The checkout process is crucial in making or breaking your sales as a Shopify merchant. It is a crucial touchpoint in the customers’ journey that either convinces them to complete their purchase or makes them abandon their carts. 

Your customers’ checkout experience should be seamless, user-friendly, and consistent with your brand to provide outstanding service. However, as an e-commerce merchant, you may think that the steps in Shopify development to meet this goal should involve coding and customizing your user interface, which is daunting. 

Shopify understands this concern and has developed two solutions to help Shopify Plus merchants like you overcome the hurdles of checkout customization: Shopify’s checkout extensibility and UI extensions. 

The Struggles of the Old Checkout Process—And How Shopify Addressed Them

Shopify has always allowed its merchants to provide their customers with a fast and reliable checkout experience in their shops. Shopify Checkout has become a model for e-commerce businesses in checkout ease and efficiency. 

However, before, for merchants to customize their shop’s checkout and make it suitable to their business needs, they had to go through a rigorous process, which was very inefficient. 

First, to apply their desired advanced customizations, merchants had to request access to their checkout.liquid theme file and edit the code with the help of a developer, which is quite an inconvenient process. Furthermore, the developer had to periodically check on the customized checkout features for upgrades while keeping the changes intact, making the customization process even more troublesome. 

To address this, Shopify created a way for merchants to personalize their shop’s checkout without working with code—through Checkout Extensibility and Checkout UI Extensions. 

What is Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility?

Shopify’s checkout extensibility is a powerful tool as it allows Shopify Plus merchants to customize the checkout experience without coding. You can purchase checkout extensibility apps from the Shopify App Store and choose the best features for your business needs. With these new features, you can build custom fields, offer products upon a customer’s checkout, customize discount settings, display notifications at checkout, and much more.

Benefits of Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility

Easy Customization

Shopify’s checkout extensibility allows for quick and easy customization of your store checkout without requiring programming skills, making it easy for non-technical users. You can now simply purchase the apps, choosing the features that will create your envisioned customer checkout experience. 

Consistent Branding

What’s great about these features is that as you customize your checkout page to your desired branding settings, they automatically adapt to these, making the customer experience consistent wherever your customers choose to check out.

Improved Conversions

With checkout extensibility, you can create a seamless purchase experience that caters to customer needs, leading to increased conversions and consistent sales.

What Are UI Extensions?

Shopify’s checkout User Interface (UI) extensions allow you to adjust and modify the look and feel of your checkout page. This feature lets you create a checkout journey that precisely reflects your brand. 

Benefits of UI Extensions

Custom User Interface

UI extensions offer complete control over checkout page customization. You can tailor it to reflect your brand’s identity and delight customers with their purchase experience.

Flexible Customizations

With UI extensions, you can make advanced customizations, creating unique checkout experiences that cater to your brand’s needs.

The new extensions also allow you to customize discount settings, whether you want to apply them only to specific products, shipping costs, or orders amounting to a certain amount. Upon checkout, customers can also quickly redeem gift cards, discount codes, and loyalty rewards points.

You can also add notifications at checkout, such as a banner that informs the customer of shipping specifications for certain products, a field that allows for an optional gift message, or special offers that customers can opt to add to their purchase or payment. You also have the option to add a custom checkout message when customers buy products from a specific category or when they earn purchase points or save money from discounts. 

You can even build apps that help you track customer behavior at the post-purchase stage and make advanced customizations to your checkout page appearance.

Customer Engagement

With checkout UI extensions, e-commerce merchants can create a visually stunning checkout experience that captivates customer attention, encouraging them to complete their purchase.

Why Choose Checkout Extensibility or UI Extensions?

Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility and Checkout UI Extensions contribute to faster checkout and better customer experience, increasing conversions. Moreover, Shopify Plus merchants like you who want to customize your brand’s checkout experience no longer need to go through checkout.liquid and can now enjoy the convenience of flexible, creative customizations that can be upgraded safely. Choosing which features to implement just depends on what you wish to achieve with your checkout customization.

Checkout extensibility is the best route if you want quick and easy customization that does not require a developer’s expertise.

If you want advanced customizations that go beyond what Shopify’s checkout extensibility can offer, utilizing the skills of a developer, UI extensions are the way to go.

Both features can be an excellent addition to your Shopify store. An intuitive checkout can significantly impact your store’s success and improve the customer experience while catering to your business needs.

A Worthwhile Investment for Your Brand

Shopify’s checkout extensibility and UI extensions are powerful tools that help you create a checkout experience perfectly suited to your business needs. You can purchase checkout extensibility apps with features catering to purchase journeys—from custom fields down to cart customization. And if you require advanced customizations beyond Shopify’s checkout extensibility features, you can utilize UI extensions to create a visually stunning checkout experience that engages your customers and reflects your brand. These features ultimately lead to increased conversions and customer engagement, making Shopify development a worthwhile investment for your brand. 
As a Shopify Partner, LeapOut can provide further support that caters to your shop’s unique needs as you create customizations in your shop to highlight your brand identity. Get in touch with LeapOut today and experience success in your business like never before.