Here's how Shabbify handles each of those, and which parts you decide.

Where you are

Sunset depends on location, so Shabbify starts with your Shopify store address and time zone. For most stores that's correct as it is.

If your business follows another community's times, set a custom location in the app. A store that ships from New Jersey but is run from Jerusalem can follow Jerusalem's times, or the other way round.

Friday: minutes before sunset

Shabbify closes the store a set number of minutes before sunset on Friday. The default is 18 minutes, the common candle-lighting time. You can set anything from 0 to 120 minutes before, so a community that lights 40 minutes before sunset can close then.

Some stores prefer to stop taking orders at midday on Friday (chatzot, the halachic midday worked out from that day's sunrise and sunset) so nothing is sitting in a queue when Shabbat comes in. That's a one-setting switch: Weekly close mode: Chatzot.

Saturday night: minutes after sunset

The store reopens a set number of minutes after sunset on Saturday. The default is 60 minutes, which lands after nightfall in most places and most seasons. You can set up to 180 minutes after sunset if your practice is later, for example 72 minutes as Rabbeinu Tam.

Yom Tov

Jewish holidays follow the Hebrew calendar, so they land on different Gregorian dates each year. Shabbify generates them for you: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot (first days, Chol Hamoed and Hoshana Rabbah), Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, Pesach (first and last days, Chol Hamoed), Shavuot, plus Purim and Tisha B'Av, which don't close the store by default but are there if you want them.

Two details Shabbify gets right so you don't have to:

• One day or two. Outside Israel most holidays last two days; in Israel, one. Shabbify decides by your store's time zone. A store in Israel gets one-day Yom Tov; everyone else gets two.
• The same minutes as Shabbat. Holidays use the same minutes-before and minutes-after settings, so your Yom Tov closure starts and ends the way your Shabbat closure does. A holiday that runs into Shabbat (or out of it) becomes one continuous closure.

Each holiday can be turned off, given different times, or given its own closed message. You can add your own closures too, for a fast day, a family simcha, or a week away.

Holidays are generated a year at a time and refreshed every quarter. If you change your location or your minutes, you can regenerate them.

What Shabbify doesn't decide

Shabbify follows the settings you choose. It doesn't claim rabbinic endorsement or halachic accuracy, and the defaults are just that, defaults. Please check that the times match your community's practice; the app shows the next closing and reopening time on its Home page so you can compare with your own calendar before the first Shabbat.

Checking the result

Open Shabbify's Home page: it shows whether the store is open or closed right now, the next change and a countdown. The Holidays page lists every upcoming closure with its exact start and end. And if you'd rather ask, Shopify Sidekick can answer "When do we close this Friday?" using the same schedule.

That box is gone. Here's what replaced it.

See what shoppers see, inside the app

The Theme setup page has a new section, Check what shoppers see. It renders your closed store right there in the Shopify admin:

• the text banner, cart warning, contact form, or the whole-store closed screen (when you've chosen to block the entire site);
• with the colours, text and layout from your live theme, so what you see is what you've set up, not a generic sample;
• on desktop or mobile;
• for a Shabbat, Yom Tov or closed-by-hand closure, since the default wording differs;
• in your admin language, including right-to-left Hebrew.

The reopening time and countdown use your real next closure. If none is scheduled yet, you see a sample for the coming Saturday night so the countdown still looks right.

Nothing changes on your store. The preview is a picture of your settings, not a switch.

The page tells you what's missing

Each card on Theme setup now shows its real state in your live theme:

• App embed: on, off, or not added, with a button to turn it on.
• Text banner, contact form, cart warning: added (and where: header, home page, cart page) or not added, with a button to add it or to edit it in the theme editor.

There's a Check again button, and the page re-checks when you come back from the theme editor. The cart warning has its own card now; it didn't have a link before.

In the theme editor: preview without a trap

Every Shabbify block has a Theme editor preview setting with two options: Store closed or Live status. It only affects the theme editor. On your live store, blocks appear only while you're closed, whatever the setting says. There is no longer any way for a preview setting to show a popup to real shoppers.

The text banner previews as closed by default, so you can style it any day. The contact form, cart warning and app embed default to Live status, because a popup that covers the page every time the editor redraws would get in the way of ordinary theme work; switch them to Store closed when you want to see them, or use the preview in the app.

Two fixes that came out of this

While building the preview we found two bugs in the cart warning: its colour settings in the theme editor were never applied to the popup, and the popup could fail to open at all. Both are fixed in the same release.

Where to find it

Shopify admin → Apps → Shabbify → Theme setup. If a block's preview looks different from what you see on your store during a closure, email shabbify@strongerecommerce.com with a screenshot of each; that's a bug and we want to know.

The easy way is in the theme: hide the add-to-cart button, grey out "Check out", put a banner across the page. It works for a shopper who loads your home page in a normal browser. It does nothing for a shopper who already has /checkout open in another tab, who reaches checkout through a link in an abandoned-cart email, who buys through a sales channel that doesn't use your theme, or whose browser has the app's script blocked. Shopify's checkout is its own system; your theme never sees it.

The right way is to tell Shopify itself not to accept the order.

What a checkout rule is

Shopify lets apps install checkout rules (built with Shopify Functions) that run inside Shopify's checkout every time a shopper tries to pay. A rule can say "this order isn't allowed" and give a reason. Shopify then refuses to continue and shows the shopper the message. There's no page for a shopper to bypass, because the check happens on Shopify's servers.

Shabbify ships one such rule, Shabbify – Close checkout. While your store is closed, every checkout attempt gets your closed message and the reopening time instead of a payment form. While the store is open, the rule does nothing.

The rule needs to be active in your store's checkout settings. Shabbify turns it on when you install the app, shows its real state in the app, and gives you a one-click button if it's ever off.

The blocking options, and what each one really does

Shabbify lets you combine four kinds of blocking. Here's what each one is, so you can choose on purpose:

The theme options are about what shoppers see. The checkout rule is about what Shopify allows. We recommend Block checkout for every store, with the theme options on top for the shopper experience you want. If you only pick a theme option, the app's Home page says so clearly, because that's a store that can still take orders.

What shoppers see at checkout

A shopper who reaches checkout during a closure doesn't get a blank error. Shabbify adds a banner at checkout with your message, the time you reopen, and a countdown, in the shopper's language where Shopify provides it. The same placeholders work as in your theme banner: [[opentime]] for the reopening time and [[countdown]] for the live countdown.

Keeping the sale

Blocking a sale isn't the same as losing it. Shoppers who visit while you're closed can leave their phone number in Shabbify's contact form or cart warning, and when you reopen, Shabbify triggers your Klaviyo flow to text them. The theme banner and the full-page closed screen both show exactly when you'll be back, which is what most shoppers want to know.

Checking it works

Ask Shopify Sidekick: "Why can customers still check out?" Shabbify runs through every condition (app on, store closed, rule active, blocking includes checkout) and reports the first one that fails, with a link to fix it. Or open the app's Home page, where the checkout rule's state is shown next to your blocking options.

Both are fine now.

Turning the emails off

Two ways:

1. In the app. Settings → Email me when my store closes and reopens. Untick it and save.
2. From any status email. Each one has a Stop these emails link in the footer. It opens a page with a single button; press it and the emails stop. Nothing changes until you press the button, so a mail scanner that opens links on your behalf can't switch your emails off by accident. Mail apps that support one-click unsubscribe (the list-unsubscribe standard) show their own "Unsubscribe" control, and that works too.

Turning emails off doesn't affect anything else. The store still closes and reopens on schedule.

The activity log keeps the record

Whether or not you get the emails, every automatic close and reopen is written to the activity log in the app, with the reason: Closed for Shabbat, Closed for Yom Kippur, Reopened. Manual closes and reopenings are logged separately, so you can always tell a scheduled closure from one you did by hand.

If you'd rather ask than look, Sidekick can read the same log: "What did Shabbify do this week?"

One email you'll never get

A brand-new install has no previous status, so the first time Shabbify works out whether your store is open or closed, it doesn't email you about it. The first email you get is for the first real change.

Emails are in your language

Like the rest of the app, status emails come in English, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese and German, following your Shopify admin language. The unsubscribe page is translated too.

Now it checks.

The setup guide verifies itself

With the read_themes permission (which Shopify asks you to approve when you next open the app), Shabbify reads your published theme's settings and templates and reports:

• whether the Shabbify app embed is on, off, or has never been turned on;
• whether a Shabbify block (text banner, contact form or cart warning) is placed in the theme.

The "Turn on the app embed", "Show shoppers you're closed" and "Check your store" steps tick themselves off when the check passes. If you open the theme editor from the app and come back, the guide re-checks on its own. There's also a Check again button.

If the embed is off while Shabbify is switched on, the Home page says so with a warning, because that's the one state where you'd expect the store to close and it quietly wouldn't.

If you haven't approved the new permission yet, the app falls back to a lighter check that needs no permission at all, and tells you when it couldn't be sure.

The checkout rule turns on by itself

Blocking checkout properly means Shopify itself refuses the order, not just a button being hidden on the page. That takes a checkout rule in your Shopify settings. Previously you had to add it by hand, in six steps.

Now Shabbify creates and activates the rule for you when it's installed, and if it's ever missing or disabled, the app shows a one-click Turn on checkout blocking button. The setup step for the rule is driven by its real state in Shopify: ticking it by hand can't hide a rule that's off. When cart or checkout blocking is configured but the rule is off, the message is blunt: Checkout is NOT blocked during Shabbat.

An activity log you can read

The activity log was a list of technical strings. It's now a timeline grouped by day, with filter tabs for closures, settings, messages and problems, and a summary strip showing the last time the store was closed or reopened by hand and how many problems there were in the last 30 days.

Routine entries, like the daily refresh of Shabbat times, are folded away by default so the things you care about stand out: Closed for Shabbat, Reopened, Settings saved, Holidays generated for 2027.

Set up by us, if you prefer

Not everyone wants to go through the theme editor. The setup guide now has a Request managed setup form. Tell us how to reach you and in which language, and the Stronger eCommerce team sets Shabbify up on your store. You get a confirmation email, and the request is logged in your activity log.

Why this matters

A store that looks set up but isn't will sell on Shabbat, and you won't find out until Sunday. Everything above exists so that the app tells you before Friday, instead of you finding out after.

What you can ask

Shabbify gives Sidekick six read-only tools. In practice that means these questions get real answers, from your store's own settings and schedule:

Times come back already formatted in your store's time zone, so "we close Friday at 4:12 PM" means exactly that.

What Sidekick can't do with Shabbify

Sidekick can read your Shabbify settings but not change them. That's a deliberate choice on both sides: Shopify asks app data tools to stay read-only, and we don't want a chat message closing a store by mistake. If you ask Sidekick to change something, it points you to the right Shabbify page and you make the change there.

Privacy

Each request carries the signed Shopify identity of the staff member asking, and the app answers only for that store. Nothing about your store is shared with other apps, and the answers never include your Klaviyo keys or other secrets.

Getting it

There's nothing to set up. If Sidekick is available on your store and Shabbify is installed, the tools are already there. Open Sidekick from the top bar of the Shopify admin and ask away.

If a question about Shabbify isn't answered well, email us at shabbify@strongerecommerce.com with what you asked. The tool descriptions are what Sidekick uses to decide when to call Shabbify, and real questions help us tune them.