9 effective ways to customize your Shopify checkout process

If you’re using Shopify for your online business, you need to customize your checkout.

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Shopify’s default checkout page works, but it doesn’t provide the quality of customer experience that wins you conversions or keeps customers coming back. From conversion rate optimization strategies to methods of increasing your revenue and average order values, a Shopify custom checkout can help your business thrive.

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How to customize your Shopify checkout

Customizing your Shopify checkout can provide a number of benefits, including increased revenue, average order values, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction. To get started, you’ll need to first consider which Shopify checkout you’re using.

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Shopify’s main checkout system for the last few years has been checkout.liquid which uses code to customize the look, feel, and composition of your checkout. In many cases, it requires development experience to make changes yourself or a number of apps to address all your needs. It also makes Shopify and app updates riskier, as changes to either could interfere with the other and lead to the checkout process breaking.

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Checkout Extensibility is the new framework that’s being slowly rolled out to stores to help simplify checkout customization. It uses apps instead of code to help protect your checkout from catastrophic errors and allows for a wide range of customizations with the native checkout editor or Shopify checkout extensions.

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If you’re looking to get a head start on customizing your checkout, give Checkout Extensions Plus a try. It’ll help unlock essential customization options for Checkout Extensibility without requiring coding experience.

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The 9 best customizations for Shopify checkout

Branding

Branding is a small but important customization to make. Shopify’s default checkout page is customized by the theme you choose, but it doesn’t always match your branding in terms of text styling or design. You don’t want to have a mismatched customer experience, so consistent branding is a simple way to encourage a seamless transaction.

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Add your logo and assets where it makes sense, including banners, and change the colors to match your brand so that everything stays uniform to help inspire confidence in customers.

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FAQs and important info

Once you’ve got potential customers to the checkout process, your goal is to keep them on the page until they complete their purchase. Nearly 70% of carts are abandoned, and it’s much more difficult to get a customer back to checkout a second time, so you need to provide all the information they need to make a decision at checkout.

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Adding elements like FAQs, return policies, shipping information, and customer support options can help answer questions potential customers may have to minimize cart abandonment.

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Social proof

Social proof is a major motivator for closing the deal with customers. 93% of consumers say that they consider online reviews before making a purchase, so including social proof may be enough to make or break a sale.

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Reviews, testimonials, feedback, and figures like products sold or customer counts can help reassure customers about their purchases to help improve conversions.

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Upsells and cross-sells

You should always be trying to generate more revenue - and cross-sells and upsells for Shopify make it easy. They’re offers that provide a discounted upgrade or additional product that aims to increase the amount a customer spends in your store per purchase.

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Using an app like UpsellPlus, you can create custom-tailored offers that customers want to take advantage of and place them throughout your checkout process to maximize conversions.

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Countdowns

FOMO, or fear of missing out, is a common but effective strategy for increasing conversions in your online store. It works to apply pressure to customers so that they have to make a decision quickly, which helps to improve conversion rates.

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You may create a banner that counts down from a specific time, a “limited stock” element that shows that others have the item in their cart, or any other timer that instills urgency into the transaction.

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Customized fields

The checkout fields take up a significant portion of the checkout process. The more information you require customers to give, the longer it takes to check out and the less likely they are to complete the sale.

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You can add or remove fields that you don’t need to include, like the shipping address for a digital sale, to expedite the process.

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Alternatively, your business may need more checkout fields than those included by default. Customer notes, gift messages, and scheduling fields can help to provide a more complete checkout process that increases confidence without needing to reach out to customers post-purchase.

Express checkout

As we’ve mentioned, checkout speed plays a huge role in the success of your checkout process. Express checkout options, including Shop Pay by Shopify, can save customers the time of entering their information so that completing a purchase is as simple as a few clicks.

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Trust elements

Online business is a very trust-heavy industry. With little to no interaction between your company and the customer in many cases, your checkout page needs to address any concerns customers may have about security and trust.

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You can add security badges, warranties, guarantees, or any other element that puts your customers’ minds at ease so that they can continue the transaction.

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Additional payment methods

Customers like to use their preferred payment methods. In fact, approximately 9% of abandoned carts are due to insufficient payment methods, so it’s important to include all reasonable payment methods that you can for your store. Shopify Checkout already takes many forms of payment, but be on the lookout for apps you can add to minimize the chances of a lost sale.

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Build a Shopify custom checkout with UpsellPlus and Checkout Extensions Plus

Customizing your Shopify checkout used to be difficult. However, with the development of Checkout Extensibility, it’s easier and safer than ever - and the right apps make it simple.

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UpsellPlus uses an algorithm to help you build effective upsells and cross-sells throughout your checkout flow so that you can place a minimally invasive, high reward that increases your AOV. 

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Checkout Extensions Plus provides a simple but effective interface for interacting with Checkout Extensibility’s many checkout customizations to make both small and large changes to your checkout for improved conversions.

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Both UpsellPlus and Checkout Extensions Plus include a 7-day free trial, so give them a try to see how you can improve revenue in your store.

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