Pre-Order legality and alternative/fix

Hello.

So my store uses Paypal for payment gateway and it requires customers to pay right away when they check out.

Now my store deals with pre-order products most of the time and most of those products will not be released 2,4, sometimes 5 months later. I believe some states, including mine, may have laws against charging people for items that are not on already ready to ship or on my property.

There are pro and cons.. Pro for paying upfront is that I can have funds from preorders to preorder goods from my suppliers. Con is that it may be hard for customers to pay me and trust me with their money for a few months AND it may be discouraged or even illegal in my state.

Authorize Pay for paypal won't work because that only holds payment for only up to 2 months.

If it is not legal to charge in advance..
Is there any way on Zen Cart where customers check out, but they are not immediately sent to paypal for payment? Instead, I would receive the order first and then I will send them an invoice asking for payment sometime down the road (I am also going to install "edit orders" and "admin new order" plugins to organize some of the orders).

When I manually send invoices to a customer to collect money, do I still get paypal shipping prices?

I dont want to get in trouble with the law. Thank you for any help or advice.

You could use check/money order module and re-phrase the text displayed
Explain to your customers that they should use the pre-order payment method

Then when you manually invoice them you will have to determine how you want to collect

do I still get paypal shipping prices?
A question for PayPal