Store Details and Features
The settings that affect everything else, and the switches that hide features you do have.
Settings, General, Store Details is the first screen worth getting right, because several other things read from it.
Store Details
Name appears in emails, on invoices, in the browser tab and in search results.
Address appears on invoices and is what carriers quote shipping distance from. An approximate address gives approximate prices to every customer, and a missing one can mean no rates at all.
Contact email is where shop notifications go, and often what customers reply to.
Phone appears on invoices and on your contact page.
Timezone decides what day an order is recorded on, what a report's date range means, and when scheduled publishing happens.
The timezone is not cosmetic
A shop set to the wrong one records orders on the wrong day in its own reports, and a month-end figure will not match what the shop owner counted. Set it before you take your first order rather than after.
Currency is what prices are stored and displayed in. Changing it later does not convert your prices, it relabels them, which is rarely what anybody wants.
Store Features
Settings, Store Features switches parts of the shop on and off: reviews, wishlists, product questions, comparison, gift cards, registries, recently viewed and others.
Switching one off hides it from the storefront and from your admin menu.
Social Sharing has a second step: with it on, you pick which buttons the product page shows from Facebook, Bluesky, X, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Email, Copy Link and the share sheet. A shop that never chooses keeps the five it started with.
Instagram cannot be one of the buttons
Instagram has no sharing link, and their terms do not allow a third party button, so no website can post to it on a visitor's behalf. The share sheet button is the way there: on a phone it opens the device's own share menu, which lists Instagram along with whatever else is installed. It hides itself on browsers that do not support it.
A missing menu item is usually a switch, not a fault
When something described in this documentation is not in your admin, check here first, then your plan. Those two account for nearly every case.
Turn off what you are not using. A wishlist nobody uses is a link on every product page doing nothing, and an empty reviews section on a new shop looks worse than no reviews section.
Cart and Checkout Settings
Settings, Cart controls how the basket and checkout behave: whether guests can check out, whether a minimum order applies, what the basket does when stock runs out, and whether gift cards can be bought.
Guest checkout is worth leaving on. Requiring an account before paying is one of the most reliable ways to lose an order.
Notifications
Settings, Notifications has a switch per email and the address low stock alerts go to.
Every switch here is honoured, so turning one off genuinely stops that mail. Check them before launch rather than discovering a confirmation email was off after a week of orders.
What to Set Before You Open
Store details including the address and timezone. The sender address under Settings, Email. Which features you want. And the notification switches.
Everything else can wait until a reason appears.