Routines

Most themes let you show “products you might also like” — an algorithm’s guess, in no particular order, with no explanation. Manifest’s routine builder does something different: it lays out a sequence, names each step, says what the step is for, and lets a customer add the whole thing to the cart at once.

The part worth understanding is where the products come from. You curate a list once per product, in Shopify’s own free app. The page assembles itself from there. There is no per-page editing, and no theme work when your catalog grows.

How it fits together

Two layers, and keeping them separate is what makes this scale:

The frame you design once in the theme editor — the tabs, the step names, the guidance copy. Think of it as a recipe card with blank slots: “step one is the cleanser, step two is the serum”.

The products come from each product’s own complementary list. Slot one asks for a cleanser, and whichever cleanser that product’s list holds is the one that appears.

One frame, an entire catalog. A facial set shows five steps, a standalone serum shows two, and a product with nothing curated shows no section at all — without anyone editing a page.

Setup

1. Install Search and Discovery. Shopify’s own app, free, from the App Store. This is what stores the list the theme reads.

2. Give your products a product type. In each product’s Product organization card, set Product type to the role it plays: Cleanser, Serum, Moisturizer, Night cream, Mask. This is how a step knows which product is the cleanser. Matching ignores capitals.

3. Curate the routine. In Apps → Search & Discovery → Recommendations, open a product and add its complementary products in the order the routine runs. Save.

That is the whole setup, and step three is the only one you repeat per product. Everything else is done once.

What a customer sees

The steps in order, numbered, each with its product, price, and its own add button. Then one control at the bottom: Add complete routine. It opens a review panel listing every step with its price and a total, and adds them in a single action — as separate line items, so discounts, subscriptions, and inventory all behave normally.

Choosing how steps find their product

Each step has a Match by setting with three modes.

Mode	How it picks	Use it when
Product type	The first product in the list carrying that type	Almost always — it survives reordering
Product tag	The first product carrying that tag	You need one product in some tabs but not others
Position in the list	The nth product, ignoring type	A one-off routine that really is “these three, in this order”

Product type is the default and the right answer for nearly every store. Reorder the list, add a product, remove one — every step still finds the right thing. Position mode is faster to set up and brittle by design: move the mask to the top and your morning cleanse step starts selling a mask.

If two products in one routine share a type — two serums, say — keep the type on both and set Match position to 2 on the second step. Type for the role, position for the tiebreak.

Tabs and steps are yours

Morning, Evening, and Weekly are just what the template starts with, the way any section starts with placeholder copy. In the theme editor you can rename tabs, add them up to five, delete them, reorder them, and do the same with the steps inside each one. One tab called “How to use this” with two steps is perfectly valid.

The guidance copy is written for the role, not the bottle — “massage onto damp skin, then rinse” is true of whatever cleanser fills the slot. That is what lets one frame serve a whole catalog. If a step’s wording is wrong for a particular product, that usually means the step’s role is wrong for it, and a separate template fixes it more cleanly than per-product prose.

What happens when something is missing

The section is built to degrade quietly rather than show a broken page:

• A step whose product cannot be found renders nothing to customers. In the theme editor you see the slot and a note explaining what it looked for, including which product types the list actually holds.
• A tab whose steps all come up empty removes itself, and its count never lies — the number on the tab counts the steps that actually rendered.
• A product with nothing curated shows no section at all, rather than an empty heading.
• Each step also has its own Product picker, used whenever nothing matches. Fill those in and an uncurated product still shows a sensible default routine.

Subscription products

A product that can only be bought with a purchase option cannot be added by a plain cart add, so the step shows the same round control linking to the product page, where the plan can be chosen. It is also left out of the batch, so one subscription product cannot stop the rest of the routine being added.

Where the routine appears

On all three product templates. On the set template it is the centerpiece of the page. Elsewhere it sits below the product story, answering “what do I use with this” once the customer knows what this is.

It also works on the home page, where there is no product in context — there it uses the products picked directly in each step, which is what those pickers are for.

The other routine section

Protocol timeline also lays out a routine, and the two are easy to confuse. The routine builder lists real products — priced, addable to the cart, drawn from each product’s complementary list. The protocol timeline lists phases you author — Cleanse, Treat, Hydrate — identical on every product page, with a badge marking where the product being viewed sits.

One answers “what else do I use with this”. The other answers “where does this sit, and how often”. Both can run on the same product page.