Widget behavior

Alignment, tooltips, showing the selected value, and limiting the widget's height.

Four settings in Settings > Settings > General > Widget Settings control how the widget behaves rather than how it looks. All of them are store-wide.

Alignment

Tab	General > Widget Settings
Default	Left

Choice	Behavior
Left	Left-aligned. Correct for left-to-right languages
Center	Centered, in either reading direction
Right	Right-aligned without changing reading direction
Right to left	Full right-to-left layout, for Arabic and Hebrew storefronts

Right to left changes the layout of the entire widget, not just the text alignment. See Right-to-left and non-Latin text.

Show tooltip when hovering over options

Default	On

Displays the option value's name when a customer hovers over a swatch. Without it, swatch names are not shown anywhere.

Keep this on. In a grid of color swatches, the tooltip is the only way a customer can see what each color is called.

Image swatch can also display a zoomed image in its tooltip, set per option. See Tooltip style.

Touch devices do not have a hover state. Put anything a mobile customer needs to know in per-value help text rather than in a tooltip. See Working with option values.

Display selected value next to label

Default	On

Displays the selected value beside the option's label, for example Color: Sage rather than just Color.

Keep this on, particularly for swatches. It confirms the selection in words rather than only by highlighting a swatch, so customers can check their choices before adding to cart.

Limit widget height

Default	Off

Turning it on displays Fixed height, a value in pixels. The widget is limited to that height and scrolls inside it.

Use it when	Avoid it when
A very long option set pushes Add to cart far down the page	The widget is a reasonable length already
Your theme's layout needs a predictable height	You have not tried Sections and conditional logic first

A scrollbar inside a page that also scrolls is confusing, and customers miss options inside it, particularly on a phone.

Try these first: group options into collapsible Sections, display options only when they are relevant using conditional logic, use collapsible layouts or sliders for long value lists, and set column widths so short fields share a row.

All four make the form shorter. A height limit only hides part of it.

Four behavior settings, all store-wide.

Two related settings

These two are in the same section:

Setting	What it does
Auto-scroll to first error message	Under Product page. On by default. Scrolls the page to the first problem when add to cart is blocked. Keep it on — without it a customer sees nothing happen
File preview	Under Product page. Whether an uploaded image shows as a thumbnail or a link. See File upload

Notes

• All four settings are store-wide and apply to every option set.

• Alignment cannot be set per language. If you sell in both left-to-right and right-to-left languages, use custom CSS.

• These are behavior settings. Appearance settings are in Design. See Colors and Borders and typography.