Field notes for your Shopify store.

How to set up back-in-stock alerts on Shopify

Shopify has no native "notify me" form, so a sold-out page lets ready buyers leave with no way to call them back.…

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The best free Shopify themes for selling (2026)

Any free Shopify theme can sell. The 2026 ranking below compares them on facts: cart drawer, related products,…

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How to add a build-your-own-bundle to your Shopify store

Native Shopify has no way to let a shopper assemble a box and have the discount grow as it fills, so a…

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Bundle pricing strategy: how deep should the discount go?

Deep enough to change behavior, never deeper than the margin the added item brings in. For most stores that lands…

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Trust signals that stop cart abandonment on Shopify

Carts get abandoned when doubt shows up late: a surprise shipping cost, a store the shopper is not sure about, a…

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How to add product reviews to Shopify without a $100+ monthly bill

Shopify has no native review display, so reviews become a paid add-on, and the popular apps bill like enterprise…

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How to show color swatches on Shopify collection pages

Dawn does not support color swatches on collection pages, so shoppers who think in color are handed a list of…

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How to add a countdown timer to the Dawn theme

Dawn has no countdown timer. The closest native move is static text in the announcement bar: "Sale ends Sunday",…

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How to add a countdown timer to the Horizon theme

Horizon has no countdown timer. Natively you can state a deadline as text, "Sale ends Sunday", with no ticking…

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How to cut your Shopify app bill without losing features

List every app you pay for and what each one does, then group the ones that overlap. Most stores run five to ten…

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How to upgrade the Dawn theme's cart drawer

Dawn includes a clean native cart drawer: items, subtotal, checkout. Turn it on under theme settings. What it…

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Dawn vs Horizon: which Shopify theme should you choose?

Both themes are free, built by Shopify, and sell fine out of the box. Dawn is the safe pick for an established…

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Do too many apps slow your Shopify store? How to tell, and what to do

Often, yes, but the count alone is not the cause. Each app you install can inject its own JavaScript and CSS into…

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How to filter Shopify collections by metafield

Shopify's storefront filter API allows only one metafield, and category metafields often aren't available to add…

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Why your Shopify product recommendations are irrelevant, and how to fix them

Generic recommendations guess from a thin signal, a shared tag or collection, so they suggest a substitute the…

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Shopify's semantic search made your results worse? Take back control

Shopify switched search to semantic matching with no setting to revert to the old keyword logic, and some stores…

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How to add a free-shipping progress bar to your Shopify cart

A free-shipping threshold lifts orders, but only if the shopper can see how close they are, and Shopify's default…

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Frequently bought together: turning order history into offers

Frequently bought together reads your store's own orders, finds the products that ship together, and offers the…

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How to upgrade the Horizon theme's cart drawer

Horizon ships with a native cart drawer: add to cart, and it slides in with line items, a subtotal, and a checkout…

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Horizon theme review: should your store use Shopify's new default?

Yes, for most new stores. Horizon is Shopify's current default theme: free, modern, with a block-based editor that…

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How to add bundles and quantity breaks to the Dawn theme

Dawn has no bundle section in the theme editor. You can list a bundle as its own product, install Shopify's free…

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How to add bundles and quantity breaks to the Horizon theme

Horizon's block-based editor has blocks for nearly everything, but none that sells a bundle. You can list a set as…

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How to add product filters to the Dawn theme

Dawn shows collection filters out of the box through Shopify's filtering system, managed by the free Search &…

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How to add product filters to the Horizon theme

Horizon ships with Shopify's collection filtering already wired in, managed by the free Search & Discovery app:…

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How to sell a pre-order bundle on Shopify without the sold-out bug

Native Shopify sets a bundle's availability to the lowest stock among its items, so a launch set shows sold out…

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How to improve search on the Dawn theme

Dawn ships with Shopify's predictive search: type in the header, suggestions appear. It covers the basics.…

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How to improve search on the Horizon theme

Horizon ships with Shopify's predictive search: type in the header, suggestions appear as the letters land. It…

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How to turn more of your Shopify searches into sales

The shopper who uses your search bar is the one most ready to buy, and native search loses too many of them to…

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The post-purchase upsell playbook for Shopify

A post-purchase upsell appears on the thank-you page, after payment clears. The order is already placed, so a…

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How to add product badges to the Dawn theme

Dawn badges two states on its own: Sale and Sold out. Anything else, New, Low stock, Bestseller, takes either…

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How to add product badges to the Horizon theme

Out of the box, Horizon badges exactly two states: Sale and Sold out. For New, Low stock, or Bestseller you either…

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How to find and fix zero-result searches on Shopify

Open your search analytics and read the zero-result list: every term shoppers typed that returned nothing. Fix…

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Shopify search analytics: what to track and what to do about it

Track four things: top searches, zero-result terms, searches that get results but no sales, and which filters…

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8 Shopify bundle ideas that increase average order value

The reflex to grow a sale is to discount, but discounting cuts your margin on every order to win the ones you…

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Shopify broke manual collection sorting for big catalogs. Here's the fix

Shopify's manual drag-and-drop only works within a single page, so for collections over 60 products you cannot…

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5 merchandising rules that lift sales on Shopify

Your collection's order is doing sales work, and a default sort does it badly: it ignores whether a product is in…

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How to offer quantity-break pricing to all your Shopify shoppers

Shopify's native quantity pricing only applies to B2B company profiles, so a regular storefront visitor never sees…

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How to set up search synonyms on Shopify

In Shopify's Search & Discovery app, open Synonyms and create a group that links the words shoppers type to the…

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How to push out-of-stock products to the bottom on Shopify

Native Shopify sorting only reorders within a single page, so it cannot keep sold-out products off the first…

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How to take a deposit instead of full payment on Shopify pre-orders

Native Shopify pre-order captures the full price at checkout, with no deposit option built in. To take a deposit,…

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How to add an upsell to your Shopify thank-you page

The thank-you page is the moment right after payment, a buyer who just proved they trust you. To use it, you put a…

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Your Shopify analytics shows what happened. Here's how to know what to do

Standard Shopify analytics reports sales, sessions, and conversion after the fact, but rarely names the cause or…

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Why your Shopify bundle shows "sold out" when items are in stock

A native Shopify bundle reads its availability as the lowest stock among its component products, so the moment one…

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