Cart settings

You will find these settings in the theme editor under Theme settings (the gear icon at the bottom of the editor sidebar), in the Cart group. Everything here is global, so it applies across your whole store, while options that belong to a single section stay on that section. The cart is the last stretch before checkout, so a few small choices here tend to show up in your order numbers.

Choose how the cart opens

• Cart type: decides what happens when a shopper adds an item or clicks the cart icon. Drawer slides the cart in over the current page, so the shopper never loses their place, and it opens on every page of the store. Page always sends the shopper to the full cart page instead. Defaults to Drawer.

Drawer suits most small catalogs, because adding one more item costs the shopper nothing in navigation. Page is the better fit when orders are large or detailed and people genuinely want to review a long list, with room for quantities and notes on one screen. Switch it, then add a product from a collection page and watch what happens: that one moment tells you which model fits your customers.

Encourage a slightly bigger order

• Free shipping threshold: enter the order value that earns free shipping, in your store currency, for example 100. The cart then shows a progress bar telling the shopper how much more they need to add. Leave it empty and the bar stays off everywhere. There is no default value, so it starts empty.
• Gift wrapping product: create a product for your wrapping service, price it at whatever you charge, then choose it here. Shoppers can add wrapping from the cart without leaving it. No product is selected by default.

Set the threshold to match the free shipping rate you have configured in your Shopify shipping settings, so the bar and the checkout agree. Pick a number a little above your typical order value: close enough that one more item gets there, high enough that it is worth doing. Setting up the shipping rate itself happens outside the theme, in the Shopify Help Center.

Tip

Give your gift wrapping product a clear title, a photo of the actual wrapping, and no shipping weight. Keep it out of your main collections so it only ever appears where you want it: in the cart, at the moment the shopper is already thinking about who the order is for.

Label pre-orders clearly

• Show pre-order labels: when a tracked variant keeps selling after stock runs out, this relabels the add to cart button and the stock status so shoppers know they are ordering ahead. Off by default.

Turn this on when you take orders for a restock or a launch. Setting a variant to continue selling when out of stock happens in your product inventory settings, and the labels follow from there, so the shopper sees the same message on the product page and in the cart. Pair it with a line in your product description saying when the item ships, and you will save yourself a good number of emails.

Note

Payments, taxes, and shipping rates all live in your Shopify admin rather than in the theme. The theme’s job is to present the cart clearly and hand off to Shopify’s checkout, which it does on every one of the five theme styles. For more on how the cart looks and behaves, see Cart and checkout.