To launch hardware pre-orders on Shopify you need four things: a pre-order app from the Shopify App Store (Shopify's own pre-orders run through one, on Shopify Payments or PayPal Express only), a decision on deposit or full payment, a ship date you have a real basis for, and a waitlist of people who have already paid something to be first in line. The checkout is the easy part. The waitlist decides whether launch day sells out or sits quiet.
Blazon has watched this play out across 500+ product launches since 2016, on Shopify, Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Founders treat pre-orders as a setting in the admin, and the setting takes an afternoon. The launch behind it takes 12 to 24 weeks.
When Shopify pre-orders beat Kickstarter (and when they don't)
Shopify pre-orders win when you already have demand. If you have a customer list, a previous product or a community that trusts you, a crowdfunding platform is charging you for discovery you do not need. Kickstarter takes 5% of funds raised plus 3% to 5% in payment processing on a funded project, according to its own fee page.
They win when the product is close to production: tooling paid, factory booked, ship window known. They win when you want to sell continuously, with no 30-day window and no all-or-nothing goal. And the checkout, the customer record and the email list are yours from the first order.
Kickstarter wins when nobody knows who you are. The platform brings browsing traffic, a deadline, and social proof that compounds in public. It also brings protection: funding is all-or-nothing, so if the campaign falls short nobody is charged and you owe nobody a product.
There is a hardware trap here. Kickstarter requires hardware creators to show a working prototype and bans photorealistic renderings. Shopify has no such gate, so you can take pre-orders on a render and then answer for the ship date.
For most hardware founders the answer is both, in sequence. A Shopify coming soon page and deposit waitlist, then the campaign, then Shopify pre-orders the day the campaign closes. Filippo Loreti raised $5.1M on Kickstarter in 30 days and went on to $10M+ in direct-to-consumer sales: the campaign was the launch moment, the store is where the business lives.
Kickstarter vs Indiegogo vs Shopify pre-orders
Indiegogo changed its model in October 2025. Flexible Funding is no longer available for new campaigns, and the post-campaign phase once called InDemand is now Late Pledge. Comparisons written before then are out of date.
| Kickstarter | Indiegogo | Shopify pre-orders | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Funding model | All-or-nothing | All-or-nothing for new campaigns since October 2025 | No goal: every order is a sale |
| Platform fee | 5% plus 3% to 5% processing, only if funded | 5% plus processing of 3% + $0.20 per transaction | No platform cut; your Shopify plan and card processing |
| When the buyer pays | At campaign end, only if funded | At campaign end, only if the goal is reached | At checkout: full price, a deposit, or nothing until later |
| Discovery | Built-in audience | Built-in audience | None: you bring every visitor |
| Hardware rules | Working prototype required, no photorealistic renders | Platform creator guidelines | No platform review; ship-date law still applies |
| Who owns the checkout | Kickstarter | Indiegogo | You |
| Selling after the campaign | Late Pledges, switched on before the campaign ends | Late Pledge (formerly InDemand) and Pledge Manager | Always on |
| Express checkout | Platform checkout | Platform checkout | No Shop Pay, Apple Pay or Google Pay on pre-order purchase options |
| Best for | New brands that need discovery and a press moment | Brands that want late pledges and a pledge manager in one place | Brands with an audience, near-production hardware, and the months after a campaign |
Two rows decide it for most founders: discovery and protection. If you need strangers to find you and the right to walk away, crowdfund. If you have the audience and the factory date, sell on your own store.
The Deposit Test: deposit or full payment
If someone will not put down $1, they will not pay $200 on launch day. Blazon calls this the Deposit Test, and it is the most reliable demand signal a hardware founder can buy.
An email sign-up is curiosity. A deposit is a decision, and a list of people who paid a small refundable reservation tells you how many units you can sell before you pay the factory. The full model is in Blazon's waitlist strategy guide, and the step-by-step version is the demand validation ladder.
Full pre-payment puts cash in hand for tooling. It also puts the full price of every unit on the line against a date you promised, and if the date slips every buyer has a card statement and a dispute button. A deposit lowers the barrier and still filters for intent, at the cost of a second payment later.
On Shopify there are two ways to take one.
The reservation product. A separate low-priced reservation, often as little as $1, refundable on request and credited against the product on launch day with a locked VIP price and first-batch priority. It is a normal product, so the normal checkout works, express payments included. Use it before a crowdfunding campaign, or whenever the final price is not locked.
The partial-payment pre-order. The pre-order app takes a deposit at checkout, Shopify stores the payment method, and the balance falls due on a set date, a number of days after checkout, or on fulfillment. The order exists from day one. Use it when product, price and ship window are fixed and the sale happens on your own store.
The choice has a legal consequence. Under the FTC's guidance, a partial payment with complete order details counts as a properly completed order, so a deposit on a product order starts the shipping clock exactly as a full payment does.
How Shopify pre-orders work technically
There are two routes, and only one is built for a launch.
The inventory setting "continue selling when out of stock" takes the full price immediately, offers no deposit, and tells the buyer nothing at checkout. It suits a restock arriving next week, not a product the factory has not made.
The other route is a pre-order app. Shopify's help center says you need to install one from the App Store and then manage pre-orders in the admin. The app creates purchase options (selling plans) that set the deposit, when the balance is due, when the order ships, and whether inventory is committed when the order is placed or when it is fulfilled.
Most founders find the restrictions after launch. According to Shopify's pre-order setup page, pre-orders are not supported on customized checkouts, run only on the Online Store and Custom Storefront channels, cannot be bought with Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay or local methods such as Klarna, and do not work with Buy X get Y discounts. Buyers on a phone are used to one-tap payment, so write the checkout copy for someone typing in a card number.
The setup sequence Blazon runs on a hardware pre-order:
- Confirm Shopify Payments or PayPal Express and a standard checkout.
- Install a pre-order app and set the purchase option: full payment or deposit, when the balance is charged, and the ship window.
- On the product, choose whether it shows only the pre-order option or both options.
- Cap the pre-order quantity at your first production run. When it sells out, open a second batch with a later ship date.
- Put the ship window on the product page, cart, checkout, confirmation email and terms, in the same words.
- Tag pre-orders (Shopify Flow does this) so support and fulfillment can see them.
- Place test orders through every path: full payment, deposit, balance charge, cancellation and refund.
Ship dates, refunds and the FTC rule
A pre-order is a sale with a date attached, and US law regulates that date. Have your terms read by a lawyer, and know these rules before the first order.
The FTC's Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule applies. You need a reasonable basis for any ship date you state, and if you state none you need a reasonable basis to ship within 30 days. The clock starts when you receive a properly completed order.
If you cannot ship on time, you must tell each buyer before the date passes and offer the choice to wait or cancel for a prompt refund. If the new date is more than 30 days out, or you cannot give one, or it is the second delay, silence does not count as consent.
That is the cash point founders miss. Once a ship date slips past those lines, every buyer who does not say yes is owed a refund, so plan cash as if a deposit on a slipping order is refundable, because in practice it is. Rules differ outside the US, so check the law in any other country you ship to.
Founders rarely get into trouble for dishonesty. They promise the factory's first estimate, then go quiet when it moves. A monthly update with the current ship window, sent before anyone asks, keeps buyers and regulators on your side.
Building a Shopify coming soon page and waitlist
Shopify's fastest coming soon page is the password page (now called private mode), switched on under Online Store > Preferences, with an email sign-up section built in. It also hides every page of your store from search engines while it is on.
That is fine for a week and wrong for a 12-week build. Leave the store open and publish the product as a live "coming soon" page with the reservation offer and sign-up form on it, so search visibility and ad data build alongside the list. On launch day, Shopify Rollouts (Markets > Rollouts) can publish the launch theme at a set date and time.
A waitlist landing page needs eight things: what the product is, who it is for, the one thing it does better, real photography or prototype footage, the expected price, the reservation offer and what it buys, the ship window, and the refund terms in one plain sentence. Kickstarter's no-render rule is good discipline on your own store too.
For capture, Shopify's own Forms app is free and writes sign-ups into your customer records with consent. Collect email and SMS consent separately. Install ad pixels and analytics before the first visitor, and fire separate events for the sign-up and the reservation: ad platforms optimize toward whatever you call a conversion, so call it a reservation.
JAYE, a wearable Blazon worked on in 2025 and 2026, shows how the two connect. Blazon built the brand, the Shopify store and the reservation flow as one piece with the launch emails, so each message speaks to whether the reader is still curious or has already reserved.
The email and SMS sequence
Split the launch list in two from day one: people who reserved and people who only signed up. Everyone gets an immediate confirmation saying what happens next and when. Sign-ups also get the reservation offer, with what it secures and how long the price lock lasts.
Between sign-up and launch, send one useful email a week: the build (factory, prototype test, packaging) and the objections (battery life, warranty, shipping, what happens if the date moves). Reservation holders hear every piece of news first.
In the final seven days, move to a countdown: date, time, price, and what reservation holders get. Give the launch time in the reader's own time zone.
SMS is the launch-day channel, for the moment checkout opens and the reminder before the early price ends. Automated marketing texts need prior express written consent under the FCC's TCPA rules, so collect SMS consent at sign-up with its own checkbox and keep the record.
Paid acquisition to the waitlist
Send paid traffic to the coming soon page and optimize to the reservation event. The number to watch is cost per reservation, because cost per email flatters every campaign.
Build your forecast from your own numbers: reservations, times the share of holders who buy, times average order value. Measure that share with a small early-access test on your own list, never someone else's benchmark.
If the cost per reservation is too high for your price, fix the offer before spending more. Sharpen the promise, raise the value of the reservation, or change the audience. Hardware creative that works shows the product in a hand, doing the job, in real footage, and retargeting answers the objections your emails already answer.
Launch day and the Dead Zone
Open to reservation holders first, for a fixed window, at their price. They paid to be first, so make it real. Send the email and SMS at the stated minute, switch ad campaigns from reservation to purchase objectives, and have someone place a real order the moment checkout opens.
Watch the production cap. When the first batch sells out, close it and open the second batch with its own later ship date. Overselling a hardware run is how a good launch becomes a refund problem.
Then comes the Dead Zone: the 9 to 12 months between a campaign closing and the product shipping, when founders go quiet and the audience goes cold.
Shopify pre-orders close it. When a crowdfunding campaign ends, the store's pre-order button goes live the same day, so every visitor the campaign created still has somewhere to buy. Blazon's guide to moving from Kickstarter to Shopify covers that handover, and the wider sequence is in how to launch a hardware product in 2026.
How Blazon runs hardware pre-order launches
Blazon builds the pieces in this playbook as one launch. The Shopify team builds the store, the pre-order and reservation mechanics, and the email flows, while the pre-launch waitlist team runs the coming soon page, the paid acquisition and the sequence.
The hardware launch team carries the product from prototype to first shipment, with crowdfunding for hardware in the same program when a campaign is part of the plan.
Stanley Black & Decker's Pillo (Pillo Health, later acquired by Stanley Black & Decker), the home-health robot, recorded 15,000+ units pre-ordered and went on to $2.5M in sales. A new kind of device has to answer what it is, where it fits in a day and why it matters before anyone pays for it.
A pre-order is a promise with a date on it. The founders who win set a date they can keep, then build a list big enough to fill the first run before the checkout opens.
Frequently asked questions
How do I add a pre-order option on Shopify?
Install a pre-order app from the Shopify App Store, set the purchase option inside it (full payment or deposit, when the balance is charged, and the ship window), then choose on the product whether it shows only the pre-order option or both. Your store needs Shopify Payments or PayPal Express and a standard checkout. Test a deposit, a balance charge and a refund before customers see it.
Can you do pre-orders on Shopify without an app?
Partly. "Continue selling when out of stock" lets customers buy with zero inventory, but it takes the full price immediately, offers no deposit and shows no pre-order labeling at checkout. For hardware with a ship window measured in months, use an app.
Do customers have to pay upfront for a pre-order?
No. A Shopify pre-order can collect the full price, a partial deposit or nothing at checkout, with the payment method stored so the balance can be charged later. For hardware, a small refundable deposit is usually the right first step because it proves intent without asking for the full price months before delivery.
What is the best pre-order app for Shopify?
The one that does the jobs your launch needs: deposits, balance collection on your chosen trigger, retries when a stored card fails, the ship date shown everywhere the buyer looks, a quantity cap, and clean exports to your email platform and fulfillment partner. Place test orders before you commit, because Shopify deletes pre-order data 48 hours after an app is uninstalled.
How do I put a coming soon page on Shopify?
The quickest route is the password page under Online Store > Preferences, which has an email sign-up section built in. It hides the whole store from search engines, so for a launch longer than a week or two, publish the product as a live coming soon page with a reservation offer and sign-up form instead.
How long can you take pre-orders before shipping?
As long as you state a ship window you have a reasonable basis for and keep buyers informed. The FTC rule defaults to 30 days if you state no date and requires delay notices with a cancellation option. If the date slips more than 30 days, or for a second time, silence does not count as consent to wait.
Are pre-orders cheaper than buying at launch?
They should be. Early buyers carry the risk of waiting, so the pre-order or reservation price usually sits below eventual retail, with the best price kept for those who reserved first. When the early price ends, say so and end it on time.
Should I launch on Kickstarter or take pre-orders on Shopify?
Crowdfund if you need discovery from strangers, public social proof and the protection of all-or-nothing funding. Take Shopify pre-orders if you already have an audience and the product is close to production. Most hardware brands do both: a Shopify waitlist first, a campaign for the launch moment, then Shopify pre-orders from the day the campaign closes.
