Regardless of how you acquire your audience on your website, the marketing funnel takes your buyers through the most crucial area of your online store - the checkout. Different Shopify plans allow you to customize your checkout on Shopify. Therefore the journey to convert a customer, from the shopping cart to your confirmation page has to be smooth, informative, branded, and allow for promotions such as discount codes. With Social Media and mobile phones, the user experience must accommodate various payment methods. Your Shopify store will have a strong conversion with a fast and intuitive interface.
Customize your checkout on Shopify - the past
By default, you get a checkout experience by Shopify regardless of the plan, using the best-in-breed and highly competitive interface for an eCommerce platform. With the maturing of a business, there will be times when the user experience might require some customization in the checkout area. In various platforms where access to the checkout pages was editable, developers could enhance and change the checkout experience, and with Shopify, changing the checkout.liquid file. Shopify Custom Apps or Private Apps couldn't access the checkout area and the development required some technical ability via Shopify Partners/Shopify Experts.
Developer Preview available for the extensibility of your checkout on Shopify
With user-centered design and customer experience guiding the improvements in conversions, Shopify Plus merchants have now a Developer Preview ability to check on the user experience UX. While this may not be within reach of some small businesses, medium to large businesses might fit the profile of Shopify Plus and its enhanced features and architectural benefits. Uniquely designed to be integrated with Shop Pay, the checkout process aims to be secure, fast, upgraded/efficient/safe, and now customizable via Shopify Apps for checkout extensibility. Shopify is now allowing Shopify partners to deploy the Custom Shopify App in the Shopify Store. This gives the developer community the to add their customizations for the Shopify Plus community to engage and match their needs and have it in their store without a long development process. Development can now use checkout UI extensions with the Shopify functions for feature deployment at the Shopify Checkout and Shop Pay. Merchants can exploit the Shopify Branding API to customize the styling and pixels to track events.
Checkout UI extensions
The checkout UI extensions are adding unique elements within the checkout process - product offers, custom fields, custom banners, adaptable to various flows as well as Shop Pay. Buyers get a unique experience when presented with an optimized experience based on the brand's way of handling the audience at this critical stage of conversion. Checkout UI automatically takes on the branding appearance of your checkout, which reduces duplication. Checkout UI has the visual design capabilities covered while Shopify functions carry the merchandising capabilities.
Shopify functions
You can extend or replace functionality on the business side of the checkout of discounts, products, or shipping. Tiered (volume) discounts are now possible. You can hide, reorder or present unique shipping or payment options so you can provide a custom experience to customers. What comes next are blended shipping rates, checkout/cart/return validations, and programmable order routing where you can then customize further your Shopify store.
Publish secure customer events
The power of pixels passes along behavioral customer data for Ads, A/B testing, marketing, and analysis. The Pixels API provides event lists to which merchants can subscribe and can be developed into your Custom Shopify App. Shopify Apps will use the hooks in the Pixels API and correlate to the checkout UI and provide additional insight into user behavior and be able to steer the business in a continuous improvement loop.
Checkout Branding API
This is a new functionality that allows you to customize your branding at checkout as well as Shop Pay. Logo, font, and colors can now be propagated and styled within your checkout experience. Rounded corners around fields, using your brand colors with the appropriate font to have Brand ID all the way through to the confirmation page.
Conclusion
Where you are going for some user experience design or Pixel-based user research and you are trying to increase conversion over a simple free shipping promo, the full marketing funnel can culminate in higher conversions at the checkout area. All Shopify Plus plan businesses should consider this crucial new functionality that was announced in June 2022 by Shopify. Sell your products with greater confidence. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at wish@thegenielab.com.