My free shipping bar shows the wrong amount

How Volume decides the free shipping threshold, and why editing the theme setting sometimes has no effect.

Volume gets the threshold from two places, and one of them silently overrides the other.

How it decides

First it reads the theme content string cart.free_shipping_minimum, whose default English value is the words free shipping minimum. If that string contains a digit, that number becomes the threshold. Only when it has no digits in it does the theme fall back to Free shipping minimum amount in the theme settings.

So if someone once typed "Free shipping over 50€" into that string, the theme reads 50 from it and ignores the theme setting completely — which is exactly why editing the setting appears to do nothing.

1

Check the theme content string

Go to Online Store → Themes → … → Edit default theme content, search for free shipping minimum, and remove any digits from it if you want the theme setting to be in charge.

2

Set the amount in theme settings

In Theme settings → Cart → Free shipping bar, fill in Free shipping minimum amount. Enter it in your store's main currency as a plain number, without the currency code. This is also where Enable on cart page and Enable on cart drawer live — both are off by default, and they are separate, so the bar can appear in one place and not the other.

3

Edit the two messages

The bar has two more strings in the same theme content screen — one for the customer who has not reached the threshold, one for the customer who has. The first contains a remaining_amount placeholder in double curly braces; keep it, because without it the customer never sees how much is left to spend.

If you use the gift wrapping feature, the gift wrapping product is deliberately subtracted from the cart total before the bar compares it with the threshold. Paying for gift wrap does not bring the customer closer to free shipping — that is intended, not a bug.

Different thresholds per market

Because the threshold can come from a translated string, you can give each language its own number by putting a digit in that string per locale. For per-market amounts the theme setting itself can be adapted with the Translate & Adapt app.

What the theme cannot do is match a shipping rate that differs by country within one language — the bar is a display, not a calculation, and it never reads your actual shipping rates.

The bar never checks whether the customer actually qualifies. If your real free shipping rate applies only to some countries or excludes heavy items, the bar will still promise it. Keep the threshold matched to your Settings → Shipping and delivery rates, and word the message carefully if the offer is regional.