Shelf rack

One section serving three dead ends, because the rule on this site is that no dead end is silent. It renders a short ruled list of hand-picked instruments, each row carrying a thumbnail, its tuning descriptor, a true recording length, a price and a play button, so "there is nothing here" is answered with something to hear rather than with an apology. Reach for it on the 404, the empty cart and the zero-results search, which are the only three templates it is enabled on. render_when decides which of those states it belongs to, and it suppresses on the positive state rather than requiring the negative one, so the section stays visible in the theme editor where a merchant can actually configure it.

Section settings

• Show this section. Always · Only when the cart is empty · Only when a search returns nothing, default Always. Lets one section serve the 404, the empty cart and zero results.
• Eyebrow. Small uppercase label above the heading.
• Heading. Default “Still on the shelf”.
• Intro. Free text, empty by default.
• Button label. Free text, empty by default.
• Button link. A link.
• Color scheme. Colour scheme.
• Top padding. 0–160px in steps of 4, default 56px.
• Bottom padding. 0–160px in steps of 4, default 56px.

Blocks

Up to 8 blocks.

• Instrument. 1 setting.

Example use cases

The 404. 404.json still-here: render_when: always, eyebrow "On the bench right now", heading "Still on the shelf", an intro that states the count and the rule ("Six instruments that have not sold. Each one plays its own recording."), six blocks running the ladder from handpan-d-minor-0418 to spinning-singer, CTA "Browse by scale", scheme-2, 56/24. A six-tile collection-list of the scales follows it, so a wrong URL gets a listen and then a route.

The empty cart. cart.json listen-while: render_when: cart_empty, heading "Eighteen dollars to two thousand eight hundred", four blocks picked one per price decade (spinning-singer, kalimba-17-walnut, bowl-hammered-24, handpan-d-kurd-0412) so the ladder is legible in four rows. It disappears the moment a line item exists, and the featured-collection bench shelf below it does not.

Zero results. search.json nothing-filed: render_when: search_zero, heading "We do not make one of those", four handpans in four different scales so a shopper can compare back to back on the page that just failed them, CTA "Browse every scale".

Notes

• It has no preset, so the editor cannot put it back. enabled_on is 404, cart and search, and the schema carries no presets entry, which keeps it out of the theme editor's Add section list. Delete it from a template and the only route back is the template JSON. Worth knowing before a merchant tidies a page.
• render_when is an exclusion, and that is deliberate. cart_empty hides only when cart.item_count > 0; search_zero hides only when search.performed and search.results_count > 0. On any surface where the state cannot be evaluated, it renders. An inclusion test would make the section invisible in the theme editor, which shows an empty cart and performs no search, and a section a merchant cannot see is a section a merchant cannot fix.
• The row is not written here. Each row is snippets/record-row.liquid, shared with the search overlay's zero-query state, so the play control, the duration bar and the heading level cannot drift between the two surfaces. A product with no custom.recording renders as a row without a play button rather than as a dead control.
• The length bar is a real length, and there is no waveform. It comes from recording.duration, written into a --dur custom property. The theme holds no per-file amplitude data, so a drawn waveform would be decorative fiction presented as measurement, which is the same violation the Chladni ornament caption exists to prevent.
• Audio. Nothing autoplays. Each row is the shared player's card variant, one recording at a time store-wide. This is one of the few places a visitor hears the shop without having armed the strike line, because the row buttons work on their own.
• Count your rows against your copy. The intro is a plain text setting, not a computed count. The 404's says "Six instruments" and carries six blocks. Add a seventh and the sentence is quietly wrong.
• Between three and six rows. The cap is 8. Under three it stops reading as a shelf and a featured-collection would do the job with less ceremony. Over six it starts competing with the page it is apologising for, and on the search template it pushes the query field off a phone screen.
• A block with no product is skipped in silence. No placeholder, no gap, no editor warning. Convenient, but a mis-set block looks exactly like a shorter list.
• Leave it off any page whose primary content is present. This is an answer to absence; on a populated page it is only another product row.