Shipping, returns and taxes, written once and shown on every listing.
Your shop policies are the four things a buyer wants settled before they pay: how you send a parcel, whether it can come back, whether the order can be called off, and who pays the duty if it crosses a border.
Nothing is written on your behalf. Artmire does not supply a default policy, and a section you leave empty is not shown at all — no heading, no placeholder. What a buyer reads is what you wrote, or nothing.
All four are required, and the reason is worth knowing: a buyer who reads three sections and finds Returns missing cannot tell whether you refuse returns or simply never wrote it down. An empty policy is not a neutral silence — it reads as something to worry about.
There are no templates and no examples to paste, on purpose. A borrowed policy that says you dispatch in three days when you dispatch in three weeks is worse than no policy at all, and it is your terms a buyer is agreeing to.
Write them the way you would answer the question if a buyer asked it in a message — plainly, in whole sentences, and with the real numbers. Short is good: these are read inside a small expandable panel, not on a page of their own.
The editor gives you headings, bold, lists, colour and links. Lists earn their keep here; most of the rest does not.
There is a fifth section in that panel, Payment, which is ours and always first. It tells buyers the payment is secured and shows the cards accepted. You do not write it and cannot change it.
You write them once and they appear on everything you sell. There is no per-item version, and no way to give one listing different terms.
An edit takes effect everywhere the moment you save — on every listing you already have, and on items already sitting in someone's cart. Nothing is frozen onto an order at the time it was placed, so a change is not a going-forward change. If your terms are about to change materially, it is worth saying so in the policy itself.
Each box shows a counter and stops you at 5,000. That figure counts the formatting as well as the words — every bit of bold, colour and every link takes up room.
This matters most when you paste. Text copied out of Word, Google Docs or a web page brings a large amount of invisible formatting with it, so a policy of a few hundred words can arrive over the limit. Paste it as plain text, or paste it and then use the editor's clear formatting button before you tidy it up by hand.
If a box looks like it has something in it but the counter reads 0/5000, it is genuinely empty — an editor that has been typed in and emptied again leaves an invisible mark that looks like content. That is why you can get "is required" for a box that does not look blank.
This is the one place your writing is shown exactly as you typed it. Your About text has a Translate this description button for buyers reading in another language; your policies do not. Only the four headings are translated.
So a buyer reading Artmire in French sees your Italian returns policy in Italian. If you sell abroad, that is worth deciding about: either write them in the language most of your buyers read, or keep the sentences short and plain enough to survive being run through a translator by the reader.
One Save Changes button covers all four. It stays greyed out until something is different, and anything missing or too long is listed together in one notice rather than field by field.
Nothing warns you if you leave the page with unsaved work. Closing the tab, pressing Back, or clicking another entry in the seller menu discards all four boxes silently. Save before you navigate away.
A shop cannot be published until all four say something. Once they do, the Shop Details page tells you your shop is ready; while any is missing, the same page names the ones outstanding and links back here.
And if your shop is already published, a missing policy blocks every other save on Shop Details until it is written — which is the same rule from the other direction.