How to fill in your shipping, returns and search engine details

Last checked against Splash 1.0.0 / 2026-08-15

Splash keeps one source for your shipping and return terms. What a shopper reads on a product page and what search engines are told come from the same fields, so the two can never disagree.

Everything on this page lives in one place. In the theme editor, open Theme settings, then SEO and structured data. The panel runs top to bottom through Organization, Social profiles, Contact details, Shipping details, Returns, Product identifiers and Ratings. This page follows that order.

Note The theme ships with shipping details and return terms switched on, carrying the demo store's figures: free shipping over $500, a flat $49 rate, 1 to 2 business days handling, 3 to 7 business days delivery, ships to US and CA, 30-day returns. Those publish on your product pages and to search engines until you edit them. See Replace the demo content.

Which fields change the page and which do not#

Two groups in this panel print on your storefront. The rest are invisible to shoppers and only describe your store to search engines.

Every field in this panel is optional. An empty setting produces no property at all rather than an empty one, so an incomplete description of your store is an unfilled field, not a fault.

Organization#

These two fields name your store to search engines. They are emitted on every page.

• Organization name. Leave it blank and your Shopify store name is used. Fill it in only if your legal or trading name differs from the store name.
• Organization logo. Square, 112 x 112 pixels minimum. Leave it blank and the theme uses your Brand logo from Theme settings. With both empty, no logo is claimed at all.

Alongside the organization, the theme describes your store's search page so that search engines can offer a search box against your site. That needs no setting.

Social profiles#

Seven fields, in a fixed order: Instagram URL, Facebook URL, X URL, YouTube URL, TikTok URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest URL.

Each one you fill in adds its icon to the footer, in that order. An empty field is left out. The order is fixed and cannot be changed from the theme editor.

These are plain text fields, not URL pickers, which makes two things possible:

• A bare domain works. Type instagram.com/yourstore and it resolves to https://instagram.com/yourstore.
• Type # to see an icon in the footer before the account exists. The theme deliberately withholds a # from search engines, because a placeholder is a fair link on a page and an unfair claim to own a profile.

Anything that is not a web address or a path inside your own store becomes an inert link that goes nowhere. If an icon in your footer does not open the profile you expected, check the field for a typo in the domain.

Contact details#

This block adds a support contact to the structured data on every page. Nothing here shows on your storefront.

Note Show contact details does nothing on its own. A Phone number is also required. Fill in only the email address, languages or areas served and the whole contact block is skipped with no warning.

• Phone number. Include the country code, for example +1 555 555 5555.
• Contact type. Customer support, Sales, Technical support or Billing support. Customer support is the default.
• Email, optional.
• Languages, optional. Comma-separated, for example English, French.
• Areas served, optional. Comma-separated country codes, for example US, CA, GB.

Shipping details#

Switch on Show shipping details and fill in what you can state for the whole store. Leave the switch off if your rates vary too much to summarize in a few lines.

Here is what each field prints in the Shipping column of the product page block.

Handling time is the business days between the order and the shipment. Delivery time is the business days the carrier then takes.

Four things that go wrong here#

• Money must be a bare number. Type 500, not $500. A currency symbol makes the line print $0.00. The theme adds the symbol and the decimals for you.
• A time line only appears when the slowest figure is above zero. Leave Handling time, slowest blank or at 0 and no handling line prints, whatever the fastest figure says.
• Leaving the fastest figure blank prints a zero. A blank fastest with a slowest of 7 reads "Delivered in 0 to 7 business days". Set both.
• Ships to on its own produces nothing. The Shipping column needs at least one of a flat rate, a free-shipping threshold, a per-product note, or a handling or delivery slowest above zero. Fill in only the country codes and the whole Shipping column is left out.

What search engines additionally need#

The visible block shows whatever you fill in. The structured data is stricter, because search engines will not accept a partial shipping statement.

Shipping reaches search results only when both of these are set:

1. Flat shipping rate. A free-shipping threshold on its own is not enough. Sending a rate of zero would claim every order ships free, which is a stronger promise than the one on your page, so the theme sends nothing instead.
2. Ships to, holding real country codes.

Limit Entering WORLD in Ships to prints "Ships worldwide" on the page and sends no shipping information to search engines at all. There is no way to express "everywhere" in the format they require. If search visibility matters, list the country codes instead.

A shipping note for one product#

One delivery promise cannot cover a freight-delivered pool shell and a bottle of chlorine. Per-product shipping note metafield is where that difference goes. It ships set to custom.shipping_note.

A product carrying a note shows the note instead of the handling and delivery lines, and its structured data drops those day counts to match, so search engines are never told a delivery time the shopper is not being shown. The flat rate, the free-shipping threshold and the destinations are store-wide facts and still show.

Requires Create the metafield in Shopify admin under Settings, Custom data, Products. Namespace custom, key shipping_note, type single line text. Then fill it in on the products that need it.

Leave the field blank to use one delivery time for every product. If you use a different namespace, type it here as namespace.key. A wrong key and a product with no note look exactly alike: the store's day counts keep showing and nothing reports an error.

Returns#

Switch on Show return policy, then set the terms.

Note Return destination is the field to check first when a return policy is missing from search results. Without it, no return terms reach search engines even with every other field set, and because nothing on the visible page depends on it, the block still looks complete.

With Returns accepted set to Within a set number of days, the Return window must also be above zero before search engines are told anything.

Product identifiers#

None of these print on a page. They identify your products to search engines, which matters most when the same item is sold in more than one place.

• Brand metafield. Namespace and key, for example custom.brand. Leave it blank and the theme uses the product's Vendor field, which is usually the right answer.
• GTIN metafield. Namespace and key. Leave it blank to use the variant barcode. On products with more than one variant, each variant's own barcode is always used and this field is not consulted.
• MPN metafield. Namespace and key, for example custom.mpn.
• Price valid for. Days. Sets how long search engines treat the current price as good for. 30 days is typical, and is the shipped value. A blank or zero entry is treated as at least one day rather than putting the date in the past.

Requires Each of these metafields has to be created in Shopify admin under Settings, Custom data, Products before a product can carry a value. Naming a metafield that does not exist changes nothing and reports nothing.

Ratings#

Two fields, Rating value metafield and Rating count metafield. Both read what a review app has written into your product metafields, for example reviews.rating and reviews.rating_count.

• Both must be filled in. Fill in one and neither is used.
• The score must be on a 5-point scale. That is what the theme reports.
• Ratings cannot be typed by hand anywhere in this theme. There is no field for a rating you write yourself, and this is deliberate. See What Splash never invents.

The same two fields drive the visible rating line on a product page, which reads "Rated 4.8 out of 5 from 26 reviews". That line needs the Rating block in your product template. See Arrange the product page.

Two things that catch people out#

The terms you publish start as someone else's#

The theme's own defaults for Show shipping details and Show return policy are off. The settings file that ships with the theme turns both on and fills them with the demo store's figures. So from the first minute your store is live, every product page states free shipping over $500, a flat $49 rate, shipment in 1 to 2 business days, delivery in 3 to 7, shipping to US and CA, and 30-day returns with a full refund and return shipping paid by the store. Search engines are told the same.

Those are promises. Work through both groups before your store opens, or switch them off until you are ready.

The block can be missing from the page while the data still publishes#

Turning the two switches on is half of it. The visible terms appear on a product page only when the product template still contains the Shipping and returns block. The shipped product template has it. Remove it, or rebuild the template without it, and your terms keep going to search engines with nothing on the page for a shopper to read.

To check: open a product in the theme editor, select the Product section, and look for Shipping and returns in the block list. Add it back if it is gone. With both switches off, the theme editor shows a hint in its place pointing you back to Theme settings, so an empty-looking block in the editor means unfilled settings rather than a missing block.

Two details about the block itself. Its Caption field is hidden whenever Product information display is set to Tabs, because the tab label already names the band. And a quote-only product still shows the block, but publishes no product structured data at all, so its terms reach search engines from that page not at all. See Quote-only products.

Checking your work#

1. Open a product page on your live store and read the Shipping and returns block. Every line there is a promise you are making.
2. If a line is missing, check the setting behind it against the tables above. A missing handling line means the slowest figure is zero. A $0.00 means a currency symbol got typed into an amount.
3. Run the page through Google's Rich Results Test. If shipping is absent, check that you have both a flat rate and real country codes. If the return policy is absent, check Return destination.

Full definitions, ids and defaults for every setting on this page are in the Theme settings reference. If something is behaving in a way this page does not explain, contact support.

Something wrong here If a step does not match what you see, say so and it gets fixed. Documentation goes stale, which is why the line under the title carries a date.