Your first shoppable video: a checklist

Most first setups that “do not work” are working correctly and missing one step. Here is the list, in the order that matters, with the two that account for nearly all of it marked.

Before you start

• An Online Store 2.0 theme. Dawn, Horizon and every modern theme qualify. If your theme predates sections everywhere, this is the thing to fix first.
• Pretty permalinks and a working storefront. Nothing exotic — just a store you can actually browse.

The setup

• 1. The video is in your library. Uploaded, or imported by link from Instagram or TikTok.
• 2. It is in a playlist. A video not in a playlist is not shown by any widget. Easy to miss, because the video looks perfectly present in the library.
• 3. Products are tagged to it. ⚠️ This is the step that makes it shoppable. Untagged, it is a video player.
• 4. The variant is tagged, where the video shows one. Olive medium, not just “the jacket”.
• 5. The app embed is on. ⚠️ One toggle in your theme. Until it is on, nothing renders on the storefront at all, whatever else you have done.
• 6. A widget is placed. In the theme editor, dragged where you want it, saved.
• 7. The placement is allowed. If you have set display rules, check the page you are testing is on the list. An allow-list is exclusive — “only Home” means the widget will not appear on the page you are looking at.
• 8. The products are in stock and published. A tagged product that is unpublished or sold out behaves according to your theme’s rules, which may mean it does not show.

Before you call it done

• 9. Open it on a phone. Not the preview. An actual phone on an actual connection.
• 10. Tap a product and add it to the cart. All the way through. The number of setups that look perfect and have a tagging mistake in them is higher than anyone expects, and you want to find it before a customer does.

The two that catch almost everyone

The app embed. It is a store-wide master switch and it lives in the theme editor rather than in the app, so it does not feel like part of the setup. If nothing at all is appearing on your storefront, check this before anything else.

Tagging. A widget of untagged videos renders perfectly and does nothing, which is a much more confusing failure than an error message. If the videos show but nothing is buyable, this is why.

What to do in week one

Leave it alone. One placement, a handful of videos, a week of data. The urge is to add three more widgets on day two; the stores that get the most from video are the ones that found out which placement worked before scaling.