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Widget text and translations

Every piece of copy the widget shows a shopper is yours to edit — nothing is hardcoded in English. Four of the most-used fields live on each campaign’s Widget settings, under the Text tab.

Field Starting text Variables Max length
Countdown — before the sale “Sale starts in {{countdown}}” {{countdown}} 120 characters
Countdown — while running “Hurry — sale ends in {{countdown}}” {{countdown}} 120 characters
Add-to-cart button “Add {{qty}} to cart · {{total}}” {{qty}}, {{total}}, {{price}} 120 characters
“You save” message “You save {{amount}}” {{amount}} 120 characters
Unit label “/item” 30 characters

The two countdown fields only matter once you turn a countdown on, under the campaign’s Countdown card — before-sale replaces the whole widget with a countdown until it starts, while-running shows alongside the level list. The unit label takes no variable; it’s plain text appended straight after the discounted per-item price, for example “$8.99 /item”.

These are starting values, not fixed defaults — change them any time, and every shopper sees your version until you change it again.

Blank is never sent to the storefront as blank. Clear a field in Widget settings and the widget falls back to that field’s own starting text from the table above — a shopper never sees an empty countdown or a button with no label.

If your store publishes only one language in Shopify, there’s nothing to translate — the Translations card says so and stops there. Add a second published language in Shopify’s own language settings, and the same four fields — plus the widget’s title and its cart-page notice text — become translatable, one language at a time, from a language picker at the top of the card.

Leaving a translated field empty does something different from leaving the base field empty: it falls back to your own base text, in whichever language you wrote it in, not the hardcoded English default. So if you’ve already rewritten the add-to-cart button for your primary language, an untranslated second language shows that same wording rather than reverting to English underneath it.

A badge on the Translations card (“{n} of {total} translated”) tracks how many published languages have at least one override, so you can see at a glance what still needs attention.

Cross-link: Custom CSS, Widget layouts.