How to upgrade the Horizon theme's cart drawer

Option A: keep Horizon's native cart drawer

It works from the first add to cart, no setup.

1. From the storefront, add a product to the cart. Horizon's drawer slides in: line items, quantities, subtotal, checkout button.
2. In the theme editor, review the cart options Horizon exposes and tidy what shows.
3. Test on mobile and desktop, then leave it alone if it covers you.

It's fast, clean, and perfectly Horizon, because it is Horizon. If a drawer's only job were displaying the cart, you could stop here.

Where it stops: the native drawer reports the cart without growing it. No free-shipping progress bar handing shoppers a goal, no countdown giving a reason to finish now, no offers. The drawer opens at the moment that matters most, and the moment stays blank.

Option B: rebuild the drawer with theme code

No native feature or free Shopify app upgrades the drawer; Search and Discovery stops at search and filters. So the do-it-yourself route runs through Horizon's theme files, and Horizon is young enough that few tutorials cover its internals yet. The route:

1. Duplicate Horizon, so the work happens on a copy.
2. Edit the drawer's markup, JavaScript, and CSS in the code editor.
3. Build the piece you want. A progress bar needs your free-shipping threshold, math against the cart subtotal, and styling. A countdown needs a script with an end date.
4. Test on every page type, since the drawer is global.

Credit where due: a developer who knows the theme can build a clean progress bar this way, native because it is native.

Where it stops: the work lives inside your theme copy, so every Horizon update means carrying the edits over by hand. Each new idea is another development round-trip. Offers in the drawer mean writing and maintaining discount logic too. Budget for upkeep, not just the build.

Option C: replace the drawer with Sledge

Sledge swaps Horizon's drawer for one built to sell, styled like Horizon out of the box, because it tunes the drawer for this theme specifically.

1. Install Sledge from the Shopify App Store and start the 14-day free trial.
2. Switch on the app embed. The Sledge drawer takes over from Horizon's automatically.
3. Pick your sections: free-shipping progress bar, countdown, bundle suggestions, order notes.
4. Publish, then add something to the cart and watch the bar fill.

The progress bar gives every cart a goal. "Free shipping is $9 away" is arithmetic about the shopper's own cart, and one more item clears it, the classic way to lift average order value. The countdown gives a reason to finish now. Bundle suggestions sell once more before checkout, and they render correctly because drawer and offers come from the same app. Order notes let shoppers leave instructions without leaving the drawer.

The exit is clean: uninstall Sledge, and Horizon's own drawer returns exactly as it was, since no theme file was ever touched. The cart that finishes the sale.

Native drawer, code edits, or Sledge?

The honest read: a store with no free-shipping threshold and no in-cart offers loses little by keeping Horizon's drawer. A store with a developer on retainer and one fixed idea can code it. Everyone who wants the drawer to sell, and keep selling through theme updates, wants the replacement.

Related reading

Sledge on Horizon · Cart Drawer · What is a cart drawer? · What is average order value?