The New Shopify Checkout - Should I Upgrade Yet?
At We Make Websites we’re having lots of clients reach out to us around the new checkout, inquiring about it generally and whether they should consider upgrading yet. Based on this I thought I’d put together a post explaining about the upgrade, my thoughts and what our take is currently around ‘when’ you should consider upgrading.
Note: This document concentrates on Shopify Plus customers only really since you couldn’t modify your checkout on regular Shopify anyway (so upgrading is typically speaking much more straight forward).
So What Is Happening With Shopify’s Checkout?
Shopify is doing a major overhaul of its checkout to make it faster, better performing and more secure and from what I’ve on various demos, webinars and experimenting with it in person it looks like it’s going to be a real improvement.
This change whilst better in the long run, will mean that a lot custom features that have been built within checkout.liquid or using Shopify Scripts will need re-work to continue running once upgraded.
The forced date to migrate checkouts over to the new system is the 13th August 2024 however so lots of time to iron out any issues thankfully.
As part of the change stores will no longer have access to checkout.liquid and Shopify scripts is also being deprecated (it’s not in the app store anymore for example).
This means that any customisations or script injections that are on that page will no longer work and will need rebuilding within Checkout Extensions or via Shopify Pixels.
?? Please note: checkout.liquid is being deprecated for checkout pages from customer information > payment. Currently speaking any changes in checkout.liquid will still render on the Order Confirmation page.
How Do I See The New Checkout?
If a customer is on Shopify Plus you can preview and publish the new checkout from with Settings > Checkout. You can preview the new checkout as you would a new theme without impacting the live site.
?? Please note: You can revert back to the ‘existing’ checkout. So if you were to publish the new checkout and it not be suitable you can currently roll back. Unlike previous checkout upgrades there is a rollback path.
Should I Upgrade?
To determine whether you should upgrade to the new checkout you need to do an assessment of the current customisations between the customer information and the payment stages of your checkout, so typically we’re talking any discounts, shipping customisations, overlays, tracking codes etc.
Once you have that list you’ll need to determine how and whether it’s feasible to port that functionality to the new checkout. Once you get to a point where all the functionality can be ported (unless there is any you can forego of course) then you can start the work of moving over.
?? Please Note: Currently not all the API’s are fully available (or out of BETA) for Checkout Extensions so not all functionality can be replicated.
Things like; shipping discounts and cart transformations (i.e. free gift with purchase or buy one get one free) for instance cannot be created using APIs that are fully released. Some of them can be done using API’s that are in developer preview but I wouldn’t personally recommend launching on them until they’re fully rolled out.
Current Design Limitations
In the spririt of making the checkout more secure and stable (which it will), what you can do from a design point of view is very limited. There is no ability to inject CSS. All the changes that we can make are done via a customiser window, think button and background colours, logo image, font selection from a pre-set list etc.
This editor allows you to do the following:
领英推荐
Useful Article: Guide to setting up your checkout branding
?? The Branding API will allow for more visual customizations of the checkout branding but is currently in an Unstable version of the API with no set date for public availability
What Are Checkout Extensions?
From Shopify: “You can customize your checkout by adding apps to your checkout. App developers and Shopify partners build apps, and then publish them on the?Shopify App Store. You can install publicly available checkout apps, or request any in-house developers to create a custom app for you.”
Essentially what this means is like with the rest of the site there are going to be lots of apps from partners to get custom functionality working within checkout. As more apps get added the breadth of what can be done on the checkout without development will improve. I think over time this is going to be fantastic and allow so much more functionality within the checkout without the need for custom development.
Developers can also create their own custom applications to create bespoke functionality also not available on the app store also.
What Are Shopify Pixels?
From Shopify: “You can use the Shopify pixels manager to manage your pixels that track customer events. The Shopify pixels manager allows you to manage and add pixels that track customer events. Customer events are actions that take place in the customer's browser, for example, clicking a link or adding a product to a cart.”
These pixels can be rendered within the checkout. So whereas before you would install custom pixels into checkout.liquid (or via GTM) you will be able to use this system instead.
It does have some considerations / limitations though; within the checkout pixels are run within a sandboxed environment which only has scope access to some customer events and cannot make changes on the page (i.e. through Javascript injection etc). This does however lend to making your checkout much more secure as any unfriendly Javascripts cannot do things they should not.
Like with checkout extensions you can either install custom events or you can install pre-built pixels from the app store.
What Are Shopify Functions & UI Extensions?
Shopify Functions allow developers to customize the backend logic of Shopify on the new checkout.
There is a super useful video from Shopify showing the power of Shopify functions and UI extensions.
Essentially think of Shopify functions as the system that will power lots of checkout logic in the future such as discounts, delivery customisations, payment customisations, order validations, bundles and more.
Useful Links
I hope you found this useful and if you have any questions, as always, please just let me know.
???Shopify Success Manager ?? Business Growth Partner ?? AI Enthusiast
1 年Well put together Nick Hurst ?? We are working with merchants to help map their customisations across to Extensibility. I’d add the ‘Checkout Build With Us’ link to your resource. https://experience.shopify.com/checkout-series-resource-hub Two other resources would be Ralf Elfving videos and Coding w Jan on YT. https://youtu.be/NR4MLaaZeMA
Content Writer, Content Marketing Specialist. Copywriter. Editor. Social Media. Crypto. Web3. Finance. Technology. Business, Marketing. 15 years of experience.
1 年If you're looking for the answer to the age-old question of 'Should I upgrade to Shopify's new checkout?' then the answer is a resounding YES! After all, who doesn't want to make their checkout process smoother and more efficient? ??
Performance Marketer | Driving ROI with Data-Driven Strategies and Innovative Campaigns | SMM | PPC | Meta Ads | Google Ads & more
1 年It's great to see Shopify constantly raising the bar and providing innovative solutions for ecommerce success.
Head of Solutions - Shopify Practice at BORN
1 年Glad Serge El Hachem and I could help ??
Technical Development Lead at Mint Velvet
1 年Good read, thanks Nick!