Store policies

Store policies are the legal pages buyers read before they trust you with a payment: how refunds work, what you do with their data, the terms they agree to, how you ship, and how to reach you. Sellerlane stores each policy as a versioned record, publishes it on your storefront at a predictable URL, and links the key ones from checkout automatically. You manage all of them from one place: Settings → Policies.

The five policy types

Every store gets the same fixed set of policy types. You can’t add custom policy types, but each one supports rich text and full revision history.

Policy	Storefront URL
Return and Refund Policy	/policies/return-and-refund-policy
Privacy Policy	/policies/privacy-policy
Terms of Service	/policies/terms-of-service
Shipping Policy	/policies/shipping-policy
Contact Information	/policies/contact-information

On the Store Policies page each type shows a status tag — Set or Not Set — so you can see at a glance which pages are live. A policy that is Not Set has no public page and won’t render anywhere on your storefront.

Note

Need to draft the wording fast? Sellerlane has free generators for the two trickiest ones: the refund policy generator and the privacy policy generator. Paste the output into the editor, then edit it to match how you actually operate.

Writing a policy

1. Go to Settings → Policies.

2. Click the card for the policy you want to write, or use its Manage button. The Set Policy editor opens.

3. Write your policy in the rich-text editor. You can use headings, bold, lists, and links — the content is saved as HTML and rendered as-is on the storefront. The field can’t be empty.

4. Click Save Policy. Sellerlane creates a new version, marks it active, and the public page goes live immediately.

When you save, the card flips to Set and shows a short preview of the content. Re-open the card any time to edit; saving again creates the next version and activates it.

Tip

Keep your Contact Information policy filled in even if you have nothing legal to say there — buyers and payment gateways look for a real business name, address, and a way to reach you. A complete contact page reduces disputes and helps with payment-gateway verification.

How versioning works

Policies are never destructively overwritten. Each save writes a new version with an incrementing version number, and only the newest one is marked active. The active version is what buyers see; older versions are retained as a history trail.

This matters for two reasons:

• Disputes and chargebacks. If a buyer challenges a charge, you can show exactly what your refund or shipping policy said on the day they ordered.
• Compliance. Privacy and terms changes are dated, so you have a record of when each revision took effect.

You can download the full history with the Export History button at the top of the Store Policies page. Choose Standard CSV for most tools, or Excel Friendly CSV (UTF-8 with a byte-order mark) if you’ll open it directly in Excel and want non-English characters to render correctly. The export covers every version of every policy.

Where policies appear

Once a policy is Set, Sellerlane surfaces it for buyers in several places without any extra wiring:

• The policy page itself, served at /policies/<handle> (for example yourstore.com/policies/return-and-refund-policy). Your theme renders it through its Main policy section, which shows the title, a breadcrumb, and your formatted body.
• Checkout footer. The checkout page always links the refund, shipping, privacy, and terms policies in its footer so buyers can read them before paying. Because these links are fixed, set each of those four policies — an unset one still shows a link, but it leads to an empty page.
• Your theme’s footer or menus, if your theme links them. Themes can read policies through Liquid — shop.privacy_policy, shop.refund_policy, shop.shipping_policy, shop.terms_of_service, or by looping over shop.policies. When you loop over shop.policies, only policies that are Set appear; unset ones are skipped so you never get a broken or empty link.

Caution

The checkout footer links the refund, shipping, privacy, and terms policies whether or not you’ve written them, so an unwritten one links to a blank page. Theme footers and menus that loop over shop.policies, on the other hand, only show policies that are Set. Either way, the fix is the same: open Settings → Policies and write the missing policy so it shows the green Set tag.

You can also link a policy from any navigation menu by hand — see navigation & content. For theme developers, the storefront policy object and the shop policy accessors expose title, body, url, and handle.

Editing the policy page design

The content of each policy comes from Settings → Policies, but the layout of the page comes from your theme’s policy template and its Main policy section. To change spacing, fonts, or surrounding sections, edit the policy template in the visual editor rather than the policy text. See themes & editor.

Troubleshooting

• A policy page returns nothing or 404s. The policy is Not Set. Write and save it under Settings → Policies to publish the page.
• My edit isn’t showing on the storefront. Saving activates the new version immediately, but policy pages are cached for a few minutes, so a browser or CDN cache may show the old copy briefly — wait a moment and hard-refresh the policy page. Confirm in the editor that the latest text is what you saved.
• A checkout-footer policy link opens a blank page. The checkout footer always shows the refund, shipping, privacy, and terms links, even for policies you haven’t written yet. Write the missing one under Settings → Policies.
• Special characters look wrong in my export. Re-run Export History and choose Excel Friendly CSV for UTF-8-with-BOM encoding.

Next steps

Refunds & returns

Your refund policy should match how you actually process refunds and returns. See refunds & returns.

Navigation & content

Add policy links to your footer or menus in navigation & content.

Themes & editor

Restyle the policy page layout in themes & editor.

Emails

Keep your contact details consistent across transactional emails.