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# Taking design control of Shopify Policies
- URL: https://tomblanchard.co.uk/taking-design-control-of-shopify-policies/
- Published: 2021-04-14T14:03:20.000Z
- Updated: 2021-04-14T14:03:20.000Z
- Author: Tom Blanchard
- Tags: #Import 2026-10-26 21:01

[Shopify Policies](https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/checkout-settings/refund-privacy-tos?ref=tomblanchard.co.uk) are a fairly new feature within Shopify - they're simple, text-based pages which live under the path "shop.com/policies/". At this this time of writing, there's five Policies you can choose to use:

- Refund policy - shop.com/policies/refund-policy
- Privacy policy - shop.com/policies/privacy-policy
- Terms of service - shop.com/policies/terms-of-service
- Shipping policy - shop.com/policies/shipping-policy
- Subscription policy - shop.com/policies/subscription-policy

They're setup via Shopify Admin -> Settings -> Legal:

![](https://tomblanchard.co.uk/content/images/2021/04/image-1.png)

By default, a Policy looks something like this on the front-end:

![](https://tomblanchard.co.uk/content/images/2021/04/image-2.png)

It doesn't look terrible, but I recently worked on a project where the designer wanted these pages to be more interesting with a different layout, images and other varied content. Shopify doesn't give you much creative freedom with Policies, all you have access to is a rich text editor for the content and you can use the theme CSS file to style the Policy pages - there's only so far you can go with this.

My first thought was to just stop using Policies to display this content and revert to using Pages, this way I can create a custom page template for each policy and make use of Sections as the content-input mechanism to code the page however I please. It turns out this isn't feasible if the store uses the Google channel because the Google Merchant Centre requirements state that you *must* use actual Policies and not regular Pages for this content.

With some Liquid trickery in the store theme, I was able to achieve the best of both worlds with keeping the Policy URL structure the same while using a custom template to code up each Policy page to look however I please, with theme Sections as the content-input mechanism.

It all starts within theme file "/layout/theme.liquid", look for this line:

```Liquid
{{ content_for_layout }}
```

To render a custom Section for the Refund Policy instead of the default Policy content, I changed it to this:

```Liquid
{% if request.path == '/policies/refund-policy' %}
  {% section 'refund-policy' %}
{% else %}
  {{ content_for_layout }}
{% endif %}
```

With this in place, I'm able to format the "refund-policy" Section however I please and ended up with this design:

![](https://tomblanchard.co.uk/content/images/2021/04/image-3.png)

Notice how the URL path is still "/policies/refund-policy" and the page content is structured via a custom design.

If you want to add other custom Sections to other Policies, tweak the above code to something like this:

```
{% if request.path == '/policies/refund-policy' %}
  {% section 'refund-policy' %}
{% elsif request.path contains '/policies/privacy-policy' %}
  {% section 'privacy-policy' %}
{% elsif request.path contains '/policies/terms-of-service' %}
  {% section 'terms-of-service' %}
{% elsif request.path contains '/policies/shipping-policy' %}
  {% section 'shipping-policy' %}
{% elsif request.path contains '/policies/subscription-policy' %}
  {% section 'subscription-policy' %}
{% else %}
  {{ content_for_layout }}
{% endif %}
```

This will render a custom Section for every Policy setup in the store.

This seems like a convoluted solution but I don't think there's any other way to achieve this for now - as always, it's all fun and games with Shopify development!