Setting up pre-orders & backorders

BackorderPRO decides a variant's inventory policy (CONTINUE or DENY) and the delivery information shown to customers. Two layers of rules drive this.

The rule engine

• Inventory rules (per feed): conditions on feed columns or Shopify data (stock level, price, compare-at price). Actions set CONTINUE (allow selling) or DENY.
• Global rules (store-wide): a safety net for variants that no feed updates anymore — for example old or removed SKUs. They can set inventory policy, stock status, clear delivery dates and set preorder_allowed.

Rule limits per plan: Free/Starter 2, Growth 10, Business unlimited.

Delivery date & lead time

• The expected delivery date is read from a mapped feed column.
• Lead-time ranges (min/max with a unit of days, weeks or business days) can be set globally and per vendor (Growth+).
• Values are written to variant metafields (snoek_bpo.delivery, vendor_lead_time, stock_status, preorder_allowed).

Pre-order settings

Enable pre-orders with the master toggle, then configure:

• Button styling: custom text, subtitle, icon, colours and click action (add to cart / notify me / custom URL).
• Minimum price: only allow pre-order at or above a price.
• Maximum lead time (days): deny pre-order when the supplier's expected restock date (the feed source date, excluding the per-feed buffer) is further than X days in the future. Leave empty for no maximum.
• Allow in-stock pre-order (optional).
• Per-vendor overrides (Growth+): enable/disable, minimum price and maximum lead time per supplier, with a _default fallback.

The original Add-to-cart button can be hidden on pre-order products (configurable). Products the supplier actually has in stock are never forced to DENY by the pre-order gates — an existing CONTINUE from a stock rule is preserved.

Tracking backorders (Growth+)

Every order is checked on creation; negative-inventory lines are stored as backorder sales with a snapshot (SKU, barcode, vendor, quantity, price, stock). The Tracker page groups open backorders per order with status buckets (on-track / due-soon / overdue / snoozed / resolved), search, vendor and sort filters, bulk snooze/resolve, per-order notes and CSV export.

Keeping customers informed (Starter+)

Customer emails for backorder and delivery updates are available on Starter and up, with 11 built-in template languages (EN, NL, FR, DA, ES, CS, PL, DE, PT, IT, SV). Customer email addresses are encrypted at rest and never shared with the AI model.

Next steps

• Frequently asked questions