Turning the gate on and off

The one checkbox that puts the gate in front of your store, and the fact that, on Standard, checkout follows it.

The Home tab has a card called Age Gate Status with a checkbox labeled Show the age gate to visitors. That is the switch.

• Ticked — visitors are asked before they can use your store, and on the Standard plan a cart that has not answered cannot complete an order.
• Unticked — your storefront behaves as if the app were not installed, and checkout takes every order.

The change takes effect immediately. There is no save button and no delay.

It starts ticked. A fresh install has the box already on, so the gate goes up as soon as a design is published and the theme app embed is saved. To get everything ready before that, see Setting it up in advance, below.

Checkout follows the checkbox

This applies on the Standard plan, the one with a checkout rule, and it is the part worth reading twice, because in most age-gate apps there is nothing like it. On Free the checkbox controls the gate alone.

Ticking the box arms two things: the gate on your storefront, and the rule at checkout that blocks an unverified cart. Unticking it stands both down.

That pairing is deliberate. If the checkout rule outlived the gate, a merchant who switched the gate off would leave every shopper who had not already answered stuck at checkout, with no gate left to clear it — a store that silently stops taking orders. And if the rule lagged behind the gate going on, the gate would be decoration until something happened to arm it.

One switch, both halvesOn Standard there is deliberately no second switch for "show the gate but don't enforce it", or the reverse. Two switches is how the two halves drift apart. If you need one of those, tell us why — [email protected].

Switching it off

Untick the box. Nothing is deleted: your designs, colors, age rules, and allowlist all stay exactly as they were, so putting the gate back is one tick rather than a rebuild.

Visitors who had already answered keep their passes. Switching back on does not re-ask them.

Off means ungatedWhile it is off, your age-restricted products are browsable and buyable by anybody. That is the correct behavior for a switch labeled this way, and it is worth saying out loud because it is the one difference between this app and its siblings that matters: turning off a maintenance page opens a store that was closed; turning off an age gate opens a store that was gated.

What the toggle does not do

• It does not cancel your subscription. If you are on Standard you are still billed while the app is installed. To stop being charged, either move to the Free plan or uninstall.
• It does not unpublish your design. It stays published, ready for the next time you tick the box. While the box is unticked, a visit to /apps/age-verification on your own domain is sent on to your storefront — use Preview Live to look at your gate then.
• It does not affect the app embed. The embed stays enabled in your theme, ready for the next time you tick the box.
• It does not reset anybody’s pass. That is a separate, one-way action — see Resetting verification passes.
• It does not override Shopify’s own password page. If that is on, nobody reaches your storefront at all and neither the gate nor your store is visible.

The status card

Above the checkbox, the Home tab shows whether a design is published and which one. Active there means a design is published, not that visitors are seeing it — the checkbox decides that. Preview Live opens your published gate in a new window, as a visitor would see it, whether or not the box is ticked.

Setting it up in advance

Every setup step works with the checkbox off — but it starts ticked, so untick it before you publish a design or save the theme app embed. With it unticked, your ages, your design, the publish, and the theme app embed all sit dormant while your storefront behaves normally. Leaving the app embed off until you are ready does the same job.

That is useful if you are adding age-restricted stock to an existing store and want everything ready before the range goes live. It is less useful than it sounds if the products are already up — in that case the checkbox is the only thing standing between your catalog and everybody, and the sooner it is ticked the better.

Still stuck?

Email [email protected] with your store's .myshopify.com domain and what you were trying to do. Most replies go out within one business day; over a weekend it can take longer.