Folding sections

A product with four option sets and six fields is a long page. Everything on it is necessary, and all of it at once is still a wall. Shoppers scroll past the thing you wanted them to notice, and on a phone they may never reach the bottom.

Folding sections give that page a shape. Each group becomes a heading the shopper opens when they get to it, so the page reads as a handful of steps rather than one continuous form.

This is a Pro feature, and it is a display choice only. Nothing about what you ask, what it costs or what reaches the order changes.

Turning it on

Groups come first: folding applies to groups, so a product with everything in one flat list has nothing to fold. Gather related questions into groups in the Product Options panel, then set the product’s layout to Folding sections.

Without Pro, or with the layout left alone, the same groups render as plain stacked sections with their headings shown. Every configuration still renders and still charges correctly; it is simply laid out in full.

What the shopper sees

Each group is a heading they can open and close. The heading carries a short echo of the state inside it, so a closed section is not a mystery: it shows what has been chosen, or Choose when the section is still waiting, or None where nothing applies.

That echo is what makes folding safe. A shopper scanning a page of closed headings can tell at a glance which ones they have dealt with and which still want them, without opening each one to find out.

A required section never hides

If a group holds something the shopper has to answer, it is never folded away. Hiding a required question behind a closed heading is how an order gets abandoned at the Add to cart button with no visible reason, so the plugin refuses to do it. You do not have to remember which groups those are.

When to use it

Folding earns its place on a product with genuinely distinct stages: the garment, then the print, then the delivery details. Each is a decision the shopper makes once and moves past.

It earns less on a product with three questions, where folding adds a click to something that already fitted on the screen. And it fights with a page whose choices depend on each other, where a shopper wants two sections open at once to compare. Judge it per product; the setting is per product for exactly that reason.

With conditional options

Folding and conditional options work together, and the order is: a rule decides whether a question applies at all, then the layout decides how what remains is presented.

A group whose contents are all hidden by rules collapses to nothing rather than leaving an empty heading to open.

If Pro lapses

The layout choice stays stored. The product falls back to the plain stacked sections, which is a longer page but a complete and correct one: every group, every question, every price, exactly as configured. Restore the plan and the folding returns without you setting it again.