scenes settings. In the menu, Admin comes first and Storefront second, and you can set them up in either order.
- Storefront (how it looks). Under Product page, Collection page and Cart page, set the button, the message, the badge and the cart label. If Back in Stock is on, POS (beta) lets staff sign customers up from Shopify POS, see Back in Stock. Under Translations, at the end of this section, set your storefront text in other languages. Learn more: Translations
- Admin (how it works). This is where you set:
- Functionality settings — how it behaves: when it shows based on stock, the shipping date, how the customer pays, and any discount. Learn more: Pre-order
- Markets & locations — where it applies, by country and by location (optional). Learn more: Markets and Locations
- Notifications: the emails your customers get. Learn more: Notifications Overview
- Tag automation: attach products automatically with a Shopify tag (optional). Learn more: Tag Automation in V2
- Attach your products from the Products section. Learn more: Adding Products
- Switch Timesact on in your theme, so what you set up can appear on your storefront. In Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Themes → Customize → App embeds, switch the Timesact V2 entry on, switch any older Timesact entry off, then click Save, the embed only takes effect once the theme is saved. Back in the app, open Timesact from your Shopify admin to reach the home page, then in the Setup guide, under Enable Timesact in your theme, click Verify step. You can also click Enable app embed there to open the theme editor at the right place. It is a theme-level setting, so you do not repeat it per product, but a draft or duplicated theme needs it switched on too.
- Check it live. Open the product in a private or incognito browser window to see it the way a shopper would. On the Products page, the Functionality status column tells you the live state, for example "Pre-order, Active" (showing now) or "Pre-order, On standby" (set up, waiting for the right stock).
Learn more
The setup steps above link to a detailed guide for each section. One more worth knowing:
- Running more than one, or several customer experience templates on one product: Customer Experience Templates Workflow
FAQ
Can one product have more than one customer experience template? Yes. On the Products page, each one shows on that variant's row with its own Customer Experience dropdown, dates and status, and Timesact automatically shows the right one to each shopper, based on where they are and your stock.
Do I need to set anything up in Shopify myself for pre-orders to work? No. When you turn on Pre-order, Timesact takes care of the technical setup behind it for you. You just choose your settings in the app. The one thing that lives in Shopify is switching Timesact on in your theme's App embeds, which is what lets the button and message appear, see the setup steps above.
What does the small label (like Manual) next to a product mean? It shows how the product was added: MANUAL (added in the app, one by one or from a collection), CSV (a CSV import), FLOW (Shopify Flow) or AUTO TAGGED (tag automation).
Where do I see my pre-order orders? In Analytics → Pre-order → Sales, or in your Shopify Orders list filtered by the Pre-order tag.
A quick note
We're still polishing the interface, so a few labels may change over the next while, but the ideas and menus in this guide are stable. Any questions? Use Chat with Us or Call me back at the top right of any screen in the app.
Updated on: 11/10/2026
Thank you!