Notify Me! alternative: EZ Preorder compared

The short version

At a glance

What you save

The two apps put the same features at very different prices. Start with deposits. In EZ Preorder they are part of Professional, at $30 a month. Notify Me!’s pricing table and help center put partial payments on Standard, at $39.90, and above. That is $9.90 a month, or about $120 a year, and preorder discounts follow the same split.

Then placement. EZ Preorder Growth ($20) puts preorders on collection pages and the home page, with badges, buttons in collection and featured product sections, a featured preorder section and a preorder page. Notify Me! shows its widget on the product page on Lite and Starter, on collection pages from Standard ($39.90) and on the home page from Rocket ($69.90).

The billing differs as well. EZ Preorder’s plans below Scale are a fixed price: when a plan’s allowance is used, the buttons pause until it resets or you move up. Notify Me!’s preorder limit is a soft one on paid plans, so preorders keep coming and each one above the limit costs $0.20 on Starter, $0.15 on Standard or $0.10 on Rocket.

Two things go the other way. Notify Me! includes more preorders per plan: 500 a month on Starter ($19.90), where EZ Preorder Growth covers 150 or $5,000 in preorder sales. And stores on Shopify Basic that are less than a year old can take its Kickstart plan at $9.90, which its help center describes as a discounted version of Standard. Notify Me! also advertises discounts for new customers and for yearly billing. The prices here are its monthly list prices.

Restock alerts you can see and export

Both apps email shoppers when a sold out variant returns. In EZ Preorder the Signups tab lists every signup with the date, the product, its market and whether the alert has gone out, and exports the list as a CSV file. The Overview tab shows total signups, alerts sent, the revenue those alerts brought back and your top products by signups. You can edit the email’s text, add your logo and match the button to your brand.

Notify Me!’s pricing table lists data export from Rocket ($69.90) and your logo on emails from Standard ($39.90). Its notification limit is a hard monthly cap, 500 on Starter and 1,500 on Standard, and its pricing guide counts reminders and thank you messages toward it. EZ Preorder counts signups: 250 a month on Core, 750 on Growth, 1,500 on Professional and 3,000 on Scale.

Notify Me! reaches shoppers on more channels: SMS, push and WhatsApp as well as email. EZ Preorder’s alerts are email only.

Tools that help a preorder sell

EZ Preorder puts as much into winning the preorder as into taking it. On Growth ($20), badges mark preorder products on collection pages, a preorder page shows everything you have on preorder in one grid, and a featured preorder section puts a preorder product on your home page with its own button.

On Professional ($30) you can add a preorder discount, give a free gift with preorders (on every preorder product or only the ones you pick, with a cap per order), and switch the Pre-order button to send shoppers straight to checkout.

Notify Me! has preorder discounts from Standard ($39.90). It lists no preorder page, no free gift with preorders and no direct to checkout button.

Where each feature sits

The lowest plan, and its monthly list price, on which each app includes a feature. Notify Me!’s column follows the comparison table on its own pricing page and its help center.

EZ Preorder plans

Start free and move up when your preorders do. Each plan includes everything in the one before it, and plans are billed in USD every 30 days through Shopify.

How EZ Preorder works

• Three rules decide when a product is on preorder. Always, for products that are not released yet. Sold out, to keep selling through a stockout. Specific inventory level, to stop at a set number of preorders. Rules are set per variant, so one size can be on preorder while the rest sell as normal.
• Orders stay ordinary Shopify orders. Shoppers go through your normal Shopify checkout, preorder and in-stock items can share a cart, and you fulfill each order the way you always do.
• A plan is a fixed price with an allowance. Each paid plan covers a number of preorders or an amount of preorder sales per billing cycle, whichever comes first, plus a number of restock alert signups. On Free to Professional there is no charge per order: when an allowance is used, the Pre-order and Notify me buttons stop showing until you move up a plan or the allowance resets with your billing cycle. Scale keeps selling past its allowance, at 1% of each extra preorder and $0.01 per extra signup. How limits work.
• Deposits charge their own balance. On Professional and Scale, shoppers pay a percentage or a fixed amount at checkout and the app charges the rest automatically, on a fixed date or a number of days after each order. Deposits run on Shopify Payments or PayPal Express with Checkout Extensibility, for online store orders, and apply to all of your preorder products once switched on. If a balance charge fails the app does not send a notice yet, so look over unpaid balances after the due date. Partial payments guide.
• Preorders get their own places in your store. On Growth and up, badges mark preorder products on collection pages, a preorder page lists everything you have on preorder, and a featured section puts a preorder product on your home page.
• Restock alerts work per variant. A Notify me button shows on sold out variants, shoppers leave their email, and the app emails everyone waiting on that variant as soon as its inventory is above 0. Each signup counts as one restock alert.
• Customers are kept in the loop. Preorder confirmation emails are on every plan, and if a ship date moves you can email everyone who preordered that product in one go.

Switching from Notify Me! to EZ Preorder

You can set EZ Preorder up on its Free plan, on one product, before you change anything else in Notify Me!.

1. Install EZ Preorder and turn on the app embed. You can start on the Free plan, which covers one preorder product and one restock alert product. The embed is a switch under App embeds in your theme editor.
2. Use one app per product. Two preorder apps changing the same Add to cart button get in each other’s way, so switch Notify Me! off for a product before you test EZ Preorder on it.
3. Add your products and pick a rule. In Preorders, select the products, then choose Always, Sold out or Specific inventory level for each variant and add a note with the ship date.
4. Set up deposits if you take them. On Professional, choose a percentage or a fixed deposit and the date the balance is charged. EZ Preorder collects balances for the orders it takes, so collect any balances still open in Notify Me! before you uninstall it.
5. Add the Notify me button. Add the EZ Preorder - Notify Me block to your product template and add products to the restock list. New signups are collected in EZ Preorder from then on, so send any alerts still waiting in Notify Me! before you remove it.
6. Turn on preorder confirmation emails. It is one switch under Configuration, in Notification Settings, and the template can be edited.
7. Add the selling tools. On Growth, switch on collection page badges and the custom preorder page and add its link to your menu. On Professional, add a preorder discount, a free gift or the direct to checkout button.
8. Place a test preorder. Open the product on your store, check that the Pre-order button shows where your rule says it should, and run it through checkout.

Each step is covered in the EZ Preorder help center.