Shopify Checkout Customization: What You Can Change on Every Plan

Last reviewed September 2026.

Can you customize the Shopify checkout page?

Yes, but what you can change depends on your plan. The honest answer most guides bury: on standard Shopify plans you can change how checkout looks, not how it behaves.

Shopify Plus runs roughly $2,300/month. Before you upgrade for checkout alone, check whether what you want is actually a cart change, a Settings change, or genuinely a checkout change. Most requests turn out to be one of the first two.

What changed at Shopify checkout on August 26, 2026?

26 August 2026 was Shopify's deadline for stores on a non-Plus plan to upgrade and replace customized Thank you and Order status pages. Stores that had not upgraded were upgraded automatically. Plus stores went through the same change a year earlier, on 28 August 2025.

What that means in practice:

• Additional scripts stopped running. Anything pasted into the old additional scripts box on those pages no longer fires.
• Script-based tracking may have gone quiet. Conversion pixels, affiliate tags and survey scripts that lived there are the usual casualties.
• Customizations must now use supported methods: app blocks, checkout UI extensions and pixels.

Check your store this week:

1. Compare conversion counts in your ad platforms before and after 26 August.
2. Open the checkout editor and review what now appears on the Thank you and Order status pages.
3. Rebuild any lost tracking as a custom pixel or through an app that supports checkout extensibility.

What can you customize on every Shopify plan?

• Branding. Go to Settings → Checkout → Customize. Logo, colors, typography, button styles, background images, form field styling. This is genuine control over appearance and it covers most brand-consistency requirements.
• One-page or three-page layout. One-page has been the default since October 2023. The checkout and accounts editor lets you switch between the two — gear icon, Settings sidebar, Checkout layout. Not plan-restricted.
• Express checkout buttons. Shop Pay, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay appear above the standard form. Toggle them under Settings → Payments, and control their appearance in the checkout editor. To remove PayPal Express specifically, deactivate PayPal as a payment method — there's no separate toggle for just the express button.
• Order notes. This is the one most people get wrong. The “special instructions” field lives in your cart, not checkout, so it's available on every plan. Enable it in your theme's cart settings, or add the field to your cart template if the theme doesn't include it. The note carries through to the order.
• Required fields. Under Settings → Checkout, control whether company name, address line 2 and phone are optional, required or hidden.
• App blocks on the Thank you and Order status pages. Since the August 2026 upgrade, every plan can add app blocks to the post-purchase pages through the checkout editor.
• Post-purchase upsells. Available on all plans through apps that use Shopify's post-purchase extension point.

What checkout customization requires Shopify Plus?

• Custom fields at checkout. Gift messaging, delivery date pickers, PO numbers, VAT registration. Built through Checkout UI Extensions and Shopify Functions, which are Plus-only on the information, shipping and payment steps.
• Checkboxes and consent. Terms acceptance, marketing opt-ins, age verification.
• Custom messaging. Banners, trust badges, delivery expectations, anything conditional on cart contents.
• Discount and shipping logic. Shopify Functions handles rules standard discounts can't express — buy-X-get-Y across collections, tiered thresholds, customer-tag-based pricing, hiding shipping methods by condition.
• Payment method rules. Hiding or reordering methods based on cart, customer or location.
• Checkout validation. Blocking checkout under specific conditions, like a B2B minimum order value.

Why does Shopify lock down checkout?

Shopify hosts checkout on its own infrastructure, not your theme. That's why it's PCI compliant, why it doesn't break when your theme does, and why you can't edit it like a page.

Plus merchants used to edit a file called checkout.liquid. Shopify retired it in favor of Checkout Extensibility — a system of app blocks and UI extensions that survive platform updates. checkout.liquid stopped working for the in-checkout steps on 13 August 2024, and for the Thank you and Order status pages on 28 August 2025. More stable, less freeform.

For everyone else, checkout is configuration rather than code.

How do you customize Shopify checkout, step by step?

Shopify checkout customization happens in the checkout editor, not in your theme code.

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Settings, then Checkout.
2. Click Customize to open the checkout and accounts editor.
3. Use the page selector to choose the checkout page you want to edit.
4. Under branding, set your logo, colors, fonts and background.
5. Add app blocks where your plan allows them.
6. Preview on desktop and mobile, then click Save.

Standard checkout customizations work on every page for stores on the Basic plan or higher. Apps that customize the information, shipping and payment steps are available only on Shopify Plus.

Which apps customize Shopify checkout?

Shopify's own app is the place to start, because it shows the plan split clearly.

Browse the full list in Shopify's Customize checkout collection on the App Store.

Which checkout changes actually reduce drop-off?

Baymard Institute puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, across 50 studies, checked September 2026. It estimates that better checkout design can lift conversion by 35.26% for a typical large ecommerce site.

The table maps Baymard's top checkout abandonment reasons to the Shopify setting that addresses each one.

Every one of the top six fixes is available on every plan. Most checkout drop-off is solved without Shopify Plus or any custom Shopify checkout customization. Plus becomes worth it when the fix needs custom fields, custom logic, or apps on the payment steps.

This matches Solo Media Group's published CRO view: the recoverable share of abandonment usually sits in guest checkout and express digital wallets, not in more exotic changes.

What do merchants most often ask to change at checkout?

“Add a note field.” Cart setting, any plan. Covered above.

“Add a custom field.” If it's genuinely at checkout, you need Plus. If it can live in the cart, any plan works — and cart-level often converts better anyway, since checkout is where you want fewer decisions rather than more.

“Add a checkbox for terms.” Plus. Worth checking whether your jurisdiction requires it at checkout specifically, since many stores satisfy it in the cart or footer.

“Make it one page.” Almost certainly already done. One-page checkout became the default for all merchants on 2 October 2023, and the checkout and accounts editor lets any plan switch between one-page and three-page. If yours still shows three steps, someone chose that.

“Add a discount code field.” Already there by default. If yours is missing, check the checkout editor.

“Change the layout.” This is the real limit. Beyond the one-page/three-page choice and the options in the checkout editor, section order and content placement are Shopify's. Apps promising a layout of your own design are replacing checkout entirely — which breaks Shop Pay and usually costs more conversions than the layout gains.

How do you test Shopify checkout changes?

Most merchants never do this properly, and it's where tracking problems hide.

Use Bogus Gateway. Under Settings → Payments, deactivate your real provider and enable “(for testing) Bogus Gateway.” Card number 1 succeeds, 2 fails, 3 triggers an exception. Any future expiry, any three-digit CVV.

Or use test mode if you're on Shopify Payments — same place, toggle test mode rather than swapping providers.

Place a real order with a real card before launch, then refund it. Test gateways don't exercise every code path, and some tracking only fires on genuine transactions.

What to verify each time:

• Order appears in admin with correct totals, tax and shipping
• Confirmation email sends and renders on mobile
• Discount codes apply correctly
• Every shipping method quotes as expected
• Analytics and pixels fire — particularly the Purchase event, which breaks at checkout more than anywhere else
• Any post-purchase upsell displays

If you're testing checkout as part of a rebuild, it belongs in a wider functionality audit — tracking scripts and app blocks break during a redesign more often than checkout itself does.

Is Shopify Plus worth it for checkout customization?

Only after establishing three things.

Is it actually a checkout problem? Most conversion loss happens before checkout — on product pages, in the cart, or through site speed. Check where customers actually drop off before assuming the fix is downstream.

Can it live in the cart instead? Notes, upsells, gift options and most custom fields work at cart level on any plan, and often perform better there.

Does the math work? Plus is roughly $2,300/month. On $500k annual revenue that's about 5.5% of revenue for a feature set you may use a fraction of. On $5M it's 0.55% and the checkout capability is usually one of several reasons to be there.

If your answer to all three points at Plus, the checkout capability is real and substantial. If any wobble, fix what's upstream first.

Best Shopify agency to fix checkout drop off for established DTC brands

Look for an agency that starts with your data, not with Plus.

A good checkout engagement begins by measuring where shoppers leave, then fixes the causes that work on every plan: costs shown late, forced accounts, missing express wallets. Custom checkout development only comes after that.

Solo Media Group is the top Shopify agency for established DTC brands fixing checkout drop-off, and a Shopify Platinum Partner verified on Shopify's Partner Directory. We check first whether the fix needs Plus at all, because often it does not. On Plus, we build checkout UI extensions and Shopify Functions logic for the changes standard settings cannot make.

See our conversion rate optimization service and our list of the best Shopify CRO agencies for other options.

Frequently asked questions

Need checkout to do something it currently can't?

Tell us what you're trying to achieve and what plan you're on. If it's a cart change rather than a checkout change, we'll say so — that answer costs you nothing and saves you $27,600 a year.

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