Product pages

Manifest ships three product page templates. Most themes ship one and let you rearrange it. The distinction matters because a $12 refill, a $198 hero product, and a four-piece kit are not the same sale, and a page that treats them identically argues badly for at least two of them.

Quick-buy — buying first

The gallery sits on one side, the buying column on the other, and both stay in view as the page scrolls. Everything needed to buy — variant selectors, quantity, price, add to cart — is visible without scrolling on most screens.

Use it when the customer already knows what the product is. Refills, repeat purchases, simple SKUs, anything where the decision is “yes” rather than “what is this”.

Default product — explanation first

The page reads top to bottom as a narrative. Sections of the story alternate down the page, with the buying column pinned alongside rather than pushed below the fold.

Use it when the product needs explaining before it can be sold. High price points, unfamiliar categories, anything where the customer’s real question is “why does this cost that”.

Below Product chapters, the sections follow the questions a customer asks in turn, moving from story to reference as the page goes down:

1. Benefits and suitability: is it for me?
2. Protocol timeline: how does it fit my routine?
3. Ingredient atlas: what makes it work?
4. Product dossier: the full ingredients, sourcing, and warnings
5. Product reviews: what do other customers say?
6. Related products: what else goes with it?

Three more sections ship in place but hidden. Show each one only when you have the content for it:

• Proof ledger, between Product dossier and Product reviews, for real test results, certifications, or standards.
• Formula comparison, above the cross-sell, when you sell a range of similar formulas.
• Routine builder, in place of Related products, once you have set up paired products in the free Search and Discovery app. Show one cross-sell, not both.

Set — the kit page

A kit is not a bigger product, it is several products with a reason for being together. Three of the single-product sections cannot work on one: a kit has no single ingredient list, no single usage protocol, and comparing a kit against a serum is apples to oranges.

So the set template drops those three and earns its keep two other ways. Evidence cards give each piece of the kit its own panel with its own facts. And the routine builder stops being context and becomes the point of the page: the kit is a routine, laid out in order, addable in one click.

Use it when you sell kits, sets, bundles, or duos — anything where the customer is buying a relationship between products rather than one product.

Choosing per product

You do not have to pick one for the whole catalog. Shopify supports alternate templates, and Manifest ships one for each of the three.

Template	Shows in the dropdown as	Built for
Product chapters	Default product	Considered purchases that need explaining
Product stage	quick-buy	Repeat purchases, refills, simple SKUs
Product set	set	Kits, sets, bundles, duos

To assign a different product page to a specific product:

1. Go to Products in your Shopify admin and open the product.
2. Scroll to the Online store card in the right sidebar.
3. Under Theme template, choose the alternate template.
4. Save.

The product now renders with that layout. Everything else about the product — its data, its URL, its position in collections — is unchanged.

A practical split: hero products and anything above your average order value get the chapters layout. Refills and repeat buys get quick-buy. Kits get the set template. Nothing needs to be built.

What every product page shares

Whichever template a product uses, it gets the same buying column, the same variant behavior, the same media handling, and the same per-product routine. The story above the fold changes; the mechanics underneath do not. That is deliberate — a catalog where checkout behaves differently depending on the page is a catalog that loses sales.

The buying column

Both architectures share the same buying column, built from blocks you can reorder:

• Product title, vendor, and price, including compare-at and unit pricing
• Variant selectors — one control per option, not a single combined dropdown
• Quantity selector
• Add to cart, with accelerated checkout buttons beneath
• Selling plan selector for subscription products
• Gift card recipient fields for gift card products
• Pickup availability
• Share

The default product template keeps its buying column short on purpose. The product description sits under the price as a three-line excerpt with a Read more button, so a long description never pushes the buy button off the first screen. The column ends with a single Shipping and returns disclosure, because benefits, ingredients, and how to use each have their own section further down the page. Adding a Collapsible information block for any of those three repeats content the page already shows.

The Product description block offers three display styles: Full content, Excerpt, and Collapsible. Excerpt shows the number of lines set under Visible lines (two to six) and expands the rest in place. Without JavaScript the full description shows.

Reorder these in the theme editor by dragging. The one constraint worth knowing: accelerated checkout buttons are rendered by Shopify with Shopify’s own styling, and their appearance is not customizable — that is a platform rule, not a theme limitation.

Variant behavior

Manifest selects the first available variant on load rather than the first variant. If your size small is sold out, the page opens on a size that can actually be bought.

When a variant is unavailable, add to cart is disabled rather than hidden, and the reason is announced to assistive technology. Variant changes update the price, availability, and the gallery in place, without a page reload — and the change is announced rather than happening silently.

With JavaScript disabled, variant selection still works. It submits a form and reloads the page, which is slower and entirely functional.

Media

The gallery supports images, video, 3D models, YouTube, and Vimeo. A few notes:

• Nothing loads until it is needed. Video and 3D model files are not fetched on page load, only when a visitor interacts with that media item. This is a significant part of why product pages stay fast.
• Video does not autoplay with sound. Space bar pauses.
• 3D models need Shopify’s model viewer, which loads on interaction.
• Switching tabs pauses playing media.

Product recommendations

The related products section uses Shopify’s recommendation engine, which learns from your store’s own order history. It needs sales data to be useful — on a new store it falls back to products from the same collection.

Complementary products are set manually through Shopify’s Search & Discovery app, and are worth the effort for products that genuinely pair.

Reviews

Manifest does not collect reviews. It provides an app block surface on the product page where a review app renders, plus a ratings summary that appears when rating data exists on the product.

Install a review app, add its block to the product page in the theme editor, and the rest follows. If you have no review app, the section stays empty rather than showing fabricated ratings.