How to Customize Checkout and Thank You Pages using Shopify Checkout Extensibility

If you're using Shopify for your storefronts, it is time to consider innovation for your checkout. Even if you enjoy the current Shopify checkout functionality, you need to get prepared for the significant changes. Starting on August 13, 2024, Shopify will stop supporting currently available checkout.liquid and additional scripts for information, shipping, and payment pages. Plus, from August 28, 2025, these will also be turned off for thank you and order status pages.

What's instead? Instead, Shopify provides Checkout Extensibility functionality for Shopify Plus users and some new customization options for other plans to extend the range of development opportunities and boost conversions.

What does Shopify Checkout Extensibility stand for, how to migrate your customization and customize checkout and thank you pages in a new reality? This article gets you covered.

Why customize Shopify Checkout and Thank You pages

A checkout page is a place where customers can choose payment methods, shipping options, and see billing details. When using Shopify, merchants can decide in favor of default checkout features or customized checkout pages aligned with their special requirements like extra shipping options. The same works for thank you pages, where you can just leave a short message like "thank you for your purchase" or leverage it for upsell/cross-sell. This step of the buyer's journey is especially important given the fact that checkout abandonment for online stores in recent years has been 60-80%. In order to reduce this rate companies strive to optimize their checkout in the best way possible.

Some other reasons to customize your checkout and thank you pages:

• boost customer engagement
• increase conversion rates at every checkout
• improve user experience with advanced shipping and payment options
• get more insights about customer experiences
• drive more sales.

Let's see if Shopify's new checkout functionality gives the opportunity to achieve these goals.

How to customize Shopify checkout pages with Basic and higher plans

Regarding the full set of Checkout Extensibility features, they’re only included in the Shopify Plus plan. However, some new checkout customization options are available for Shopify Basic and higher plans by using custom and public Shopify apps. Such apps help add, hide, or rename payment methods and delivery options, and more. For example, you can install a payment method customization app from the Shopify App Store and configure desired payment custom options in your admin panel. Similarly, you are free to use any public app built with Shopify Functions. Besides checkout customization apps, there are also available post-purchase app extensions for upsell and cross-sell and web pixel apps for tracking customer behavior.

How to customize checkout pages in Shopify even further, adding more custom features?

If you need more profound customization, reach out to a trusted Shopify partner like DigitalSuits to develop a custom solution tailored to your specific needs. Along with deep expertise in developing public and custom Shopify apps, DigitalSuits developers excel at third-party app integrations. This expertise along with the experience in Shopify theme customization forms a solid foundation for extending your Shopify project functionality to any desired scope.

If your project has already extended the limit of the features available for basic Shopify plans, consider switching to Shopify Plus, as it opens way more customization opportunities like the complete range of Checkout Extensibility functions.

See how Shopify Plus checkout extensibility package differs from that for other Shopify plans.

Next, we make a detailed review of Checkout Extensibility features and capabilities.

What is Shopify Checkout Extensibility?

Shopify Summer ‘22 Edition announced over 100+ updates to improve user experience and boost merchant success based on cutting-edge solutions. One of these updates was the improved checkout functionality – Checkout Extensibility. By announcing Checkout Extensibility, Shopify team offered a new way to handle checkout operations by using apps and branding tools. In the years that followed, they continued upgrading checkout features and added new functionality including Shopify's collection of 14 new components and APIs for even more bespoke checkout experiences.

Note that Checkout Extensibility is an umbrella term for five different technologies:

• Checkout UI extensions
• Branding API
• Shopify Functions
• Post-purchase checkout extensions
• Web pixel extensions

We'll explore them further but let's clarify first how this new approach is different from the previous one based on checkout.liquid.

What is checkout.liquid?

Checkout.liquid is a code-based file located in the layout directory of your Shopify theme.

The same as for Checkout Extensibility, checkout.liquid is only available for Shopify Plus users. Others can customize their checkout pages through Theme editor.

The default checkout.liquid file requires updating to add customization. However, as the Shopify team claims, there are some difficulties with maintaining and testing customization with this method. Plus, it is incompatible with Shop Pay, has security vulnerabilities and requires complicated updates to access new features. This scope of issues along with Shopify team’s desire for constant checkout improvement have led to development of Checkout Extensibility.

In contrast to checkout.liquid, Checkout Extensibility allows for implementing customization using tools other than Liquid. And that's not the only feature of the latter that sets it apart from the previous checkout solution.

Advantages of Checkout Extensibility

Checkout Extensibility is a preferred way of Shopify checkout customization for several reasons.

• App-based: Shopify Store provides more than 90 public apps for customizing your checkout which allows you to scale your projects without overloads and save time by incorporating no-code solutions.

• Enhanced security: New Shopify UI components and APIs run in isolated environments, improving security indicators.

• Consistent buyer experience: You have the same features applicable for Checkout, Thank you, and Order status pages for upgrading your entire checkout flow from beginning to end.

• Increased speed: With the Checkout Extensibility latest technology set, checkout interactions are processed twice faster.

• Upgrade-safe option: You get access to new checkout features as soon as they become available. So you don’t ever need to upgrade checkout as it was required with checkout.liquid.

• Fully integrated with Shop Pay: The unique Shopify payment system, Shop