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 Shopify Extensions to customize the branding and functionality of checkout in a way that is app based, 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 with Shopify Extensions work seamlessly with Shop Pay, which converts up to 50% better than guest checkout. Merchants on the Shopify Plus plan can customize their checkout with Shopify Extensions using features such as blocks, Functions, and pixels. Features like one-page checkout, Shopify’s bundles offering, discount stacking, and more 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 Shopify Extensions
Rapidly growing businesses like Fashion Nova, Ruggable, and Monos are tapping into the speed and reliability of Shopify Extensions 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 Shopify Extensions 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 Shopify Extensions.
App developers are innovating with Shopify Extensions
Our community of app developers has fully embraced Shopify Extensions launching over 860 extensibility-powered checkout apps with a wide range of capabilities.
The developers of Smile.io, a popular loyalty and rewards app, have found that Shopify Extensions save them time and effort and opens up new possibilities for features that integrate well into Shopify’s checkout.
“Our experience with Shopify Extensions 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 Shopify Extensions early. He went all in to build the app that empowers merchants on Shopify to customize checkout pages with code-free customizations like upsells, custom fields, delivery methods, address validation and more. Checkout Blocks, a Shopify-owned app, is available to merchants on all plans to easily customize the Thank you and Order status pages using Shopify Extensions, no coding required.
“The model of Shopify Extensions 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.
The best checkout experience across the entire buying journey
Merchants on the Shopify Plus plan can customize the Shipping, Information, and Payment pages within Checkout using Shopify Extensions with blocks, Functions, and pixels. Merchants on all plans can use Shopify Extensions to customize the Thank you and Order status pages for a consistent experience across the buyer’s journey. Developers can use Shopify Extensions to build customized experiences with UI extensions and pixels, and merchants can choose from a variety of ready-to-use apps for customizing these post-checkout pages.
For brands with mobile apps, the Checkout Sheet Kit (supporting Android, Swift, and React Native) brings your fully customized, app idiomatic, and easy-to-maintain checkout experience to your native mobile apps with just a few lines of code.
Head over to our dev docs to learn more about Shopify Extensions.
