2025 Common Pain Points Project

At the start of every year, we focus on our Common Pain Points project—tackling smaller but meaningful improvements based on customer support trends and feature requests that don’t quite fit into larger development cycles. Over the past six weeks, we’ve shipped a number of updates designed to smooth out pre-orders, optimize workflows, and add new flexibility. Here’s what’s new:

Refunds, Payments & Order Management

You can now issue refunds directly from PreProduct, making it easier to handle cancellations and customer requests without needing to jump into Shopify or BigCommerce admin. This streamlines workflows and keeps everything in one place.

For those using the Shop Pay app, we’ve introduced automatic toggling of the sales channel when listing or de-listing a product for pre-order. This ensures that Shop Pay (which doesn’t support pre-orders) doesn’t allow customers to bypass the pre-order flow.

We’ve also added support for editing pre-order quantities—though at this stage, only decreases are supported. This helps merchants manage inventory levels dynamically as pre-orders roll in.

Better Pre-Order Button & UI Handling

We’re introducing an experimental Optimized Button Loading feature for Shopify stores, which ensures that buy-now buttons are hidden more quickly for pre-order products. This reduces friction and prevents customers from checking out incorrectly before the pre-order messaging loads.

We’ve also improved add-to-cart button detection to ensure it doesn’t hide other essential elements on the page, such as quantity selectors and carousel navigation.

Customization & Merchandising Enhancements

Merchants can now set default Shopify ‘purchase option’ names directly from the ‘Customize Wording’ screen, giving more control over how pre-orders and deferred payment options appear to customers.

We’ve added a unit count display for pre-order sections on “See All” listing screens, making it easier to track pre-order demand at a glance.

Backend & Developer-Focused Improvements

Agencies and developer stores can now access a free, unlimited ‘Partner Test’ plan, making it easier to build and test pre-order setups without incurring extra costs.

We’ve updated our search functionality, allowing Shopify users to find products by name, handle, or SKU. BigCommerce merchants will continue to use their native ‘search like’ function for finding products.

On the technical side, we’ve rolled out updates to the latest platform APIs, libraries, and frameworks to ensure long-term stability and compatibility.

Availability Monitoring & Customer Experience

We’ve added a storewide Availability Issues notice to the top-right of the main dashboard. This feature detects pre-order listings with availability issues and allows merchants to resolve them directly from a pop-up modal.

Customers can now update their payment method directly from their customer portal, reducing friction and improving the self-serve experience.

Looking Ahead

These updates are all about making the pre-selling experience smoother, less error-prone, and better converting. We have some exciting bigger features and updates in the pipeline, but for now, here’s to a great 2025!

Oli