1. Find the questions your store already gets

They're in your email, your Inbox chats, your store's search and your return reasons.

A list copied from a template answers what someone guessed shoppers ask. Your store already has a record of what they actually asked:

  • Your email and contact form. One merchant's rule on Reddit's r/shopify: "Look at the last 20 emails and put the 5 questions that keep coming up on the product page."
  • Shopify Inbox, under Sales channels, keeps every chat.
  • In Analytics, the Behavior reports include Searches with no results. Each term in it is something a shopper typed into your store's search and found nothing for, which makes it a question your pages don't answer.
  • Return reasons. Shopify asks why each return is requested, with reasons that fit the product's category: Too big and Too small for clothing. A reason that keeps coming back is a question to answer before the sale.
  • If you use Shopify's Knowledge Base app, its query log lists what AI shopping agents were asked about your store. Filter it to Unanswered.

Chat and email only show you the people who wrote in. For the ones who left, a merchant on r/ecommerce suggests one question after checkout: "what almost stopped you from buying today?"

Keep the shopper's wording, count over a month, and keep the questions many people ask. How to write FAQs covers the wording and the order in more detail.

2. Answer what decides the sale first

Shipping cost and time, returns and fit, each with its number in the first sentence.

These are the answers people leave over. Baymard Institute asked 1,083 US shoppers in 2026 why they had abandoned a cart. Leaving out the ones who were only browsing, 40% named extra costs such as shipping, 20% slow delivery and 13% the returns policy. Narvar's survey of 3,461 US shoppers in August 2025 found that 90% check the return policy before they buy, and that 40% won't buy if no delivery date is shown.

"Orders ship within 1 business day and arrive in 3 to 5 business days in the US" is an answer. "We aim to ship as quickly as possible" isn't.

The questions about your product come next, and they depend on what you sell. Fitness equipment gets asked about dimensions and weight limits, and furniture about room size and assembly. Clothing gets asked whether it runs small, is see-through or shrinks, and skincare whether it suits sensitive skin. A merchant on r/ecommerce drew the line that matters: whether a watch strap comes in another colour is a preference, but "someone not knowing whether the watch will fit their wrist" may not buy at all. Answer that second kind first.

"Where is my order?" is the question merchants say they get most, and a FAQ answers it badly, because the shopper wants news of their own order. Put the delivery window in your order confirmation and shipping emails. Use the FAQ for the cases those emails don't explain: a label created with no scans yet, a parcel stuck in transit, "delivered" when nothing came.

3. Write answers that match how Shopify works

Many FAQ templates describe a store that doesn't run on Shopify.

  • Signing in. Shopify's customer accounts sign shoppers in with a one-time code sent to their email, with no password, and Shopify has deprecated the older accounts that used one. Many templates still ask "How do I reset my password?" Answer "How do I sign in?" instead.
  • Duties. Shopify can collect an estimate of duties and import taxes at checkout, so the parcel arrives with nothing more to pay. If your store doesn't, the shopper pays when it's delivered. Say which, and for which countries.
  • Payment. List the methods your checkout shows, and only those.
  • Policies. Your return, shipping, privacy and terms pages live in Settings > Policies, and Shopify keeps its automated policies in step with your shipping and return settings. Your FAQ doesn't follow along. When an answer repeats a number from a policy, such as the return window, link the policy as well, and change both on the same day. If you have no shipping or return policy yet, our free shipping policy generator and refund policy generator write one from a few answers.
  • Order changes. Say until when a shopper can change or cancel: until it ships, or for an hour after ordering. "Contact us as soon as possible" leaves them guessing.

4. Create a FAQ template, then the page

Dawn and Horizon don't come with one, and skipping this step puts your FAQ on every page.

What you add in the theme editor belongs to a template, not to one page. Add a FAQ to the default page template and it shows on your About page, your Contact page and every other page that uses that template. Merchants ask about it on Shopify's community forum again and again. Shopify's free themes ship no FAQ template: Dawn 16 and Horizon 4.3 have the default page template and one for the contact page, nothing more. So make one first.

  1. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store, find your theme and click Edit theme.
  2. Open the template menu at the top of the editor, which starts on Home page. Choose Pages, then Create template. Name it faq, base it on the default page, and create it.
  3. Add the questions. In Horizon and the themes built on it, click Add section and choose FAQ, under Text. You get a heading and an Accordion with five sample questions. Replace every question and every answer, because the samples say things like "Our goal is for every customer to be totally satisfied with their purchase", which answers nothing. Add an Accordion row for each question you have. In Dawn and the themes built on it, add the Collapsible content section and a Collapsible row for each question. A Dawn row can also take its answer from a Shopify page, with Row content from page.
  4. Save. Then go to Online Store > Pages, click Add page and title it FAQ. In the page's Online store section, set Theme template to faq.

The Theme template menu lists only the templates in your live theme. If you built yours in an unpublished copy of the theme, publish it first.

Paid and older themes name these sections differently, so look for FAQ, Accordion, Collapsible or Tabs. If your theme has none, a FAQ app adds one. Shopify FAQ apps compared describes seven of them.

5. Put the deciding answers on product pages

Three to five answers near the Add to cart button, where shoppers hesitate.

Shoppers look for these answers on the product page, not on a FAQ page. In Baymard's survey of 1,032 shoppers, 60% look for the return policy on the product page, and in its usability testing 64% looked for shipping costs there before adding a product to the cart. One merchant on r/shopify moved shipping time, the return policy, the size guide and material details "right below the buy button", because most shoppers land on a product page and go no further.

In the theme editor, choose Products and then Default product from the template menu. In the Product information section, add a Collapsible row block in Dawn, or an Accordion in Horizon. What you type into it shows on every product that uses the template, which is what you want for shipping and returns.

Some answers differ from one product to the next, such as fit, care or what's in the box. There are two ways to handle them without code:

  • Give a group of products its own template, such as product.bedding, with its own rows, and choose it in each of those products' Theme template.
  • Or keep one template and store each product's answer in a metafield. In Settings > Metafields and metaobjects, add a product definition, a rich text field called Fit for example. Connect a row's content to it in the theme editor with the Connect dynamic source icon, then fill the field in on each product. In Dawn, a whole set of questions can come from a list of metaobjects. Horizon can't do that yet, and Shopify staff called it "a gap" on the community forum in August 2025. On Horizon, that means one row per question, each connected to its own metafield.

Leave the rows that decide a sale open. Shoppers miss a size chart hidden in a closed row. A merchant who asked on r/shopify whether collapsible rows confuse customers got two answers worth keeping: "Set those to expanded by default. They are huge trouble on a cellphone," and "hidden info is the enemy of conversion." Horizon's rows have Open row by default, and Dawn's Collapsible content section has Open first row. Closed rows stay in the page's HTML, so search engines still read them.

In the footer menu, under plain names: FAQ, Shipping, Returns.

Baymard's usability testing found that some shoppers always look in the footer for shipping and returns, and that 20% of sites have no plain link to them there. Use the words people look for. "Don't like it? Send it back" isn't one of them.

Menus are under Content > Menus now. Tutorials that send you to Online Store > Navigation are out of date. Open your footer menu, click Add menu item and pick the FAQ page from the list of pages rather than pasting its address, because Shopify warns that a pasted link can break and lead to a 404. The Policies link type adds your shipping and return policies the same way.

7. Make sure search engines and AI assistants can read it

An answer in the page's HTML gets read. One that a script loads later might not.

Dawn's and Horizon's rows put every answer in the page itself, open or closed. Some FAQ apps load their answers with JavaScript after the page arrives. Google runs scripts, but in a 2024 study Vercel found that the crawlers OpenAI and Meta use for their AI tools don't. To check your own, open the FAQ page, view its source with Ctrl+U, or Option-Command-U on a Mac, and search it for a sentence from one of your answers. If the sentence isn't there, those crawlers can't read it.

Shopify's own chat reads your pages too. The AI agent in Shopify Inbox answers shoppers from "your products, store policies, and pages", in Shopify's words, so a vague FAQ makes for vague chat answers.

The Shopify Knowledge Base app does a different job. Its FAQs are for AI shopping agents such as ChatGPT, and Shopify says they "aren't displayed directly on your storefront". Use it for the agents and keep a FAQ on your store for shoppers. Shopify Knowledge Base and a FAQ on your store explains how the two fit together.

8. Keep it true

Change an answer the day you change the setting it repeats.

A new shipping rate, a longer return window or a holiday cutoff makes every answer that quotes the old one wrong. Shopify updates its automated policies when your settings change, and your FAQ waits for you. Once a month, read Searches with no results, your Inbox chats and your return reasons again. What's new there is your next question, and a question nobody asks any more can go.

A Shopify FAQ template

Copy the questions that fit your store and fill in the brackets with your own facts. Each answer starts with the fact.

Shipping and delivery

  • How much is shipping? [Free over $X / $X flat in the US]. You see the exact cost at checkout, before you pay.
  • How long will my order take? We ship within [X] business days, and it arrives in [X to Y] business days in [country].
  • Do you ship to [country]? [Yes, in X to Y business days / No, we ship to A, B and C].
  • Will I pay duties or import taxes? [No, they're included in what you pay at checkout / Yes, the carrier collects them on delivery].
  • When should I order for [holiday]? By [date] with standard shipping, or [date] with express.

Your order

  • Can I change or cancel my order? Yes, until [it ships / an hour after you order]. Reply to your order confirmation email.
  • My tracking hasn't moved. Is my order lost? [What "label created" or "in transit" means with your carrier, and after how many days to write to you].
  • It says delivered, but it isn't here. [What to check first, and what you do if it doesn't turn up within X days].

Returns and exchanges

  • Can I return it? Yes, within [X] days of delivery, if [condition]. [Sale items are final / can be returned too].
  • How do I start a return? [Where to start it, and who pays for return shipping].
  • Can I exchange it for another size? [Yes, at no cost / No, return it and place a new order].

The product

  • Does it run true to size? [It runs true to size / It runs small, so size up if you're between sizes]. [Link the size chart.]
  • What is it made of, and how do I care for it? [Material]. [Care, in one line].
  • What's in the box? [Everything that comes with it].

Payment and your account

  • Which payment methods do you accept? [Exactly what your checkout shows].
  • Do I need an account to order? [No, you can check out as a guest]. To see your orders later, sign in with your email and the one-time code we send you.

Reaching us

  • How do I contact you? [Email or contact form], and we reply within [X hours] on [days].

Where Actually Asked fits

We make Actually Asked, a Shopify app that does steps 1, 5 and 7 for you. It writes your first FAQ from your store's pages, products and policies when you install it, and you place it on your FAQ page and product pages as a block in the theme editor, in your theme's fonts and colours. Each product can have its own questions, shown above your store-wide ones, with no metafields to set up, and the questions are in your store's HTML. Shoppers can ask their own question under the FAQ and get an answer from your store's content. A question several shoppers ask joins the FAQ, and anything you edit stays as you wrote it. More on how it works for online stores.