How to Customise Your Shopify Checkout: Branding, Extensions, and UX Best Practices

Shopify Plus now favors modular, secure checkout extensibility over checkout.liquid. Using Developer Preview, UI extensions, Shopify Functions, Pixels, and the Branding API, merchants can test, brand, and personalize checkout, optimize pricing, shipping, and payments, track events, and add trust cues—reducing friction, boosting conversions, and scaling improvements safely.

Written by Chris Behier

Oct 18, 2022

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Why Customising Your Shopify Checkout Matters

Your checkout is the last page standing between a customer's intention to buy and the confirmation email. Every design decision, trust signal, and friction point on that page directly affects whether the sale completes. For Shopify Plus merchants, Checkout Extensibility provides the tools to customise the checkout experience meaningfully — without the fragility of the old checkout.liquid approach.

Checkout Branding and Visual Customisation

Shopify Plus merchants can customise checkout colours, fonts, logo placement, and background images using the checkout editor in the Shopify admin, no code required. Consistent branding across the checkout reinforces trust for customers who are evaluating whether to complete their purchase — a checkout that looks disconnected from the rest of your store raises doubt.

Checkout Extensibility: What You Can Add

Beyond visual branding, Shopify's Checkout Extensibility framework lets Plus merchants add functional components to the checkout using UI extensions:

Custom fields — gift messages, delivery instructions, order references
Trust badges and security seals — surfaced at the payment step to reduce last-moment hesitation
Post-purchase upsell pages — offer additional products after payment confirmation without disrupting the primary checkout flow
Loyalty point redemption — let customers apply loyalty rewards directly within checkout
Dynamic content blocks — show relevant messaging (free shipping threshold, returns policy) based on cart contents

Shopify Functions for Checkout Logic

Shopify Functions allow Plus merchants to customise checkout business logic without relying on third-party apps: custom discount rules, shipping rate filtering, payment method visibility (e.g. showing net terms only for B2B customers), and custom validation. Functions run server-side and don't affect checkout page load performance.

What Shopify Plus Customisation Enables That Standard Shopify Doesn't

Standard Shopify merchants have access to the checkout editor for basic branding. Shopify Plus merchants additionally get: full Checkout Extensibility (UI extensions and Functions), checkout.liquid access for legacy builds, post-purchase page customisation, and the ability to build custom checkout flows for B2B accounts including account-specific payment terms.

Best Practices

When customising your checkout, prioritise changes that remove friction or build trust over decorative additions. Test each extension on mobile as well as desktop. Use Shopify's checkout editor to preview changes before deploying. For complex customisations — particularly those involving Shopify Functions or multi-step logic — work with a qualified Shopify Plus partner who can test the implementation against edge cases before going live.

Checkout customisation on Shopify Plus goes further than you might think — and we've shipped all of it.

Explore Shopify Plus Checkout Customisation Options →

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