Shopify checkout page: How to customise + Examples

We all know the importance of a good checkout experience. After all, that’s where your customers hand over the money!

With the checkout experience playing such a large role in conversions and customer loyalty, it’s important to understand how you can optimise yours – and the role of tools like Shopify checkout.

In this article, we’re going to deep dive into Shopify checkout, covering everything you need to know to create a frictionless checkout experience for your eCommerce store. We’ll also explore the rest of Shopify’s checkout solutions, the role of checkout extensibility and how shipping fits in.

Finally, we’ll look at some of the other must-haves for a checkout experience so you can build loyal customers that keep coming back. Let’s dive in.

Table of contents

• What is Shopify checkout?
• What are the benefits of Shopify checkout?
• What’s new in Shopify checkout
• A guide to Shopify’s checkout and payment solutions
• 5 considerations for your Shopify checkout experience
• 3 examples of great Shopify checkouts
• How to edit the checkout page in Shopify
• Understanding shipping and Shopify checkout
• Quick Shopify checkout page FAQs
• Wrap up

What are the benefits of Shopify checkout?

Beyond offering a rock-solid checkout option for eCommerce businesses, what are some of the other benefits of using Shopify checkout?

• Speed – Shopify has now processed over 2.5 billion orders, a number that continues to climb. Shopify checkout is one of the fastest checkout solutions available.
• Delivers conversions – When you use Shopify checkout, you know you’re getting a solution that will give you a high close rate. Shopify checkout is fast and easy to use, meaning it’s one less potential drop-off point for customers. You can speed things up even further with Shop Pay, which we’ll cover below.
• Support for subscriptions – Shopify checkout has full support for selling subscriptions, which is ideal for SaaS businesses.
• Support for multiple payment methods – Shopify checkout supports Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Apple Pay, Google Pay and more. Customers can also use local payment methods and various currencies.
• Native mobile support – By 2025, mobile is set to make up 44.2% of all retail eCommerce sales in the US. To ensure retailers are ready, Shopify designed Shopify checkout to work perfectly with mobile.
• Integrations – Shopify checkout’s extensibility means you can add another apps and services to add additional functionality.

Shopify checkout: New feature overview

Drag-and-drop checkout editor

There's a new drag and drop checkout editor which integrates with Shop Pay so that retailers can give their customers a consistent brand and buyer experience. Note that Shopify announced this new feature is exclusive to Shopify Plus.

You can now add your own logo, change the font and change the background color or image in your checkout.

Extend your checkout with apps

As part of this update, you can also install apps which integrate directly with the checkout. This lets you do things like add your own loyalty program, insert additional fields and display live shipping rates to your customers (with apps like Starshipit).

Cart and checkout validations

You can now create rules that implement custom and dynamic restrictions to determine whether a product can be purchased (and in what quantities) with validations. This feature is built on Shopify Functions.

Speed up the checkout process

You can use Shop’s sign-in features to let customers seamlessly sign in and checkout, which will help to increase your conversions.

A guide to Shopify’s checkout and payment solutions

If you’ve visited the main Shopify website, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by sheer number of solutions the company offers. Here are the two main Shopify payment and checkout services you need to know about.

Shop Pay

Shop Pay is an online accelerated checkout service which allows customers to save their email, credit card and shipping and billing information so they can save time at checkout. As a payment solution, it sits alongside other payment options like Visa and Apple Pay etc. in your checkout.

Shop App

Shop App is two things: a sales channel which you add to your Shopify Admin, and an app which is available to customers. Together, this means you can sell products to customers who have the app installed on their phone. It’s also designed to be used with Shop Pay to speed up the conversion process.

5 considerations for your Shopify checkout experience

1. Use live rates at checkout

With live rates at checkout, you can display a range of shipping options to customers at the point of purchase – right from within Shopify checkout. Live rates helps customers to know exactly what they’re paying for at the point of purchase. You can also configure your own margins and use rules to create helpful automations. You can do all of this with Starshipit.

2. Make your Shopify checkout as frictionless as possible

Your goal when creating your checkout page should be to reduce friction as much as possible. Keep your page layout simple and be sure to offer fast payment options like Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay to move customers through without bottlenecks.

3. Make it easy for customers to get in touch

If a customer ever runs into an issue when they’re going through your checkout, you don’t want them leaving the page to dig up a support article or phone number. Instead, make sure you’ve got helpful resources available right on the checkout page, including phone numbers and FAQs.

4. Give customers an idea of their progress

Checkout progress indicators are a great way to reassure customers of the length of the checkout process. For example, you might have the following four indicators at the top of the screen: Information, Shipping, Payment and Complete.

5. Allow guest checkout

You should never lose a sale due to an account sign-up requirement. If customers want to check out as a guest, let them. Besides, if you reduce friction with their first purchase, chances are they’ll be more likely to return to your store in future.

3 examples of great Shopify checkouts

Here are some examples of Shopify checkout pages from leading retailers to give you an idea of how to structure your own. We’ll say it again: Keep it simple!

How to edit the checkout page in Shopify

To edit your checkout page in Shopify, head to the theme editor. This is where you can add your logo, change the colours of icons and buttons and adjust the font to one that matches the rest of your website. Remember, as we touched on above, keep your checkout design simple. You want as few barriers as possible.

Check out Shopify’s guide for specific instructions of everything you can customise.

Here’s a list of everything you can edit on your Shopify checkout page:

• Background image for the banner
• Logo
• Background image or color on the main content area
• The colour of the form fields
• Background image or color to the order summary
• The font on the checkout page
• Button and accent colors on the checkout page

Understanding shipping and Shopify checkout

If you’ve used Shopify before, you’ll likely have noticed that Shopify does offer a service called Shopify Shipping. However, this is only useful if you’re shipping small volumes and aren’t planning on growing. You can only get Shopify Shipping in certain countries too.

Using a more complete shipping solution like Starshipit gives you the ability to grow on your terms and access other useful features, including:

• Customisable SMS/email notifications and branded tracking pages.
• International shipping automation (Shopify international shipping can be quite challenging).
• Use your own courier rates that you negotiate directly with courier companies (instead of using pre-set rates).
• Ability to autocorrect invalid addresses
• Ready-to-go integrations and a robust API.
• Shipping analytics to understand how the delivery side of your business is running.

Wrap up

So that’s everything you need to know about Shopify checkout! While it’s quite a basic tool on its own, the extensibility means you can build on it to create a checkout experience that works for the needs of your business.

As we’ve seen, shipping obviously has a large part to play in getting your customers over the line once they’ve arrived at the checkout – so make sure this part works well! Take a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) or speak to one of our friendly team if you’d like to get this part of your checkout experience right.