The cart builder
The cart builder is the one screen where you decide what goes in your cart drawer, in what order, and whether shoppers see it at all.
What the cart builder is
A cart in Smart Cart is a saved configuration. It is made of modules — the cart items, an announcement line, a product upsell, a free gift, a terms checkbox, and so on. The cart builder is the list of those modules.
Everything you do here is saved straight away to your draft, but nothing reaches a shopper until you publish. You can add, reorder and remove modules on a live cart all afternoon and your storefront will not change until you use Review and publish.
How to open it
- Go to Carts in the app menu.
- Click the cart's name, or the Open button in the Actions column.
The page is headed Cart builder and has four sections: Modules, Add a module, Publish, and See it and style it.
Adding a module
- Scroll to Add a module.
- Pick one from the Module dropdown.
- Click Add.
The module appears at the bottom of the list, above the checkout. It is switched on from the moment you add it, so if it needs settings before it can show anything, set those next.
The controls on each module
Every row in the Modules list carries the same set of buttons.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Up and down arrows | Moves the module one place up or down the list. The arrow is greyed out when the module is already first or last. |
| Settings | Opens that module's own settings screen. Some modules have nothing to configure and will say so. |
| Hide / Show | Switches the module off or on. A hidden module keeps its settings and is left out of the cart entirely when you publish. |
| Remove | Deletes the module and its settings from this cart. Not offered on required modules. |
Under each row you will see a short line such as Visible · position 3, telling you whether the module is switched on and where it sits.
Reordering uses buttons, not dragging. That is deliberate — a drag handle cannot be operated by keyboard, and every move is announced to screen readers as “moved to position 3 of 7”.
Fixed modules and body modules
Some parts of the drawer are locked in place. They show a grey Fixed position badge with a padlock instead of the up and down arrows.
| Module | Where it sits | Can you move it? |
|---|---|---|
| Header | Top of the drawer | No — and it cannot be hidden or removed |
| Rewards bar | Top of the drawer | No |
| Everything else | The body, between header and checkout | Yes |
| Checkout | Bottom of the drawer | No — and it cannot be hidden or removed |
| Trust badges | Below the checkout button | No |
The reason is the shopper's cart. If the checkout button and the cart items could be pushed anywhere, it is easy to build a drawer where a shopper has to scroll past your offers to find their own products and the button that buys them.
Modules you cannot remove
Header, Cart items and Checkout are required. Their Hide button is greyed out and they have no Remove button. Every new cart is created with all three already in place.
What you can add
The Add a module dropdown offers the modules that live in the body of the drawer:
- Cart items
- Announcement
- Product upsell
- Free gift
- Discount code
- Variant switching
- Order notes
- Terms checkbox
- Countdown timer
- Checkbox add-on
- Quantity limits
- Subscription frequency
- Custom HTML
Discount code, Variant switching and Cart items have no settings of their own — they are on or off. The rest open a settings screen with fields.
Warnings on a module
If a module is switched on but has nothing to show, an orange warning appears on its row. This happens for three cases today:
- an upsell with no products and no collection chosen
- a free gift with no gift product chosen
- an announcement with no text written
These are warnings, not errors. The cart will still publish — that module will simply render nothing. Open Settings on that row to fix it.
The other screens
The builder holds the module list and links out to everything else, rather than showing all of it at once. Under See it and style it you will find buttons for Preview, Design, Rewards bar, Shopper copy, Sticky bubble, Custom CSS, Offers and A/B test.
Display rules — showing a module only to carts over a certain value, or one country, or shoppers on a phone — are not set from this list. Open a module's Settings and look for Who sees this.
Limitations
- You cannot drag modules. The up and down arrows are the only way to reorder, and each press moves the module one place.
- Rewards bar and Trust badges are not in the Add dropdown. Both are fixed modules, and the dropdown only offers body modules. A cart gets them by applying a template from the Templates screen. If your cart has no Rewards bar row, that is why.
- Nothing stops you adding the same module twice. Add Announcement twice and you get two rows and two announcements. Use Remove on the spare.
- The button inside a warning returns you to this same list rather than opening the module it is about. Use the Settings button on that module's row instead.
- There are no performance figures here, or on the Carts list. The Carts list shows name, status and live version only. Per-cart opens, conversions and revenue are not measured yet, so no number is shown rather than a zero that would read as failure.
- No warning tells you a display rule is matching nobody. That would be a claim about real traffic, and the app is not yet counting it.
- Forwarding cart events to Google Analytics 4 or Meta is not available. It is not on any plan and is not something you can switch on today.
Adding and arranging modules changes your draft only. Until you publish, your storefront shows whatever you published last — or nothing, if this cart has never been published.
When the list looks right, open Publish → Review and publish. That screen is also the only home of version history and rollback. See Publishing a cart. If a published cart still does not appear on your storefront, check the app embed is switched on in your theme.