Best Shopify Back-in-Stock and Pre-Order Apps

When a product sells out, the sale is not lost yet. You can keep the demand in one of two ways: let shoppers sign up to be emailed when it is back, or let them pre-order it and take the money now. Shopify files the apps for this under two categories, Stock alerts and Pre-orders. Our index holds 330 live apps across the two, and the listings are a poor guide to choosing between them: 133 of the 144 that have any reviews show 4.5 stars or better, and 186 have never been reviewed at all.

So we scored them from our own crawl. Then we re-read the 33 most-reviewed apps on the live App Store on 22 October 2026, including every line of their pricing cards, so the ratings, prices and free-plan limits below are today's. Nobody paid to be in this list.

Four things to know before the list

Five apps hold half the reviews. Of the 30,397 ratings in the two categories, the top five apps hold 16,167 (53%). The other 325 apps share the rest, and most of them have none.

"Free" means a cap on alerts, and the cap is low. The apps are cheap: 182 of the 330 (55%) offer a free plan, and the median cheapest paid plan is $9 a month. But a free plan in this category is a monthly allowance of alerts. We read the free plan of every shortlisted app. Of the 25 whose free plan sends back-in-stock alerts, 14 stop at 30 alerts or fewer, and 7 stop at 10 or fewer. One popular product with 40 sign-ups uses up a 30-alert plan in a single restock.

Pre-order pricing hides in the small print. Ten of the 33 apps list a per-use charge on top of the monthly price: $0.10 to $0.30 per pre-order above the plan's limit, per-SMS fees, or a charge per batch of extra emails. Three price on something other than the number of pre-orders. PreProduct's entry plan has no monthly fee but takes 5% of paid pre-order revenue. Preorder Wolf caps each plan by pre-order revenue, $500 a month on the cheapest. And PreOrder App+Partial Payment caps its plans by your store's total Shopify orders, not just pre-orders: the $9.99 plan covers nine orders a month. Two listings that say "free plan available" or show a free tier offer it only to test or development stores.

Ratings will not separate them. 26 of the 33 shortlisted apps show 4.8 stars or better, and 8 show a flat 5.0. We have written about why Shopify app ratings bunch up like this. The useful signals are elsewhere: how many stores run the app, what its plan really allows, and what breaks.

Before you install anything: what Shopify already does

Shopify can already keep selling a product at zero stock. Tick Continue selling when out of stock on a variant and it takes orders as normal. That is a backorder with no explanation: no shipping date on the page, no "pre-order" label, no separate email. The apps add exactly those things, plus deposits, partial payments and charging the card later.

For alerts, check your email platform first. Several, Klaviyo among them, have their own back-in-stock flow, and a second tool that emails the same people is one more list to keep in sync.

The shortlist, by job

Thirty-three apps clear the bar: the name promises back-in-stock alerts, restock alerts, a waitlist, pre-orders, presales or backorders, and the listing carries at least 50 ratings. Everything in these tables was read from the live App Store listing on 22 October 2026. 26 of the 33 carry Shopify's Built for Shopify badge, the one quality signal on a listing that an app cannot award itself.

Decide which job you need first. If you restock the same products again and again, you need alerts. If you sell launches, limited runs or made-to-order goods, you need pre-orders. If you need both, one app that does both avoids two widgets fighting over the same button.

Pre-orders and back-in-stock alerts in one app

The biggest apps in the category now do both, and they score highest here. STOQ, REZ, Essent and Globo pair more than a thousand ratings each with a free plan and a first paid plan of $10 or less. Compare the free plans, not the scores. Essent's free plan sends 300 alerts a month, while Amp's sends 10.

App	Score	Rating	Ratings	Starts at	Free plan includes
Preorder, Back In Stock ‑ STOQ	96	5.0	3,839	Free, then $10/mo	30 alerts and 10 pre-orders a month
REZ Preorder, Back In Stock	90	5.0	1,622	Free, then $4.99/mo	30 emails and 20 pre-orders a month
Essent Preorder Back in Stock	86	5.0	1,323	Free, then $4.95/mo	300 alerts and 25 pre-orders a month
PreOrder Globo | Back in Stock	85	4.9	1,968	Free, then $9.9/mo	First 100 alerts and 20 pre-orders
Preorder, Back in stock Duck	79	5.0	536	Free, then $9/mo	50 alerts a month, unlimited pre-orders
Amp Back in Stock & Preorder +	78	4.9	969	Free, then $19/mo	10 alerts a month
Bat Preorders & Back In Stock	64	4.9	291	Free	Free app
Back in stock Restock Preorder	62	5.0	151	Free, then $5.99/mo	10 alerts a month
Early Bird: Preorder & Restock	43	4.8	79	Free, then $19/mo	5 alerts and 5 pre-orders a month
EZ Preorder & Back In Stock	39	4.5	155	Free, then $10/mo	First 30 alerts and 10 pre-orders
Pre‑Order | Restock Notifier	25	4.5	53	Free, then $4.99/mo	First 50 emails, 5 pre-orders

Back-in-stock alerts only

A "Notify me" button on the sold-out product, a sign-up form, and an email (sometimes SMS or push) when stock returns. Kbite is the most-reviewed app in either category at 4,326 ratings, with a $5 paid plan. Notify! is close behind and adds a wishlist. If you send SMS alerts, read the per-message price. It ranges from $0.02 to $0.40 a message across these listings.

App	Score	Rating	Ratings	Starts at	Free plan includes
Back In Stock,Notify Me: Kbite	100	5.0	4,326	Free, then $5/mo	30 alerts a month
Notify! Back in Stock+Wishlist	90	4.9	3,936	Free, then $9.9/mo	10 alerts and 5 pre-orders
Ordersify: Restocked Alerts	75	4.9	687	Free, then $9.99/mo	100 alerts a month
CWILL Back in Stock Notify Me!	60	4.8	623	Free, then $9.9/mo	10 alerts a month
Appikon ‑ Back In Stock	51	4.8	1,455	Free to install, then $19.99/mo	10 emails a month
Doran Notify Me Back in Stock	47	4.8	147	Free, then $9/mo	100 alerts
Back In Stock Alert‑ Notify Me	46	4.8	212	Free to install, then $4.99/mo	50 alerts a month, up to 10 products
WC Wishlist & Back in Stock	45	4.8	192	$4.99/mo	No free plan
Back in Stock, Notify Me: Stok	45	4.8	125	Free, then $10/mo	20 alerts a month
XFlow Back in Stock Alert	45	4.9	69	Free, then $9/mo	Unlimited alerts, 5 attributed orders
Notim: Back In Stock+Notify Me	42	4.8	68	Free, then $4.99/mo	30 alerts a month
Alert Me! Restock Alerts	41	4.3	254	Free, then $4.99/mo	10 alerts a month
A1: back in stock | sms alerts	40	4.8	62	Free, then $9/mo	30 alerts a month
SC Back in Stock Notify Me	39	4.5	176	Free, then $10/mo	50 alerts
Swym Back in Stock Alerts	36	4.6	446	$19.99/mo	No free plan

Pre-orders only

For launches and made-to-order products: a pre-order button, a shipping-date message, and a choice of how to take the money. Decide that first. Charging in full now is simplest. A deposit or partial payment lowers the barrier but needs a second charge later. Charging only when the order ships is the friendliest for customers and the most complex. Timesact leads this group on adoption with a free plan of 20 pre-orders a month. Read the pricing model of the others carefully, because this is where the per-order, revenue-based and total-order pricing sits.

App	Score	Rating	Ratings	Starts at	Free plan includes
Preorder Now Presale Timesact	94	5.0	2,115	Free, then $5/mo	20 pre-orders a month, unlimited emails
Dibs – Preorders & Backorders	59	5.0	144	Free	Free app
Preorder Wolf | Pre order now	52	4.8	492	$4.99/mo	Test stores only
PreOrder Now & Pre order | PQ	49	4.8	525	$7.99/mo	No free plan
PreOrder App+Partial Payment K	40	4.7	397	Free to install, then $9.99/mo	Development stores only
PreProduct pre‑order	37	4.9	108	Free to install, then 5% of pre-order revenue	No monthly fee, 5% of pre-order revenue
Magical Preorder & Presale	21	4.3	67	$2.99/mo	No free plan

What actually goes wrong: 131 angry reviews

We hold 6,854 crawled reviews for apps whose name promises restock alerts or pre-orders. 131 of them are one or two stars with text, and reading all 131 tells you more than any feature comparison.

Support comes first again. 52 of the 131 complain about a reply that was slow or never came. We found the same pattern across 2,797 bad reviews store-wide and in returns apps.

Billing is the category's own problem. 48 reviews are about money: a free plan that became paid, a price rise, per-pre-order fees nobody noticed, charges that continued after uninstalling, and in one case pre-order customers charged without being told. On the store side, 13 reviews say the app broke something that matters: the add-to-cart button disappeared, the "continue selling" setting was switched off, or a Liquid error appeared on every product page.

And it fails late. The early complaints, in the first month, are mostly about support and setup. The late ones are different. Of the 57 negative reviews written after six months, 29 are about billing, and seven of the nine reviews about alerts not being sent, or sent wrongly, come from that late group too. One store found that thousands of sign-ups had never received a single email. A trial cannot catch a price change or an alert that stops working in month eight. Only a habit of checking can.

So test it like this

• Count your sign-ups before you pick a plan. Take the sold-out product with the most demand, estimate sign-ups per restock, and multiply by restocks a month. That number, not the monthly fee, decides which plan you are really on.
• Read the whole pricing card. Look for a fee per pre-order above the limit, a price per SMS, a percentage of revenue, and what counts as an "order". Is it pre-orders, or every order in your store?
• After installing, check add-to-cart on an in-stock product, a sold-out product and a collection page, on mobile. Do it again after uninstalling, because code left behind is a known failure here.
• Sign up for an alert yourself on a test product, restock it, and time the email. Repeat every month. It is the only way to catch alerts that silently stop.
• Make sure you can export your waitlist on the plan you are on, and export it regularly. The sign-up list is yours; an app going offline should not take it with it.
• Note the price you installed at and check the app's billing every few months. Half the late complaints in our data are about billing.

The honest part: nobody can tell you how many sales an alert recovers

Twelve of the 33 listings promise recovered sales or revenue. We cannot check any of those claims, and an article that quotes you a recovery rate for one of these apps did not measure it either. What we can say is simpler. An alert only helps if you restock. A pre-order only helps if you give a real ship date and keep it. And the cheapest test is the one above: sign up, restock, and see whether the email arrives.

How we scored these

Each shortlisted app gets a 0–100 score from three measurements, each ranked against the other 32: adoption (45%, rating count on a log scale, because it is the only public proxy for how many stores actually run the app), satisfaction (35%, the star rating pulled toward the shortlist average of 4.80 in proportion to how few ratings back it) and price (20%, a free plan taking the top of the band, paid apps ranked by their cheapest monthly plan; PreProduct, whose entry plan charges a percentage instead of a monthly fee, gets a neutral price score). There is no momentum term: the score tells you who is established, not who is growing. The score also ignores how much each free plan allows, which is why the tables show it in its own column.

Three honest limits. First, the categories are Shopify's, not ours. We narrowed them to apps whose own name promises alerts or pre-orders, which leaves out low-stock counters, stock alerts that go to the merchant, and inventory tools filed in the same place. Second, free-plan allowances and per-use charges were read by hand from each live pricing card. Plans change often in this category, so check the card on the day you install. Third, the complaint analysis reads the 6,854 reviews we have crawled, not every review these apps hold, and themes were assigned by keyword. Treat them as a picture of what goes wrong, not a ranking of which vendor goes wrong most.

Our live scored rankings of the Stock alerts and Pre-orders categories update weekly. They keep Shopify's whole categories and apply no rating floor, so they will disagree with these tables in places. That is the floor and the narrowing doing their job, not a contradiction.

Related reading: best Shopify SEO apps for Google and AI search, best Shopify apps to reduce returns, and best Shopify apps for raising average order value.

Work at a back-in-stock or pre-order app?

We sell one labelled placement per category page, and it sits outside the ranking. The tables above are computed from the crawl and are not for sale at any price. If you build in this category and want the labelled slot, the packages and prices are on bestappify.com/advertise.