Shopify Checkout: The New Way to Easily Customize Your Shopify Checkout Experience

For years, Shopify has empowered merchants worldwide with a checkout system renowned for its reliability and exceptional conversion rates. Shopify Checkout has redefined the standard for speed and simplicity, offering a seamless experience. With Shop Pay, the process becomes even more efficient, delivering purchases four times faster and boosting conversion rates by 11% compared to competitors.

However, despite its performance, customizing Shopify Checkout was a cumbersome task for hired Shopify developers and Shopify development service providers. Brands and Shopify Partners often found it challenging to tailor the checkout to specific business needs—until now.

The Traditional Challenges of Customizing Shopify Checkout

Shopify Checkout, optimized over 16 years, comes equipped with built-in features like express checkouts, local payment options, and tipping settings, making it a powerful tool out of the box. Yet, as businesses grow, the need for advanced customizations arises for Shopify development service providers to add more functionalities, and boost the performance—whether to enhance order value or meet regulatory requirements.

Previously, Shopify Plus brands could request access to the checkout.liquid file for deeper customization. However, this process involved complex coding, required skilled developers, and often led to inconsistent buyer experiences or performance issues. Moreover, regular updates were necessary to maintain compatibility with new features, adding further complexity and cost.

The Modern Approach to Shopify Checkout Customization

To address these limitations, Shopify introduced a new, innovative solution designed to simplify the customization process. Instead of editing code, brands can now leverage apps and branding tools to personalize their checkout which simplifies the work of Shopify development service providers.

With Checkout Extensibility, Shopify Plus merchants can easily make app-based customizations that are upgrade-safe, high-performing, and seamlessly integrated with Shop Pay. This new suite of tools enables no-code adjustments while offering developers powerful APIs and components to create tailored experiences.

This evolution allows brands to adapt their checkout processes efficiently, ensuring a perfect balance of functionality, flexibility, and performance—all while maintaining Shopify’s adherence to reliability and conversion excellence.

Explore the Features Included with Checkout Extensibility in Shopify

1. Checkout Editor

With the checkout editor, you can effortlessly personalize your checkout experience to reflect your brand identity. Modify your logo, font styles, colors, and background with ease. Additionally, the new drag-and-drop interface allows you to enhance functionality by integrating apps without any coding knowledge, making customization accessible for all store owners.

2. Checkout Apps

Enhance your checkout by adding advanced features such as UI extensions, custom logic, post-purchase pages, and pixel tracking. With these apps, you can implement new functionalities seamlessly, all without the need to write code, ensuring a smooth and efficient checkout process tailored to your business needs.

3. Customer Events

Manage your pixel tracking across your online store and checkout securely and conveniently from a single dashboard. This streamlined feature allows you to track customer actions more effectively, helping you make data-driven decisions while maintaining the security and integrity of your store.

4. Checkout Branding API

With the Checkout Branding API, Shopify development service providers and merchants can go beyond basic customization and fully transform the checkout experience for their customers. Match it to the design of your online store by customizing the layout, visuals, and overall style, creating a cohesive and memorable shopping experience for your customers.

5. Components for Custom Apps

Develop fully personalized checkout customizations by building custom apps with Shopify’s robust tools, such as Functions, checkout UI extensions, web pixel app extensions, and post-purchase extensions. These components provide the flexibility to create unique features that cater specifically to your business and customers.

Explore the Benefits of Upgrading to Checkout Extensibility

1. Accelerated Speed and Higher Conversion Rates

Checkout Extensibility leverages cutting-edge platform technology to deliver faster and smoother checkout experiences. Interactions and page transitions are now twice as fast, reducing customer wait times and creating a seamless flow that encourages completion. On average, merchants see over a 1% increase in conversion rates, turning more visitors into paying customers and boosting revenue effortlessly.

2. Seamless Integration with Shop Pay

With Checkout Extensibility, all your customizations seamlessly integrate with Shop Pay, creating a unified and consistent checkout journey for your customers. Shop Pay’s accelerated checkout speeds, which are up to four times faster than traditional methods, ensure that your customizations work in harmony with its proven performance, improving the overall shopping experience and satisfaction.

3. Access to Advanced Checkout Features

Upgrading unlocks an array of powerful new features to enhance your checkout process. From streamlined one-page checkouts and Shopify’s bundles offering to stackable discounts and more, these features give you the tools to create a highly functional and customer-friendly checkout. These enhancements help optimize sales, reduce cart abandonment, and provide customers with greater flexibility.

4. Upgrade-Safe Customization

Now you can say goodbye to the hassle of manual upgrades with Checkout Extensibility. Unlike checkout.liquid, this new system automatically integrates new Shopify checkout features as they become available. You and your hired Shopify developers will never have to worry about missing out on updates or risking disruptions in your checkout flow, saving time and ensuring continuous improvements.

5. Enhanced Security Measures

Checkout Extensibility operates within a secure, sandboxed environment powered by Shopify’s robust UI components and APIs. This design significantly reduces vulnerabilities and enhances the protection of customer data, providing peace of mind for both merchants and shoppers. Your checkout remains reliable, fast, and secure at all times.

Timeline

• August 13, 2024: Shopify will discontinue support for checkout.liquid on the information, shipping, and payment pages.
• August 28, 2025: Support for checkout.liquid on the Thank You and Order Status pages will also end. This includes turning off apps using script tags and additional scripts on post-purchase and order status pages.

Impact of Missing the August 13, 2024 Deadline

Starting August 14, 2024, the Shopify team has begun the process of shutting down checkout.liquid for the Information, Shipping, and Payment pages. Shops that have not upgraded will experience the following consequences:

• Customizations are locked: Any customizations made using checkout.liquid by your hired Shopify developers will be locked. Shopify will no longer support updates or fixes for these customizations, and they will become uneditable. Shops using the outdated code after the deadline do so at their own risk.
• Payment gateways are locked: The ability to deactivate or switch payment gateways will be disabled.
• Risk indicators for orders are disabled: Fraud prevention features will no longer function properly due to unsandboxed code running in checkout, meaning risk assessments will be unreliable for new orders.
• Slower Shopify Payments payouts: Orders processed through outdated checkout.liquid will be flagged as higher risk, leading to delays in payouts of up to 5 days after transaction processing.

Auto-Upgrades Starting January 6, 2025

On January 6, 2025, Shopify will begin auto-upgrading stores that continue to use checkout.liquid. Merchants will receive a 30-day notice via email. The auto-upgrade process will include:

• The Information, Shipping, and Payment pages will revert to the default state, and all customizations made via checkout.liquid will be lost.
• The storefront will continue to process checkouts without these customizations.
• Brand settings defined in the online store theme editor will be automatically applied to the default checkout, but any custom visual changes through .liquid files or associated JavaScript and CSS will not be included.

Instructions

1.  Accessing Settings:
Go to Settings → Checkout in your Shopify admin panel. Here, you would typically find options for adding additional scripts under the “Order Status” or “Thank You” pages. Depending on whether you’ve upgraded to Checkout Extensibility, you’ll see one of two options:

• A prompt to “Upgrade”
• A button to “Go to Pixels”

2. Important Note Before Upgrading:
If you haven’t upgraded to Checkout Extensibility, carefully review Shopify’s upgrade instructions from the main site of Shopify before proceeding. Upgrading will significantly impact your store’s checkout experience. Proceed only if you’ve completed the upgrade and see the “Go to Pixels” option.

3.Adding a Custom Pixel:

• Navigate to the new Customer Events/Pixels page and click the “Add custom pixel” button at the top-right corner.
• Name your custom pixel tag (e.g., “LiveIntent LiveConnect Tags”).
• Click “Add Pixel” to open a new page where you can input custom pixel code.

4. Implementing the Pixel Code:
Copy the pixel code provided below and replace [YOUR-APP-ID] with your LiveIntent advertiser account ID. If you don’t have this ID, reach out to your account representative.

This setup will enable key LiveIntent events, including Product View, Add to Cart, and Product Purchase, along with the base tag, ensuring seamless tracking and functionality.

Conclusion

Shopify’s transition from checkout.liquid to Checkout Extensibility marks a significant leap forward in empowering merchants with a secure, flexible, and user-friendly checkout customization process. With tools like the Checkout Editor, Checkout Apps, and robust APIs, brands, and Shopify development service providers can now deliver tailored, high-performing checkout experiences without the complexity of custom code.