We serve your gate, so in the rare event we cannot be reached it cannot be shown. The Settings card headed In the unlikely event we’re unreachable is where you decide what shoppers see in the meantime.
The defaults are the right answer for nearly every store, which is why the controls sit behind a Change what shoppers see disclosure rather than in front of you during setup.
What is not affected
Before the choice, the part that makes it a small one.
Your checkout rule keeps working. It runs on Shopify’s servers and reads two values from Shopify’s own input — it never calls us, so it cannot be affected by us being down.
Nobody can earn a new pass while we are down, because the pass comes from us.
Put together: no order goes through either way. An outage cannot let an unverified cart complete an order, whichever option you pick. The only thing at stake is what a shopper sees while it lasts.
The choice
Let shoppers browse if we’re unreachable — a checkbox, off by default.
| Off (default) | On | |
|---|---|---|
| What a shopper sees | Your message, over a covered store | Your storefront, ungated |
| Can they browse your products | No | Yes |
| Can they complete an order | No | No |
Off is fail-closed: showing age-restricted product to somebody who has answered nothing is the worse failure, so opting out of it is a deliberate act.
On suits a store whose catalog is not itself the sensitive part — a general store with one age-restricted category, say, where blanking the whole site over an outage costs more than it protects. Nobody can buy anything either way.
What to tell them
What to tell them is a text field, up to 300 characters. It is shown only when the gate cannot load and browsing is off. Leave it blank to use ours:
We can’t verify your age just now. Please try again in a few minutes.
Worth replacing with something in your own voice. It is rendered by your theme rather than by us, which is what makes it available at exactly the moment we are not — so write it now, because by definition you will not be able to edit it while it is showing.
The other message, which is not this one
There are two “something went wrong” strings and they are easy to confuse:
- What to tell them, here in Settings, is shown when the gate itself cannot load. Your theme writes it.
- If the check can’t run, in the gate editor, is shown when the gate has loaded but cannot complete the check. The gate stays up and the visitor can retry.
Both fail closed. Nobody is let through by either, and nobody is refused for either.
How long it waits
The storefront gives the gate a few seconds to answer before deciding it is unreachable — long enough that a slow phone on a bad connection is not told the store is broken, short enough that nobody stares at an empty frame wondering.