V2 General Guide

New to Timesact, or moving over from V1? This is your quick tour: what changed, where everything lives, and how to set up your first pre-order (or any other functionality). No technical know-how needed.

What's new in V2

In V1, every functionality had its own separate setup, one for Pre-order, one for Back in Stock, and so on, and you configured them one at a time.

V2 brings it all together into one reusable thing called a customer experience template. Think of it as a single setup that can run one functionality or several at once, and that you reuse across as many products as you like. You set it up once instead of repeating yourself for every product.

And you don't have to start from a blank page. On the Experiences page you'll find ready-made customer experience templates you can use straight away:

• Pre-order Launch
• Pre-order & Back In Stock
• Back-order & Notify me
• Coming soon
• Low stock & Pre-order

Click Use on one to start from it, or click + Create customer experience to build your own.

Coming from V1

Everything you built in V1 still exists, arranged differently. What used to be a separate purchase option plus a pre-order template is now one customer experience template:

• Shipping date, how the customer pays, and any discount: Admin → Functionality settings (Shipping, Billing, Pricing).
• Button, message and badge: Storefront → Product page. Cart label: Storefront → Cart page.
• The stock rule that decides when it shows: Admin → Functionality settings → When Pre-order shows.
• Products: attached in the Products section, instead of being assigned to a plan and a template separately.

One consequence worth planning for: the shipping date lives inside the template, so a store that ran one plan per shipping date runs one customer experience template per date, and the badge and button styling is set in each one. Split templates only where something genuinely differs, a date, a billing policy or a market, and start from a ready-made customer experience template on the Experiences tab rather than a blank one. Your products, your back-in-stock sign-ups and the orders you have already taken all come across as they are.

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 as your usage climbs and again when you reach your limit, then a 24 hour grace period runs during which everything keeps working. After it, the pre-order functionality stops showing and your theme's own button comes back. Checkout is never blocked, and nothing in your setup is deleted.
• 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 splits into two parts:

• Storefront — everything your shoppers see: which functionality is turned on, and how it looks on the product page, the collection page, and the cart.
• Admin — everything that works behind the scenes: each functionality's detailed settings, where it applies (countries and locations), its emails, and translations.

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 six are supporting functionality you can layer on top to round out the experience.

V2 has nine in total, grouped into five types. Inside a customer experience template, click + Add functionality to pick from them:

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

1. Go to Experiences and click + Create customer experience. Give it a title (and an optional description), then click Create.
2. 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, and it helps to follow it in that order: the Storefront side is everything shoppers see on your store (the frontend), and the Admin side is the behind-the-scenes settings (the backend).

1. Storefront (how it looks). Under Product page, Collection page, and Cart page, set the button, the message, the badge, and the cart label.
2. 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
• Translations — your storefront text in other languages. Learn more: Translations
• Notifications — the emails your customers get. Learn more: Notifications Overview

1. Attach your products from the Products section. Learn more: Adding Products
2. 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 the Dashboard and click Verify step. 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.
3. 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. Each one shows as its own row on the Products page with its own 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.

I had a custom country script added by support in V1, can I remove it? Almost always, yes, the Markets & locations settings replace those older fixes. Check with support before removing anything custom, just to be safe.

What does the small label (like Manual) next to a product mean? It shows how the product was added. Manual means you added it yourself, one at a time. Products added through a collection or a CSV file show their own label, so you can tell them apart.

Where do I see my pre-order orders? In Analytics → Pre-order for the totals, 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: 08/27/2026