Building pages

Where you compose your home page, your category landing pages and any other page, out of sections. What you see is the real storefront, in your real theme — you edit the page by editing the page.

The four pages you already have

Every shop is created with About Us, Shipping & Returns, Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy, and all four are live from day one — a shop that takes money with no returns policy is a shop with a problem.

The three legal ones come already written, as a starting point, with your shop name, address and contact details filled in. About Us is left blank, because only you can write that.

Read them, and finish them. They are a sensible draft for a UK or EU shop, not legal advice, and they are not tailored to how you trade. Anywhere they need a decision from you is marked in square brackets — [add your dispatch time], [say whether you or the customer pays] — and those brackets are on your live storefront until you replace them. Search each page for [ before you open for business, and have someone qualified look over the result.

Your details were filled in when the shop was created, and the wording follows the country you were set up in — the law it names, the consumer rights it quotes and the data protection regulator it points at all differ between a UK shop and one in the EU. Changing your address in Settings afterwards does not rewrite these pages; they are yours now, so edit them here.

Customers have to agree to them. Anyone creating an account on your shop must tick a box confirming they have read your Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy, and the box links to these two pages. The date they agreed is kept on their customer record. That is another reason to finish the pages before you open: the agreement is only worth having if there is something behind the link.

How it fits together

• A page is a stack of sections (we also call them blocks).
• Each section has a type — a hero, some cards, a block of text — and most have a variant, which is the same content in a different shape.
• Everything you type goes to a draft. Customers keep seeing the live version until you press Publish.

Editing text

Click any text in the preview and type. Dotted outlines mark what's editable; a placeholder like "Write this section's copy…" is an empty field waiting for you, not missing text.

Some text can't be edited here — a product's name, a category's title, a blog post's headline. Those belong to the thing itself and the editor says "edited on its own screen" rather than letting you type something that would never save. Change the product and the page follows.

Selecting a whole section

Click a section (rather than its text) and its toolbar appears, with everything you can do to it. That toolbar has its own help.

Nothing is live until you publish

The safety property worth trusting: you can rebuild your home page on a Saturday afternoon with customers on the site, and they see none of it until you say so.