Checkout Extensibility Implications: What Every Shopify Merchant Should Know
From tracking to customizations, ensure your business is prepared for the shift away from checkout.liquid.

Shopify is phasing out checkout.liquid and introducing Checkout Extensibility, a suite of features that offer enhanced customization for your checkout experience.
While these updates significantly improve post-purchase interactions, merchants need to know the change impacts tracking.
Switching from checkout.liquid to Checkout Extensibility will affect your tracking, and some customization features, such as preorders, try-before-you-buy and product bundles, are incompatible with the new system.
This article will cover:
Implications for Merchants
With checkout.liquid deprecated, Shopify merchants need to ensure their tracking scripts are protected. Failing to do so could result in the loss of important business data and functionality due to the removal of additional scripts.
Impact on Tracking
Enabling Checkout Extensibility poses risks to your tracking scripts if you don’t take certain actions to safeguard your tracking mechanisms ahead of time (we’ll explain those actions below).
Here’s how Checkout Extensibility could pose risks to your tracking scripts:
- All of the code or tags located within the tracking and the Additional Scripts section on the Order Status Page will stop firing.
- Apps relying on Shopify’s ScriptTag functionality may face disruptions because Checkout Extensibility isn’t compatible with apps using script tags.
It’s recommended to have a solution in place for each script prior to migrating.
Impact on Customizations
With Checkout Extensibility, customizations run in an app-scoped context. Unlike checkout.liquid, where customizations run on the parent element in the DOM, these apps run in a sandbox that can’t directly influence the parent DOM or other elements within the checkout process.
This allows for more stable, performant, secure, and upgrade-safe customizations.
Customizations that require access to the parent DOM or other elements on the page don’t work with Checkout Extensibility.
Examples of types of apps that are impacted by this change include:
- Heatmaps
- Visitor Recording
- A/B testing, which relies on manipulating the DOM directly
- Performance Monitoring
Solutions for Tracking
Shopify merchants can prepare their tracking mechanisms for the deprecation of checkout.liquid and making the upgrade to Checkout Extensibility by utilizing Custom Pixels and Customer Events.
Update Shopify Source
When you migrate to Checkout Extensibility, you’ll need to migrate your checkout code to Shopify’s new Customer Events setting.
For an in-depth guide on how to update your Elevar checkout tracking to be compatible with Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility, click here.
All Elevar customers should confirm their Shopify source is up to date:
- Within your Elevar app’s homepage, navigate to My Tracking.
- If you see a notice that says, Update Available on your Shopify Source, then follow our guide to upgrade.
Order Status Page Information
Secondly, you’ll want to ensure all checkout scripts are in place as Custom Pixels in Shopify’s Customer Events setting.
When the Checkout Extensibility upgrade is made, any code in the box titled Additional Scripts box (see below) will cease to function.

To resolve this issue, you’ll need to set up the new method of tracking for you via the Customer Events section of your Shopify Store.
For Elevar, we effectively remove our code from the Additional Scripts box and input different code into a Custom Pixel.
Additional Scripts
You shouldn’t copy/paste over the code from the Additional Scripts into a Custom Pixel because the Custom Pixel loads scripts within an iframe.
This means tracking scripts may not work as intended. Learn more here.
Questions about Checkout Extensibility?
As a Shopify Plus preferred partner, you can depend on Elevar to support your transition to Checkout Extensibility.
Elevar seamlessly integrates with Checkout Extensibility to load Google Tag Manager and fire checkout datalayer events using the Customer Events Setting.
Plus, Elevar differentiates between first-time subscriptions and one-time orders and identifies new vs returning purchases server-side.
Learn more about how Elevar can support your transition to Checkout Extensibility, or book a call with us.
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