Authors & ratings

These are the two fields that make a book listing readable, and the two that a general-purpose theme leaves you to improvise.

The author

The theme shows Shopify's product Vendor field as the author:

  • under the title on every product card
  • under the title on the product page
  • as a second line in predictive search results

Nothing needs configuring. Fill in Vendor and it appears.

Turning it off

Theme settings → Product cards → Show vendor. The product page keeps its own author line, which is part of the vendor block — remove that block in the editor if you do not want it there either.

If Vendor is already in use

Some shops use Vendor for a publisher or distributor. Two workable options:

  1. Give Vendor to the author and move the publisher into a metafield, shown through a text block on the product page. Search matches Vendor, so this is the option that makes authors searchable.
  2. Leave Vendor as the publisher and turn Show vendor off, putting the author in the title (Saltwater Almanac — Marin Okonkwo). Simpler, but search then matches only the title string.

There is no third option where both are searchable, because Shopify's predictive search indexes title, vendor, type and tags — not arbitrary metafields.

Star ratings

Ratings read two standard metafields:

reviews.rating         (type: rating)
reviews.rating_count   (type: integer)

These are the metafields Shopify's own Product Reviews app defined, and the convention nearly every third-party review app follows. If your app writes them, the stars appear.

A product with no rating renders no stars at all — not an empty five. So you can install the theme before you have a single review without anything looking broken.

The star colour

Theme settings → Product cards → Star colour, defaulting to #f5a623.

This exists because the shared stylesheet behind this theme originally drew stars in the body text colour, which is correct for a furniture catalogue and wrong for a bookshop, where the rating is a thing people scan for. Setting it to your accent colour also works.

Turning ratings off

Theme settings → Product cards → Show rating. The product page rating is a separate block; remove it in the editor.

What the theme does not do

It does not collect or store reviews. It reads a metafield and draws stars. Use any review app you like — the theme has no opinion about which, and no integration to break when you switch.