The drawer is the funnel, compressed
Every other page on your store has a job and an exit. The cart drawer has one job and no exits other than checkout or close. That is what makes it the cleanest experiment surface on Shopify. You can change one element, ship to half of traffic, and read the result in 72 hours.
Most stores treat the drawer as a confirmation screen. It is not. It is a sales surface. Treat every pixel like it has to earn its place, because it does.
Header: brand chip, close affordance, nothing else
The header is where teams over-design. We have seen drawers with three icons, a search bar, a continue-shopping button, and a wishlist link, all competing for attention in 56 pixels of height. None of them help the customer check out.
Keep two elements. The brand mark, and the close affordance. Anything else is a distraction. If you need search, the customer can hit the close button. They know how doors work.
Line items: image, title, price, qty, remove
The line item is the most-tested element in ecommerce, and the consensus is boring. Image on the left at 64 pixels. Title and variant on the top right, two lines max. Price on the right edge, bold. Quantity and remove below, smaller.
Resist the urge to add subscription toggles, gift wrap checkboxes, or estimated delivery dates to this row. Each of those adds cognitive load and lifts cart abandonment more than it lifts attach rate.
Order bump: the highest-converting upsell on the page
If you are going to add one merchandising element to the drawer, make it the order bump. A single recommended product, priced at 15 to 30 percent of cart subtotal, with a single-tap add. We see 18 to 35 percent attach rates on this surface, against single-digit attach rates on PDP upsells.
The reason it works is intent. The customer has already decided to buy. They are not shopping anymore. The order bump turns a one-line decision into a two-line decision, and most customers say yes to the smaller second decision because they have already made the larger first one.
Footer: subtotal, checkout, nothing else
The checkout button is the only button. Make it the full width of the drawer, 56 pixels tall, with the subtotal next to or above it. Do not put PayPal, Shop Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay all in the drawer. Those belong at checkout, where they earn their place.
Stacking express checkout options in the drawer turns one decision into five. Customers hesitate, and a small percentage of that hesitation converts to close. We have measured the loss. It is not small.