Close your store with an opening-soon page

What it is

Close the store is one checkbox that takes your whole store down to a single page. Shoppers who open any link to your store — the home page, a product, the cart, anything — see the same page: your logo (or your store name), a heading, a message from you, an email box and your social links. Nothing else of the store shows and nobody can place an order. When you untick the box, the whole store comes back exactly as it was.

Use it when you have sold out and will make more, when you take prebookings in batches, when you are launching and want a place to collect emails before the shop opens, or when you are closing for longer than a short holiday and would rather shoppers left their email than saw empty shelves.

Close your store

1. 1Open your store dashboard and go to Settings.
2. 2Open the Checkout section, or type “close store” into the Search settings… box at the top. Close the store is the second card, right under Pause ordering.
3. 3Tick Close my store and show an opening-soon page. The row turns amber and the boxes for the page appear.
4. 4Write your Heading (up to 80 characters) and your Message (up to 400). If you leave them empty the page reads “Opening soon” and “We've sold out for now. Leave your email and we'll let you know the moment prebooking opens.”
5. 5Leave Collect emails on the page ticked to show the email box. You can change the Button text (“Notify me”) and the line shoppers read after they sign up.
6. 6Press Save in the bar at the bottom of the page.

The block on new orders applies the moment you save. The page itself reaches your home, products and cart pages within a few minutes. Individual product pages are stored for speed and can take up to an hour to switch over. Nobody can order in the meantime either way, because the check happens on our server when an order is priced.

What shoppers see

• One page, on every link. Whether they open your store link, a product link you shared last month, or a link from Google, they land on the opening-soon page. It uses your brand colour and brand font from Settings → Branding, so it looks like your store.
• Your logo or your name. The logo you uploaded under Settings → Branding sits at the top. If you have no logo, your store name is shown instead.
• Your heading and message. Exactly what you typed, or the default wording if you typed nothing.
• The email box. One field and a button. When a shopper leaves their email they see your thank-you line, and the email appears in your Subscribers tab straight away, marked as coming from the closed page.
• Your social links. The links you set under Settings → Navigation & menu → Social links are listed at the bottom, so shoppers can follow you while they wait. If you have none set, that row is simply left out.
• On the free plan, the SitesPlaced badge. The same small badge that sits on every page of a free-plan store sits on this page too.

What is blocked

Every way of placing an order is closed: Direct Order, WhatsApp checkout, Cash on Delivery, bank transfer, online payment through any gateway, 1-click checkout, and orders sent through the API or an AI tool connected to your store. Shoppers cannot reach the cart or a product page at all, and a shopper who still had the cart open in another tab from before you closed gets your message instead of an order when they press the button.

The emails you collect

Every email left on the opening-soon page goes to your Subscribers tab, the same place as emails from a newsletter section or from the email signup strip. From there you can export the whole list as a file, or email everyone on it, so the day you reopen you can tell exactly the people who asked. Emails are checked for a real format before they are saved, and one address is only saved once.

Close the store, or pause ordering?

The two switches sit next to each other in Settings → Checkout and both stop orders. The difference is what shoppers can still see.

• Pause ordering keeps the whole store up — products, prices, pages — and only closes the checkout. Choose it for a holiday or a stock count, when you want shoppers to keep browsing and to come back. It is explained in Pause ordering on your store.
• Close the store hides everything behind one page and collects emails. Choose it when there is nothing to browse — you have sold out, you have not launched, or you are away for long enough that a shop full of things nobody can buy would do more harm than good.
• If both are ticked, the opening-soon page wins, because there is no cart left to show the paused message in.

Reopen your store

Go back to Settings → Checkout, untick Close my store and show an opening-soon page and press Save. Your store comes back exactly as it was: every page, every product, your announcement bar, all of it. The heading and message you wrote are kept, ready for the next time.

Then go to your Subscribers tab and email the people who asked to be told. That list is the whole point of closing the store this way rather than just unpublishing it.