For years, Shopify has helped merchants of all sizes deliver the most reliable, highest-converting checkout on the planet. Fast, intuitive, and simple, Shopify Checkout has set the standard for what a checkout should be, while Shop Pay, our accelerated checkout, delivers a buying experience that's four times faster—and a conversion rate that's 11% higher—than the competition.
The only problem? Customizing checkout can be a slow and rigid process, making it difficult for partners to adapt checkout for their merchant’s needs—until now.
Today, we’re releasing Checkout Extensibility in developer preview, so every partner can build public and custom apps to creatively customize Shopify Checkout and Shop Pay for Plus merchants. We're sharpening our focus on extensibility so that the apps you build can meet the needs of the largest brands in the world.
The old way to customize checkout
When they launch a store, Shopify merchants benefit from checkout pages that have been built from the ground up to ensure that the checkout experience is optimized for speed and conversion. As their business matures, they may begin to see the need for customized elements of their checkout for unique use cases.
In the past, functional and aesthetic checkout customizations for merchants had to be added by modifying the checkout code directly, through editing checkout.liquid. These customizations can’t be deployed through an app or configured by non-technical users, which often meant longer ramp up times for merchants and partners.
Checkout Extensibility—now available in developer preview
We wanted to make it faster and more flexible for Plus merchants to extend their brand to checkout and offer even more opportunity for partners to deliver unique commerce solutions. So we built Checkout Extensibility.
Uniquely designed to be secure, fast, and upgrade-safe—as well as seamlessly work with Shop Pay—Checkout Extensibility provides everything developers and merchants need to optimize the checkout experience for buyers. The best part? For the first time, Shopify is unlocking the ability for partners to deploy their customizations through a custom app or public app on the Shopify App Store.
This comes with a whole new set of features for making checkout customizations accessible to every developer. App developers can now use Checkout UI extensions and Shopify Functions to add new functionality in various places in checkout and Shop Pay, while merchants can use the new Checkout Branding API to customize the styling and pixels to track events.
“The best part? For the first time, Shopify is unlocking the ability for partners to deploy their customizations through a custom app or public app on the Shopify App Store.”
Checkout UI extensions enable you to add in unique elements like product offers, custom fields, custom banners, and more that are adaptable to various flows, including Shop Pay. This creates a unified experience for buyers wherever they choose to checkout. Moreover, you don’t have to worry about duplicating branding settings in your app, since UI extensions automatically inherit the branded appearance of the merchant’s checkout. At general availability, you can deliver your new functionality exclusively to Shopify Plus merchants and feel confident that merchants can always access the latest checkout features.
Shopify Functions give you the flexibility to extend or replace native Shopify server-side business logic so you can customize the discounts applied to orders, products, or shipping. For example, you could build a Function that provides tiered discount options, such as spend $100 get $20 off. Functions will also let you hide, reorder, or present unique shipping and payment options so that you can provide an ideal experience to customers. As Functions grows over time, we’ll be including support for blended shipping rates, checkout and cart validations, return validations, and programmable order routing, so you can customize various parts of Shopify.
A checkout that feels like your brand
Ever hear from merchants who want to extend the look and feel of a brand into checkout? Say hello to the all new Checkout Branding API.
Merchants can now use this API to customize the style of checkout and Shop Pay, adapting the visual appearance such as the logo, font, and colors. This gives Plus merchants the freedom to integrate their own branded colors, add rounded corners to form fields and much more - so a customer can connect with the uniqueness of a brand’s identity every step of the way.
Publish secure customer events
With pixels, merchants can collect and pass behavioral customer data for marketing, ads, and analysis. Partners can use the Pixels API to provide events list that merchants can subscribe to. Apps will be able to hook into the events in the Pixels API, including checkout, to give merchants access to customer behavior analytics with added security.
Let’s get started!
We’re excited to give you these new tools and see what customizations you build for checkout. Checkout Extensibility is available in developer preview until the end of September 2022, at which time your apps can be available to merchants for the first time on the Shopify App Store. By being an early launch partner, your app will be one of the first available to some of the biggest brands in commerce and will help Plus merchants to convert buyers and build a loyal customer base.
As we continue to fine-tune these extensions and APIs, we will be sharing our intentions for shipping additional features in our developer documentation, so let us know what we might be missing and what is important to you. Have questions about these tools? Our product experts will be holding frequent office hours on the ShopifyDev Discord throughout the developer preview to help you learn and build faster. Join our Discord channel to stay up to date with new features as they are added!
Please try it out and let us know what you think. Here’s how to get started:
- Follow our tutorials to begin developing your checkout customizations
- Share your feedback in Github
- Check out Editions Dev Mode to learn about all of our latest features for developers
- Register for the next Partner Town Hall—Find out the latest from our product teams, submit your questions live, and discover other updates from Editions