At Shopify, we’re proud to have the best-converting checkout on the internet, and we’re dedicated to continuously enhancing its security, speed, and global interoperability. But that’s only the beginning of what’s possible. For large businesses to reach their full potential, they must be able to extend checkout to meet their unique needs—to differentiate their brands, drive value, and comply with local business regulations.
In the past, we offered the checkout.liquid file as a solution, but it had its limitations. Customizations made through checkout.liquid were difficult to test and maintain, incompatible with Shop Pay, and required periodic and complicated upgrades to access new features. They were also inherently insecure in how javascript was executed outside of a sandbox in the browser.
To address these challenges, we built Checkout Extensibility, a suite of tools for app-based customizations that is fast, secure, and upgrade-safe. It not only surpasses the limitations of checkout.liquid, but it provides a far more powerful solution for customizing checkout, both now and in the future.
Customizations made through Checkout Extensibility work seamlessly with Shop Pay, which converts up to 50% better than guest checkout. New features like one-page checkout, Shopify’s bundles offering, discount stacking, and more are instantly available, and they’ll work consistently across all buying surfaces. Our ever-expanding app ecosystem offers a wide variety of additional app-based customization options. As we are constantly launching new APIs and UI components, the possibilities are endless.
Brands are supercharging checkout with Checkout Extensibility
Rapidly growing businesses like Fashion Nova, Ruggable, and Monos are tapping into the speed and reliability of Checkout Extensibility to fuel their growth.
Monos easily configured their checkout with upsell offers and streamlined their pixel tracking, resulting in a faster- and higher-converting checkout just in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
“A big part of the reason we went with Checkout Extensibility was the speed, which improves conversions and reduces checkout abandonment. The other part of it was just keeping updates simple. Anytime I don't have to update code in checkout.liquid is better. So we're happy with the end results.”
—Jake Fox, Senior Ecommerce Developer, Monos
Read more about Monos’s experience with Checkout Extensibility.
App developers are innovating with Checkout Extensibility
Our community of app developers has fully embraced Checkout Extensibility launching over 400 extensibility-powered checkout apps with a wide range of capabilities, and over 90 new apps since the Summer '23 Edition.
The developers of Smile.io, a popular loyalty and rewards app, have found that Checkout Extensibility saves them time and effort and opens up new possibilities for features that integrate well into Shopify’s checkout.
“Our experience with Shopify's Checkout Extensibility has been great! The availability of a comprehensive library of well-designed components, documentation and hooks made building our extensions a breeze, allowing us to easily implement features that were previously impractical to build in a way that blends seamlessly into merchants' checkout pages—regardless of their theme.”
—Smile.io's Storefront Engineering Team
Gil Greenberg, solo developer and founder of Checkout Blocks, saw the potential in Checkout Extensibility early. He went all in to build the app that empowers merchants on Shopify globally with code-free customizations like upsells, custom fields, delivery methods, address validation and more.
“The model of extensibility solves many of the technical challenges, allowing a solo developer like myself to move more quickly in solving actual problems and letting Shopify handle much of the underlying complexity (hosting, scaling, UX). By not focusing on infrastructure, I can focus strictly on solving complex customer requirements”
—Gil Greenberg, Founder, Checkout Blocks
Read more about how Checkout Blocks scaled to success with Extensibility.
What’s new in the Winter '24 Edition
The best checkout experience across the entire buying journey
We first introduced Checkout Extensibility on the Shipping, Information, and Payment pages within Checkout. It’s now also available on the Thank you and Order status pages to merchants on Shopify for a consistent experience across the buyer’s journey. Developers can build customized experiences with UI extensions and web pixels, and merchants can choose from a variety of ready-to-use apps for customizing these post-checkout pages.
For brands with mobile apps, we’ve introduced the Checkout Sheet Kit (supporting Android, Swift, and React Native) to bring your fully customized, app idiomatic, and easy-to-maintain checkout experience to your native mobile apps with just a few lines of code.
14 new APIs, UI components, and features to elevate your checkout
We're expanding Checkout Extensibility with 14 new APIs and updates that allow partners and developers to create unique checkout experiences with apps.
The new branding API capabilities empower developers to dramatically transform the look and feel of checkout with advanced color settings and schemes, header and footer customizations, and container styling in the main body and order summary sections.
As of this release, the Cart and Checkout Validation Function APIis now available for building public apps as well as custom apps. This means developers can extend the benefits of custom validation logic through public apps. This in turn allows for powerful configuration UI with a wide range of use cases, like creating rules to restrict items to certain customers, or making specific fields mandatory.
We are also launching privacy consent support, which lets apps collect consent directly within the checkout process to meet compliance regulations across markets.
Lastly, new UI components including Map, ChoiceList, ToggleButtonGroup, Payment Icon, and Product Thumbnail are now available.
Head over to our dev docs to see more of the updates for Checkout Extensibility, and check out everything in the Winter ’24 Edition.
Upgrade to Checkout Extensibility today
Still using checkout.liquid? Checkout Extensibility is the new way to customize Shopify checkout that replaces it. Start planning your upgrade now to get ahead of these deadlines:
Resources to help you plan your upgrade:
Checkout Extensibility hub: Learn about the benefits of upgrading from checkout.liquid and find helpful resources on our hub.
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App guide: Explore a curated guide of the latest Shopify Partner Apps to help with a variety of customizations.
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Product roadmap: View the latest features in development on our Checkout Extensibility roadmap.
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Partners and agencies: Get upgrade support from a Shopify Partner with Checkout Extensibility expertise.
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Customizations report: Get a personalized overview of your existing checkout.liquid customizations, powered by Shopify Magic, with high-level guidance on how to implement them using Checkout Extensibility. Go to Settings, select Checkout, and you’ll find the report there.
