The Rules of Checkout Settings

Every other article in this category tells you how to set one thing. This one covers what is true across all of them: how a change reaches your live checkout, what checkout will and will not enforce, and which controls you cannot change at all.

Six rules cover it. They are worth reading once before you touch the Checkout settings page, because most of them are otherwise discovered the hard way.

Before you begin

• You can reach your own checkout on the storefront. Saving publishes immediately, and looking at the live checkout is the only way to check your own work.
• Your role includes Checkout settings.
• Open Settings, then Checkout.

Saving publishes immediately

The Checkout settings page keeps your changes pending. Touch any control and a You have unsaved changes bar appears at the top of the page. Nothing you have done has reached a shopper yet.

Click Save on that bar and it all applies at once, to your live checkout, immediately. There is no preview and no draft. The next shopper to reach checkout meets whatever you just saved.

The two useful consequences: leaving the page without saving discards everything, which is your undo. Because saving publishes, the only real verification is opening your own checkout and looking at it.

Dialogs do not save themselves

Address collection and Add-to-cart limit open dialogs rather than sitting on the page, and their buttons do not behave the way the names suggest.

• Done closes the dialog. It does not save.
• Cancel closes the dialog. It also does not undo a change you already made inside it.

What a dialog does is hand your change back to the page, which then shows the unsaved-changes bar like any other change. The page Save is what publishes it.

Required means blocked

Under Customer information, each field can be set to Don't include, Optional, or Required. Required means exactly that: the shopper cannot complete the order until the field is filled.

That makes Required the strongest thing on the page and the one to use least. Every field set to Required is one more chance for a shopper to give up while paying, and a field you never asked for cannot be recovered afterwards. Optional is the setting that serves both: the buyers who need it fill it in, and the rest are not held up.

Some controls cannot be changed

Not everything on the page can be set, and nothing marks the difference clearly.

The reverse also happens. Selecting Require billing and shipping addresses to match in the Address collection dialog leaves the prefill checkbox below it fully enabled, even though there is then no separate billing address for it to act on. An available control is not a promise that it applies.

The channels offer different placements

Under Marketing opt-in, the email and SMS sign-ups look like a matched pair and are not.

• Email can be placed in four ways: Don't show, Checkout only, Sign-in page only, or Checkout and sign-in page.
• SMS offers two: Don't show or Checkout only.

So a plan that puts both sign-ups on your sign-in page cannot be carried out. Check the dropdown before you design around a placement.

What checkout will not enforce

This is the boundary that catches people arriving from another platform. There is no checkout rules screen among your checkout settings, and nothing on the Checkout settings page applies a condition to an order.

Nothing on the page will verify a shopper's age, hide a delivery method when an order meets some test, cap what one customer may buy across orders, or run validation you have written yourself. What the page does is decide what the checkout form asks for and offers. An installed app may add behavior of its own, so check your apps before concluding that something is impossible rather than absent from this page.

One thing often assumed missing is present: Validate shipping address, in the Address collection dialog, has checkout confirm that the address a shopper typed is a valid, deliverable one. If bad addresses are your problem, that control is the answer rather than a rule.

Where the conditions actually live

The controls that behave like rules are elsewhere in the admin, not at checkout.

Best practices

• Say it before checkout, not at it. A restriction a shopper meets at the payment step reads as a wasted trip.
• Change one thing, save, and look. Since saving publishes, a single change you can verify beats five you cannot.
• Reach for Optional before Required, and only require a field you genuinely cannot fulfill without.
• Read the dropdown before planning a placement, because the channels do not offer the same ones.

Common mistakes

• Planning a launch around a rule that does not exist, which is the expensive version of this and the reason this article is here.
• Pressing Cancel in a dialog and assuming the change is gone.
• Leaving the page with the save bar still showing, so nothing you did took effect.
• Requiring fields to catch bad data, which also slows down every shopper who would have got it right.

Next steps

• Checkout Settings
• Customer Information
• Address Collection

Related articles

• Advanced Preferences
• Add-to-cart Limit
• Checkout Language