Shopify Pre-order Examples: 11 Real Brands and How They Sell
TLDR: Eleven real Shopify pre-order examples, grouped by the decision each brand made rather than by industry. Jones Soda built a themed landing page for a $49.99 soda and gives the first 1,500 orders a better sticker. Dalstrong sold a $1,499 axe on a countable limit of 20 with a choice of payment models. Scotch Porter and Gretchen Scott disclose pre-order terms in opposite ways, and both work. Sirius Dice had 22 pre-order listings live at once, which looks less like a campaign than a default setting. Pick the one that fits your next product.
Introduction
Most round-ups of Shopify pre-order examples show you sixteen product pages in a row and tell you to add a countdown timer. The screenshots are usually fine. The grouping isn’t: by industry, or one brand after another. Four fashion brands all “using social proof” teaches you the same thing four times.
This piece is grouped by the decision instead. Each example is from a real pre-order campaign where the merchant made a different call: how specific to be about the ship date, what to offer for ordering early, and how specific to be.
Eleven brands, eleven decisions. Some will fit your product and some won’t, which is the point.
Most of these campaigns ran on our own pre-order platform, so the detail is first-hand: exact on-page copy, real payment models and lead times. Finished campaigns are described in the past tense.
How real brands use pre-orders: 11 Shopify pre-order examples at a glance
#
Approach
Brand
Use it when
1
Tailor-made launch landing page
Jones Soda
The launch is an event, not a restock
2
Licensed collab storytelling
Away
You’re borrowing another audience
3
Reward tier instead of a discount
Jones Soda
You want urgency without capping supply
4
Countable limited allocation
Dalstrong
Scarcity is real and you can state the number
5
Batch selling as the model
Paynter
Scarcity is structural, not a tactic
6
Loud on-page disclosure
Scotch Porter
Mixed carts could cause support headaches
7
Clean page, terms in a pop-up
Gretchen Scott
Brand aesthetics matter as much as clarity
8
Deposit to lower commitment
Perk Supply
The product is untested or high-ticket
9
Lower-commitment language
Matias Moellenbach
Price alone causes hesitation
10
Reviews and UGC carrying the risk
Tinge Beauty
You have history on the product line
11
Pre-order as a default state
Sirius Dice
You have continuous inbound stock
Build the entire page around the launch
Jones Soda x Nuka-Cola: a themed environment, not a product page
The hero does no selling at all. It builds a world: space background, Vault Boy, custom display type, product art directed to match the Fallout universe. The commercial work happens further down, where the buy module carries the terms.
Two details are worth copying. The pre-order policy is linked by name at the point of purchase rather than buried in the footer: “By purchasing this item you are acknowledging you have read and agree to our Pre-Order policy.” And the ship date is a specific month, October 2026, not a vague quarter.
If you’re building the page itself, we’ve covered layout and hierarchy separately in our guide to pre-order landing page examples. This section is about the decision to give a launch its own environment in the first place.
Away x The White Lotus: borrow an audience, borrow its visual language
Away’s collaboration with The White Lotus took the idea further, adopting the show’s illustrated art direction instead of Away’s usual product photography. It opened with “LIFE IS SHORT… JUST TAKE THE TRIP.” and a second panel of pure storytelling, the luggage almost incidental.
The collection has since sold out, and that state was left live pointing at new arrivals. A finished drop still works as proof that drops sell out.
Make the incentive something that isn’t a discount
The reflex, when you’re asking someone to wait, is to knock money off. Most merchants resist it. According to our report on over One Million pre-orders, only 9.6% of pre-orders carry any discount at all, and the most common band, 5% to 10%, applies to just 5.3% of listings.
That leaves a better question than “how big a discount do I need to offer?” it’s “what can I give early buyers that doesn’t cost me margin?” Jones Soda has the sharpest answer here.
Jones Soda’s tiered sticker reward
Jones Soda’s answer:
“We reserved a limited number of Edition One stickers to account for incidentals, and a few are still available. That means the first 1,500 units ordered will receive Edition One stickers. All remaining orders will ship with Edition Two stickers.”
Look at what that does. Nobody is turned away. A capped drop creates urgency by refusing customers; a reward tier creates urgency while still taking every order. The margin cost is a sticker, and the scarcity is specific, so nobody has to be disappointed.
The generalisable rule: tier it rather than gate it, and state the number. “The first 1,500 units” is urgency. “A limited number” is not.
Three other ways to pay for commitment
Free shipping attached to a payment choice. Dalstrong offered two radio buttons on its Gene Simmons Hellfire Demon Axe: “Pay 20% now to secure your order” or “Pay in full to unlock free shipping.” Both cautious and committed buyers get an option, and neither involves cutting the price.
Price protection.Perk Supply tells early buyers that “reserving locks your launch-price spot.” The reward is certainty, not a saving.
A stacked, frictionless saving.Obsidian Adventure Gear is the outlier that does discount: “Submit your pre-order now and save $30 plus free US shipping. Discount auto-applied at checkout.” Note the framing. It reads as a reward for committing early, not a markdown, and there’s no code to hunt for.
Obsidian’s page is also a reminder that pre-orders aren’t only for launches. “New Inventory arrives late August” frames this as a restock, which is a far more common use case than the launch-day drops most articles fixate on.
Use scarcity a customer can actually count
Dalstrong: “Limited Edition: 20 Available for Pre-Order”
The Dalstrong KISS collaboration was a $1,499 item, and its buy box did more work than any other here. Alongside the payment choice it stated “Limited Edition: 20 Available for Pre-Order” and “Limit 1 per customer”, declared the 20% deposit non-refundable in plain sight, and broke the bundle into named components.
“20 available” is scarcity a customer can verify. “Limited edition” on its own is a claim. The difference matters more than the wording of the button.
Paynter: when scarcity is the business model
Paynter sells in numbered batches. Batch no.22 sold out, and the page still worked by pointing at the next one. Because the constraint is structural rather than a marketing device, Paynter never has to manufacture urgency. Customers know the rules.
Say the awkward part out loud, in one of two ways
Every pre-order has an uncomfortable truth attached: the customer is paying for something they can’t have yet. Two brands in this library handle it in exactly opposite ways, and both are right.
Scotch Porter: the unmissable on-page warning
Scotch Porter put a warning block directly under its pre-order button:
“PRE-ORDER NOTICE (Beard Oil + Beard Balm Only): These items must be purchased in a separate order. If you check out with a pre-order item in your cart, your entire order will be held until that pre-order item is ready to ship. Place separate orders if you want in-stock items shipped right away.”
This is the mixed-cart problem stated in the customer’s own language, at the moment of decision. Most stores discover it at support-ticket time instead. 37.9% of stores that allow mixed carts, and those that do inherit exactly this conversation.
The reason it doesn’t kill the sale: the warning tells the customer what to do, not just what will go wrong. That reads as helpful rather than as a deterrent, and it sits below the call to action, so it informs without blocking.
Worth saying that asking politely is the fallback, not the only option. Scotch Porter is relying on the customer reading the notice and choosing to place two orders. A more capable app decides it for them. PreProduct’s front-end redirects offer two settings: send the shopper straight to checkout, so a pre-order can never share an order with in-stock items, or send them to the cart, where several pre-order items travel together but buy-now items are kept out.
Which you want depends on the trade-off inside that 37.9%. Isolated carts are cleaner to fulfil and avoid charging shipping twice on an order that ships in two parts. Mixed carts protect average order value. Allow mixing and you need the Scotch Porter notice; enforce isolation and you don’t.
Gretchen Scott: keep the page clean, put the terms one click away
Gretchen Scott takes the opposite view. The product page is deliberately unremarkable: standard photography, colour and size selectors, and a single black “Preorder” button where “Add to cart” would normally sit. No banner, no badge, no warning block. A shopper browsing the catalogue sees a normal fashion page.
Clicking the button opens a pop-up that carries everything the page omits, in one sentence of plain language: “We expect the So Sweet Dress will ship in September 2026. Preorder today and we’ll hold off charging you until we’re ready to ship.” There’s a quantity stepper, a “+” to add more pre-order items to the same reservation, and an optional note field that catches sizing questions at the point of order.
Neither brand hides anything. They differ on when the buyer sees it. If your brand lives on visual restraint, defer the terms. If your logistics create a real surprise, put it on the page. What doesn’t work is leaving it to the confirmation email. For the wording itself, we’ve collected pre-order message examples and templates drawn from over a thousand stores.
Perk Supply’s buy box shows £19.99 struck through, replaced by “Deposit, £5”, with “Balance only charged when we ship” underneath. In red beneath the button: “Limited to our first pre-order test batch, reserving locks your launch-price spot.”
A deposit on a £19.99 consumable is unusual, and that’s the interesting part. It isn’t there to spread cost. It’s there to lower the commitment on an untested product, and Perk says so openly by calling it a test batch. Honesty about the campaign’s purpose is itself a trust signal.
The Interpolate Chair uses “Reserve now” rather than “Buy”. It reframes the transaction as holding a place rather than parting with money. On high-ticket, long-lead items, the language of commitment matters as much as the amount does.
Let other customers carry the risk
Tinge Beauty: reviews from shipped batches de-risk the next one
Tinge’s pre-order page leads with a 4.35 out of 5 rating from 79 reviews, a customer video review and a photo strip, plus “free + easy returns, always” in the top bar. The price sits inside the button: “pre-order | $44.00”.
This is why a repeat pre-order converts better than a first one. Reviews from previous batches answer the question a new buyer can’t otherwise resolve: does this thing work? A shade quiz does the same job a measurements table does for apparel, reducing returns on an order that won’t arrive for months.
Long Table Pancakes: ride a live press moment
After appearing on Shark Tank, Long Table renamed the product “As Seen on Shark Tank Variety Pack”, which is exactly what people typed into search after the episode aired. The page carried the pull-quote “BEST PANCAKES I’VE EVER HAD” with the investors named and the air date given, so the claim was checkable.
The operational half is what most brands skip. An announcement bar read “Where is my order? >>Shipping schedule & Shark Tank update<<“, and the PDP framed demand overflow as proof rather than apology: “You blew up our spot! 10,000 orders and counting.” Naming it “Round 2” set the expectation that batches repeat. Our pre-order campaign framework covers the phases in detail.
Run every restock and purchase order through a pre-order stage
Every example so far is a campaign: a launch, a drop, a moment. Sirius Dice looks like something else, and it points at the most under-covered idea in this category.
What’s visible from the outside: 22 pre-order products live at once, a permanent “Coming Soon” collection in the navigation, and the same boilerplate line on every listing (“…is a pre-order item to be released at a later date. It will be shipped once the item is available.”). Inventory state shows as “Backordered” under the button, consistently everywhere the product appears.
We can’t see their purchasing calendar, so we don’t know whether that’s policy or just how things have settled. It doesn’t read like a campaign though. No countdown, no hero treatment, no launch moment. Pre-order looks like a normal state for a product to be in.
That’s the model worth borrowing, whether or not anyone set out to build it: treat a pre-order stage as the default for upcoming products and restocks, rather than deciding case by case. The argument for it:
The sell window opens when the purchase order is placed, not when stock lands. Every week a new release sits unannounced is a week of demand going nowhere.
Out-of-stock pages stop being dead ends. A licensed range has continuous new sets and restocks. The alternative is a sold-out page converting at zero.
Demand signal arrives before the reorder. Pre-order volume tells you how deep to go on the next purchase order, before committing cash.
It compounds. Customers learn where to reserve the new set, which is what makes the next launch bigger.
The operational point is what makes it possible. At that many live listings, ship dates and charge timing can’t depend on someone remembering to write them into a description. A boilerplate line plus consistent button treatment is the whole per-product effort; the app handles the rest, tagging products automatically so they stay filterable from day one. If you’re weighing this against letting stock go negative, our guide to Shopify backorders covers where the two approaches diverge.
How to pick the right pre-order approach for your product
Work through four questions.
Launch or restock? Launches justify a tailor-made page and a story. Restocks don’t, and shouldn’t wait for one. Obsidian’s restock page is one orange paragraph.
What’s the price? Above a few hundred dollars, reduce the ask: a deposit, a payment choice, or softer language. Below that the friction usually isn’t money, it’s confidence, so lead with reviews.
Is the awkward part on the page? Ship date, charge timing and mixed-cart behaviour, somewhere before checkout, in plain language. It’s the cheapest thing on this list and the one most often skipped.
Key takeaways from these Shopify pre-order examples
The 11 Shopify pre-order examples above have little in common on the surface. A $50 soda bottle, a $1,499 axe, a £19.99 drink and 22 dice sets don’t share an audience. What they share is a decision made deliberately rather than by default. Five things to take away:
Reward early buyers with something that isn’t margin. A better sticker for the first 1,500 orders creates urgency without capping supply or cutting the price.
Make scarcity countable. A number a customer can check beats an adjective.
Put the awkward part before checkout, on the page or in a pop-up. Both work. Silence doesn’t.
Match the payment model to the lead time. Long waits want charge-later or a deposit; short waits can charge upfront.
Consider making pre-orders standard procedure, not a special event. That’s where the compounding is.
Work out which decision your next product actually calls for, then copy that one properly.
To run any of these plays on your own store, PreProduct handles charge-upfront, charge-later, deposit and capture-only pre-orders on Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce, with fulfilment holds and customer updates built in. Plans start free.
