How upgrading to Checkout Extensibility saved Monos 10 hours per month

Monos is a Canadian travel brand launched in 2018 that creates minimalist luggage designed to stand the test of time. Just like the products they sell, Monos has proven that they’re a brand built to last.

“We made it through the pandemic when nobody was buying luggage,” explains Mike Wu, Monos’ Director of Ecommerce and Customer Experience. “Ever since then, we’ve been growing year over year and expanding into a full lifestyle brand.”

Today, the brand manages four online stores to serve their customers around the world. Monos needed an easier way to customize and manage their checkouts without the need for complicated custom coding and costly testing to avoid breaking their customizations when new features were released. So they upgraded from checkout.liquid to Checkout Extensibility – a suite of powerful platform features that let merchants make no-code customizations to their checkout and a collection of developer tools for making more advanced customizations via apps. Checkout Extensibility is higher-converting, allows customizations to work in Shop Pay, and unlocks access to new features like the one-page checkout, discount combinations, pre-orders, and Shopify's bundles offering.

Since upgrading to Checkout Extensibility, Monos has seen:

Challenge: Managing four stores with a small team

Monos has a team of around 100 employees, but only four of them oversee the brand’s multiple storefronts. Keeping the branding and functionality uniform and updated was complicated and time-consuming for them using checkout.liquid, the old method for Shopify Plus merchants to customize their checkouts. Even the tiniest tweaks would require navigating to a specific file in the code editor, locating and altering the correct code line, testing configurations, and finally rolling out the changes to buyers. Then, this process had to be repeated for each of their storefronts.

“Once every month or two there was some change that needed to happen. It becomes time consuming after a while, especially in checkout or cart, because those are crucial, and you want to test them rigorously before updating,” says Jake Fox, Monos’ Senior Ecommerce Developer.

With Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) looming, Monos needed a solution to simplify their checkout workflow across all of their stores so they could tackle their biggest sales weekend of the year with confidence. This is what motivated their upgrade to Checkout Extensibility.

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Solution: Checkout Extensibility eliminates the need for constant code updates

Checkout Extensibility is the new way to customize checkout for merchants on Shopify Plus. With over 400 extensibility-powered checkout apps available in the Shopify app store, merchants can add a wide range of functionality to their checkouts quickly. If they can’t find the perfect solution readily available, they can choose to build out their own bespoke solution with Shopify Functions, checkout UI extensions, web pixel app extensions, and post-purchase extensions. Checkout Extensibility is built on Shopify’s latest platform technology, with 2X faster checkout interactions and page transitions that increase conversion by over 1% on average.

For Monos, the upgrade meant no more sifting through finicky code or having to fix the same issue across multiple checkouts each time a configuration needed updating.

“We’d had issues with checkout.liquid because of all the customization and trackers that we had. So Checkout Extensibility definitely felt like the safer and more efficient choice,” Mike says of the upgrade, which the team performed themselves by using Shopify dev docs, help docs, and the Checkout Extensibility upgrade hub. “We wanted to get it out before Black Friday because we knew it would definitely help us during that period. And it did.”

Checkout is a high-stakes part of any store that can make a massive difference in a customer’s experience and a store’s performance. This can make a big change like upgrading to Checkout Extensibility understandably daunting, especially before an important event like BFCM. But for Monos, that apprehension quickly turned into relief.

“The upgrade was easier than I imagined,” says Jake. “Checkout Extensibility makes things easier to manipulate, so I didn’t even have to make updates to it in a lot of ways.”

Results: A faster checkout that’s effortless to manage

After upgrading to Checkout Extensibility, the Monos team immediately observed how much faster their checkout was performing.

“Speed is a big part of the reason we went with Checkout Extensibility in the first place. Faster checkouts make buyers more confident in their purchases, which helps us improve conversion and reduce checkout abandonment.” Jake says.

Checkout Extensibility made it simple for Monos to add upsells for products like protective luggage covers to their checkout without affecting any prior customizations. And it also allowed them to create and seamlessly integrate their own extremely successful shipping insurance add-on to their checkout, using an easy-to-customize app.

But for Mike and Jake, the largest impact was in their workload. Upgrading to Checkout Extensibility has saved them over 10 hours of development time each month, eliminated the need for frequent fiddling with fragile code, and reduced their mental load.

“Since we have such a small team, anything we don’t have to think about is better. We have four stores, so simplifying the process is always good,” says Jake.

Mike encourages other brands not to hesitate and to make the upgrade as soon as possible, saying “It definitely makes things simpler and will help reshape your processes.”

Today, the Monos team is free to focus on making improvements without constantly worrying about their checkout performance. “We know it works well. It’s doing its thing. We don’t have to focus on it. We don’t have to worry about it,” Jake says.

Since upgrading to Checkout Extensibility, Monos has seen:

Checkout.liquid will be turned off on Aug 13th, 2024 for the Information, Shipping & Payment pages. All Shopify Plus merchants need to upgrade to Checkout Extensibility by this date. Visit our Checkout Extensibility hub to learn more and find resources to help plan your upgrade.