How to Sell Preorders in Essential Upsell Offers and Bundles (Essent Preorder Back in Stock app)

You can sell preorder products through Essential Upsell offers, including quantity breaks and bundles. When a shopper picks a tier or adds an offer product that is in one of your preorder campaigns, it goes to the cart as a real preorder. It carries the campaign's details (selling plan, preorder note and discount), so Essential Preorder tags the order just like an order placed with the Preorder button.

The preorder campaign is set up here in Essential Preorder. The offer is built and styled in our Essential Upsell app, which reads your preorder campaigns automatically.

How the two apps work together

Essential Preorder (this app) is where you create the preorder campaign: which products are on preorder, payment (full or partial), discount, fulfillment status and tags.
Essential Upsell is where you create the offer: quantity breaks, bundles, cross-sells and add-ons. Products in a live preorder campaign are added to the cart as preorders.

You need both apps. There is no account to connect. Essential Upsell finds the Preorder app and your campaigns on its own. You only switch pre-orders on in each offer (Step 2).

Which offers support preorders

Volume discount (quantity breaks and Buy X Get Y). This is the one to use if you want preorder bundles such as “Buy 2, save 10%”.
Cross-sell, Add-on and Frequently Bought Together, including when they are shown as a pop-up. Products that are on preorder get a preorder message on the offer card (by default “Pre-order now”, which you can change).
Post-purchase offers are not supported.

Full payment and partial payment (deposit) campaigns both work.

Step 1: Set up the preorder campaign in Essential Preorder

Create or open your preorder campaign and add the products (or variants) you want to sell in the offer.
Publish the campaign (Live). Draft campaigns are not picked up.
Make sure the Essential Preorder app embed is turned on: in Shopify admin go to Online Store → Themes → Customize → App embeds, turn the app on and click Save. Essential Upsell reads your preorder data from this embed, so it must be on.

New to campaigns? See Essential Preorder app: setup and feature walkthrough.

Step 2: Build the offer in Essential Upsell

If you have not yet, install Essential Upsell and turn on its app embed the same way.
Create a Volume discount, Cross-sell, Add-on or Frequently Bought Together offer with the preorder products.
In the offer editor, find the Pre-order section and make sure pre-orders are switched on for this offer. It also shows whether the two apps are connected (see the next section).
Optional (Cross-sell, Add-on and Frequently Bought Together): edit the Pre-order message shown on the offer card. You can use variables such as {ship_date}, {payment}, {remaining}, {preorder_message} and {selling_plan_name}. Variables that have no value for a product are left out.
Publish the offer.

For the offer types themselves, see A Simple Guide to Upsell Offer Types in Essential Upsell.

What the Pre-order section in the offer editor tells you

Connected to … · 1 active campaign (or more): everything is set up.
Offer products in a pre-order campaign: X of Y: how many of the offer's products are in a live preorder campaign. Products that aren't in one are sold as normal products.
Installed, but it has no active pre-order campaigns: publish a campaign, or add the offer products to one.
Turn on the … app embed in your theme so this offer can show pre-orders: the Essential Preorder app embed is off. Click Activate next to the message, or follow Step 1.

If you don't have Essential Preorder installed yet, the section shows a banner (Essential Preorders & Back in Stock – Never lose a sale again! Works with Essential Upsell) with an Install now button. When an offer product is out of stock, you may also see Sell out of stock products with … with an Add button.

Good to know

Give it a minute. After you publish a campaign or offer, it can take about a minute before the preorder shows correctly in the cart. Refresh and try again before troubleshooting.
Volume discount offers. The volume discount widget doesn't add a preorder message of its own. Your Preorder button and preorder message on the product page already show it. If the offer has a Subscribe & Save option, it is hidden while the product is on preorder, because a preorder and a subscription can't be combined on the same item.
Mixed cart rules still apply. If your campaign doesn't allow preorder and in-stock items in the same cart, that rule also applies to items added from an Essential Upsell offer.
After uninstalling Essential Preorder. For about 48 hours, the offer editor can still say the app is installed but has no active campaigns, instead of showing the install banner. This is because some preorder data stays in your store for about 48 hours after an uninstall. Offers keep working normally, without preorders.
Shopify's preorder rules still apply: Shopify Payments or PayPal Express, no accelerated checkouts (Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay) for preorders, and no preorder + subscription in the same checkout. See the walkthrough for the full list.
Using a different bundle app? Third-party bundle apps follow different rules. See Preorder & Bundle Compatibility.

Troubleshooting

The item is added as a normal product, not a preorder. Check that pre-orders are switched on in the offer's Pre-order section, the Essential Preorder app embed is on, the campaign is Live, and the exact product or variant is in it.
The order wasn't tagged as a preorder. Check that the offer is not a post-purchase offer, and see Why wasn't an order tagged as a preorder?
The section says “X of Y” products, but you expected all of them. Campaigns can be set per variant. Add the missing products or variants to the campaign.

Still stuck? Contact us with the product link, the offer name and the campaign name, and we'll check it for you.