What happens when your pre-order campaigns run from real data

For the past 12-18 months, a small group of brands has been quietly running pre-orders through an app nobody else can use yet. Self Portrait and Roland Mouret. Rat & Boa. Dorsey. Naked Wolfe. Around 10 stores in total.

The app is called Prebuy. It connects directly to your purchase order data and runs pre-order campaigns from it. It's heading to the Shopify App Store, and the story of why it exists is about as close to home as it gets for us.

Most DTC brands manage pre-orders by hand. A buyer creates a Shopify listing, sets a dispatch date, connects it to Klaviyo, and when the shipment moves - because shipments always move - goes back in and updates everything manually. Across 20 pre-order lines and 3 incoming shipments, that's a week of ops time that should run itself. Purchase orders in one system. Campaigns in another. Someone carries the information between them by hand. The Dark Stack running your pre-order channel.

The tools that existed hadn't solved it. They take the order, show a date, maybe stretch to changing a button. None of them touch the operational layer: the shipment data, the PO lines, the actual information that tells you when stock arrives. Prebuy does.

"The dream is just to have your supply chain flow into your app and for pre-orders to be on by default. If you run out of something, it just turns on."

Alister Hewitt, Co-Founder, Prebuy

Three scenarios, one campaign engine

Prebuy handles 3 pre-order scenarios: selling before confirmed stock arrives, relaunching an out-of-stock when a restock is confirmed, and capturing demand the moment goods land at the warehouse. Same campaign logic across all 3.

When you set up a campaign, you connect it to your PO data rather than a manually entered date. Prebuy reads your purchase order lines and their inbound shipment dates, and builds an inventory pool from them. If stock is coming in across 3 shipments at different dates, the campaign sells through the earliest allocation first, then rolls to the next automatically.

Buffer days are set per brand: the processing time between goods arriving and being ready to pick. Rat & Boa run 7 days. When a receiving date shifts, the customer-facing dispatch date updates with it. Orders go through Shopify's native checkout, held on-hold until stock is released, first in first out.

When a date moves, customers find out before they ask

This is where most pre-order tools break down.

When a shipment date changes, Prebuy updates every affected campaign automatically and triggers a Klaviyo delay notification to every customer who placed an order against that shipment - attributed to your brand, through your flows - before anyone emails support. No manual Shopify edit. No chase to the ops team. No customer left to find out themselves.

Order confirmations on pre-orders go through Klaviyo too, with the dispatch date and next steps included from the start. The full communication flow runs from the same data driving the campaign.

Your checkout, your brand, nothing in escrow

Every other app had the same structural flaw. Purple Dot, the most credible option on the market, becomes the merchant of record: it holds the customer's money, sits between you and your customer at the moment of purchase, and puts its own branding on your confirmation emails.

For brands where the purchase experience is the product, that's not a workable trade-off. Self Portrait, now running 2 brands on Prebuy, made exactly that point when they came on board. They'd been dealing with it elsewhere.

Prebuy runs through Shopify's native checkout: your gateway, your brand, your confirmation emails. The customer relationship stays yours.

Our June 2024 conversation

Prebuy is built by Alister Hewitt and developer Oliver Evans. We've built an Airtable app that combines POs, Shipments and Marketing Campaigns into one place and is tightly integrated.

Our involvement started from a specific moment. Oliver had just finished reviewing every pre-order app on the market for another client and couldn't recommend a single one. He told Alister that up front: there was no good solution. That conversation was the start of Prebuy.

Two years on, the private beta is running. The roadmap includes returns handling (using inbound RMAs as pre-orderable supply) and LLM features in early testing. For brands not on Airtable, Prebuy connects via Fulfil integration or CSV upload.

It's coming to the App Store

Prebuy is heading to the Shopify App Store imminently. We know this is solving a real gap in the market and want to help as many brands stuck without a viable pre-order solution get onboard. If you want to know when it's live or want to talk through whether it fits your stack, get in touch.