How to Set Up a Checkout Experience
A Checkout Experience adds Intelligems blocks to your Shopify checkout: product upsells, trust signals, promos, and timers that move buyers through the last step instead of losing them there.
Step 1: Create a block
Go to Checkout in Intelligems and click New Checkout Experience.
Choose Test or Personalization
Run it as a Personalization to show it to everyone or to a targeted audience, or as a Test to run variations against each other and see which one earns more. The build is the same either way. See Tests vs. Personalizations for how to pick.
Select the block type you want to create: Upsell, Trust badges, Call out, Static image, Brand logo, Progress bar, Timer or Text only.
Depending on which block type you've chosen, you may need to choose a template.
Step 2: Configure your block
Configuration options vary by block type. See below for Upsells, Content (i.e. Trust badge, Call out, Static image, Brand logo or Text only) and Timers.
Upsells
General
Block Name An internal label for your reference — not visible to customers.
Location ID A unique identifier that connects this block to your Shopify checkout. Each block needs its own ID, unless you want different blocks to show in the same location without adding each ID to Shopify.
Use lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens only.
Examples:
trust-badge-1,warranty-callout,3-product-upsellYou'll need this exact ID when adding the block to Shopify.
Product recommendations
Settings Set whether to exclude out of stock items, whether to exclude products that are in the cart, and the max number of products returned.
Rules Each rule has two parts: a condition (IF) and a result (THEN SHOW). Use the + Add Rule button to add multiple rules. Rules are evaluated in order. Once a rule is met, it will stop moving forward and apply that rule.
IF — targeting type options:
Anything in cart
Rule applies to any cart
Specific products
Cart contains or does not contain a specific product
Products from collection
Cart contains or does not contain a product from a collection
Product with tag
Cart contains or does not contain a product with a specific tag
Cart subtotal
Cart meets a subtotal condition
Cart item count
Cart contains a set number of items
Adding multiple products, collections, or tags to one condition means any single match will trigger the rule. To require more than one condition to be true, use + AND condition. For example, in the below, we would return products that were in either the "Home page" OR "All" collection.
If we wanted to return products that were in both the "Home page" AND "All" collections, we would want to set it up as an + AND condition like the below:
THEN SHOW — targeting type options:
Shopify recommendations
Uses Shopify's recommendation engine (recommended)
Specific products
Show a fixed set of products
Products from collection
Show products from a specific collection
Products with tag
Show products matching a tag
Adding multiple tags to one condition means any single match will trigger the rule. To require more than one condition to be true, use + AND condition. For example, in the below, we would return products that had either the "drinkware" OR "mug" tag.
If we wanted to return products that had both the "drinkware" AND "mug" tag, we would want to set it up as an + AND condition like the below:
Use the cart tester on the right hand side of the screen to test your rules out to confirm the expected products are being returned.
Discount Define a percentage or fixed amount off.
Styling
Heading Appears above your upsells. Leave blank to hide it. Can edit copy, typography, color and appearance.
Product Card Control how each product displays — including image size and cropping, button text, typography for the product name and price, text spacing, and colors for text, background, and buttons.
Body Set the spacing between product cards and between the heading and the cards.
Block Style the container that holds the content of your block.
Background Color: Sets the background color for the entire block.
Border Style: The line style for the block border.
Border Thickness: Width of the border around the entire block.
Corner Radius: How rounded the block corners are
Outer Padding: Controls spacing between the block border and the content inside.
All colors and typography come from your Shopify checkout brand settings. They are not custom color pickers - you're selecting from preset colors defined in your checkout theme. You can't fully customize checkout block colors or typography because the checkout is a secure, locked environment for security and consistency, limiting changes to basic theme settings like accent colors. This is a Shopify limitation.
Step 3: Preview your block
As you make changes, the preview pane on the right updates in real-time to show how your block will appear on checkout:
Review the overall layout and spacing
Check that colors match your brand
Verify text is readable and properly sized
Ensure icons are positioned correctly
Step 4: Add the block to Shopify checkout
This step is required. The block won't appear on your checkout until it's added in Shopify.
Copy the Location ID from Intelligems (shown in the configuration instructions)
In Shopify Admin, go to Settings → Checkout
Under Configurations, click Customize to open the Checkout editor
In the top panel, click Apps
Navigate to Intelligems, click (+), and choose Checkout
Toggle on Include block in Shop Pay (recommended).
Paste your block Location ID into the block settings
Drag the block into the position you want in checkout
Click Save in the top right corner
Important: Each Checkout Personalization needs to be added to your Shopify checkout separately using its unique Block ID. Without this step, the block won't appear on your checkout page.
Once this step is completed, you can preview your Checkout Personalization or Test on your live website by going to the Preview tab → selecting Open Full Screen Preview.
Building this with the Intelligems MCP? This step still has to be done by hand.
Shopify doesn't let apps add blocks to checkout programmatically, so an AI assistant can create and configure your block but can't place it. Someone with Shopify checkout permissions has to complete Step 5.
Until they do, the block will look correctly configured in Intelligems and render nothing at checkout — with no error in either place.
Step 5: Set up targeting if needed
Targeting is an optional step. By default, a visitor will be immediately assigned to your Checkout Personalization or one of the test groups, but you can control who sees your Checkout Expierences using targeting rules. There are a few different ways you can do this:
You can set up currency and country targeting that allows you to limit your Experience to a single currency and/or a list of specific countries.
You can use UTM parameters to customize your user experience under the Audience option.
You can filter traffic based on JavaScript Expressions under the Audience option.
You can filter traffic based on device type (i.e. mobile or desktop) under the Audience option.
You can filter traffic based off of whether a visitor is new or returning under the Audience option.
You can prevent users from being targeted by related experiments to reduce undesired interactions under the Mutually Exclusive Tests option.
When to use targeting for Checkout:
Test blocks with specific customer segments first
Show different messages to different regions
Display country-specific guarantees or policies
Limit to specific marketing campaigns
Show different upsells on different devices
You can learn more about targeting here!
What happens next?
Now that you've created your Checkout Personalization or Test, you can QA using this checklist!
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