Shopify Checkout Customisation in 2026: What You Can Change on Each Plan

Shopify’s checkout is no longer a template you edit. With checkout.liquid and Shopify Scripts both retired, every change now runs through four tools: the checkout and accounts editor, checkout UI extensions, Shopify Functions and pixels.

What you can do with each depends on two things: your plan, and whether the app doing the work is a public app from the Shopify App Store or a custom app built for your store alone.

Here is where the line sits, plan by plan. These rules change often, so every one below comes from Shopify’s developer docs and help centre, checked on 4 October 2026.

What each plan can change

What you want to change	Basic, Grow, Advanced	Plus
Logo, colours and fonts in the checkout and accounts editor	Yes	Yes
Checkout and accounts pages adapted for each market	Advanced only	Yes
Styling through the Checkout Branding API	No	Yes
App blocks on the Thank you and Order status pages	Yes	Yes
App blocks on customer account pages	Yes	Yes
App blocks in the information, shipping and payment steps	No	Yes
Public App Store apps that use Shopify Functions	Yes	Yes
Custom apps that use Shopify Functions	No	Yes
Cart transforms that override a line’s price, title or image	No	Yes
Payment terms set by a payment customisation	No	Yes
App pixels for tracking	Yes	Yes
Checkout Blocks, Shopify’s free checkout app	Content blocks on Thank you and Order status pages only	All features
checkout.liquid	No	No
Shopify Scripts	No	No

The pattern is simple. Below Plus, you can brand the checkout, add to the pages customers see after paying, and install public apps that change checkout logic. Plus adds the checkout steps themselves, logic built for your store alone, API-level styling, and a few Function features that stay Plus only whichever app provides them, such as payment terms and cart line price overrides.

The checkout and accounts editor

The editor lives under Settings > Checkout in the Shopify admin. Click Edit on a checkout configuration and you get one place to edit the checkout, Thank you, Order status and customer account pages, separate from your theme editor. Shopify’s help centre lists access to it on the Basic plan or higher.

The branding settings cover your logo, with its width and alignment, plus colours, fonts, a reusable colour palette, form field styles and the order summary background. One recent change: Shopify says that as of 5 February 2026 you can no longer add a background image to the checkout header or the main content area.

Two things sit beyond the editor’s own settings. Customising checkout and accounts pages for specific markets needs the Advanced or Plus plan. And the Checkout Branding API, which styles checkout through the Admin API, is Plus only, as is using Checkout Blocks for those advanced branding changes.

For many stores, the editor alone is enough to make checkout match the rest of the site.

Checkout UI extensions: where Plus starts

Checkout UI extensions are how apps add content and fields to checkout: a delivery instructions field, a banner, an upsell offer, a survey. Merchants place them as blocks in the checkout and accounts editor, with up to three extensions in the same block location.

The plan line is at the top of Shopify’s reference: “Checkout UI extensions for the information, shipping, and payment steps are available only to stores on a Shopify Plus plan.” On a one-page checkout, those steps are the single Checkout page. The help centre adds that this covers checkouts from draft orders too.

Every plan from Basic up can use apps with UI extensions on:

• The Thank you page, shown once after purchase. Shopify’s examples include a survey asking how the customer heard about you.
• The Order status page, which customers return to from their confirmation email. Examples include product review requests and upsells through order editing.
• Customer account pages, such as order history and profile.

So “can we add a field to checkout?” is a Plus question, and “can we add a survey after purchase?” is not.

Checkout Blocks

Checkout Blocks is Shopify’s own free app for customising checkout without code. Its help page sets the limit plainly: “Merchants on the Basic plan or higher can use the dynamic content and static content blocks, and can place them only on their Thank you and Order status pages. All other features of Checkout Blocks are available only to Shopify Plus.” Those other features include custom fields, reordering payment and delivery methods, order value limits and custom discounts.

Shopify Functions: public app or custom app

Shopify Functions change checkout logic rather than what customers see. They run inside Shopify’s backend, compiled to WebAssembly, and Shopify calls them at set points as the customer moves through checkout. The ones that matter here:

• Discount: new discount types, including tiered discounts and exclusions, across products, orders and shipping.
• Delivery customisation: rename, sort and hide delivery options.
• Payment customisation: rename, reorder and hide payment methods.
• Cart transform: bundles, by expanding or merging cart lines.
• Cart and checkout validation: stop checkout when a rule fails, such as a quantity limit or a B2B order minimum, including in express checkouts like Shop Pay and Apple Pay.

The plan rule is the same for all of them, and Shopify states it at the top of its Functions guide: “Stores on any plan can use public apps that are distributed through the Shopify App Store and contain functions. Only stores on a Shopify Plus plan can use custom apps that contain Shopify Function APIs.”

In practice, a Basic store can hide a payment method or add a tiered discount, as long as a public app does exactly what it needs. If the rule is specific to your business and no app models it, a custom Function is a Plus conversation. We set out how to make that call in when a custom Shopify app is worth building.

The Functions reference says that rule applies “except as noted in individual API pages”, and three of those notes matter:

• Cart transform: only Plus stores, and development stores, can use apps that override a cart line’s price, title or image. Bundles that expand or merge lines carry no such note.
• Payment customisation: setting payment terms is Plus only, and so is choosing which placements a payment method is hidden from. The help centre also says that below Plus in the United States and Canada, payment customisations apply only to non-credit-card methods.
• Delivery customisation: hiding delivery options for PO Box addresses only works for rates from carrier services or third-party shipping apps, because with Shopify’s built-in rates the address data may not reach the function.

Installed customisations are managed in the admin: payment customisations under Settings > Payments, delivery customisations under Settings > Shipping and delivery, and validation rules as checkout rules under Settings > Checkout.

Shopify Functions limitations

Functions are fast because they are constrained. These are the limits in Shopify’s reference:

• Size and work: a compiled function can be up to 256 kB. For carts of up to 200 lines it gets 11 million instructions, 128 kB of input and 20 kB of output, and some limits scale for larger carts.
• Input: the query that feeds the function is capped at 3,000 bytes and a calculated cost of 30.
• No randomness and no clock: Shopify does not allow either.
• External data: calling another service from a function, the fetch target, is limited to custom apps on Enterprise stores, or on Plus and Enterprise stores for discount functions, and network access has to be requested. Otherwise data comes from metafields or cart attributes.
• Counts: up to 25 discount functions and 25 validation functions per store, and one cart transform function per app.

None of these get in the way of ordinary discount, delivery or payment rules. They do mean a function usually cannot ask your ERP for live data, so that data has to be in Shopify already.

Pixels

Pixels handle tracking, and they have changed as much as the checkout. They are managed in the Customer events section of the admin, in two forms: app pixels, installed with marketing and analytics apps, and custom pixels, added by a developer in the pixels manager. Apps built with web pixel extensions work on every plan from Basic up, and the Thank you page supports app pixels.

The catch is the sandbox. App pixels run in a strict sandbox inside a web worker, and custom pixels in a sandboxed iframe that cannot reach the page around it. Anything that relied on reading or writing the page will not work; pixels use the customer events Shopify passes in instead. Where customers must consent to tracking, app pixel callbacks only run after consent.

If your conversion tracking was a snippet pasted into the old Thank you page, it needs to be rebuilt as a pixel.

The end of checkout.liquid

checkout.liquid is gone on every plan. Shopify’s checkout guide for developers says “checkout.liquid is now unsupported for the Information, Shipping, and Payment checkout steps.” For the Thank you and Order status pages, it says checkout.liquid and additional scripts were sunset on 28 August 2025, and that script tags on those pages were sunset on 28 August 2025 for Plus stores and on 26 August 2026 for non-Plus stores.

The help centre says 26 August 2026 was the deadline for non-Plus stores to upgrade their existing Thank you and Order status pages, and that the additional scripts section has been view-only since 28 August 2025.

If Settings > Checkout still shows an upgrade notice on a configuration, open the upgrade guide Shopify generated for it. It lists your apps, the incompatible ones and your additional scripts, with suggested replacements.

Shopify Scripts

Scripts, written in Ruby, used to change discount, shipping and payment rules on Plus stores. Editing stopped on 15 April 2026 and all Scripts stopped running on 30 June 2026, so they are not part of any plan now. Functions replace them, and the Scripts customisations report in the admin lists what your store had. We covered what quietly broke, and how to check, in Shopify Scripts stopped on 30 June.

Which plan do you need?

Write down the checkout changes you want, then sort them:

• Branding, post-purchase pages, account pages and tracking work on the plan you have.
• A logic change that a public app already makes works on the plan you have.
• UI inside the checkout steps, a custom Function, payment terms at checkout or API-level styling needs Plus.

B2B is a separate question. The B2B basics have been on every plan from Basic up since 2 April 2026, and our Shopify B2B guide covers what Plus still adds. If your list lands on Plus, what a Shopify Plus build costs in Australia sets out the fees, and our Shopify Plus page covers when the tier is worth it.

Three of our developers hold Shopify certifications, and checkout extensions and Functions are where that matters. When no public app does the job, we build custom Shopify apps. More on our Shopify development work.

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Sources: Shopify’s developer docs on apps in checkout, checkout UI extensions, Thank you and Order status page customisation, checkout styling, Shopify Functions, Function APIs, the discount, delivery customisation, payment customisation, cart transform and cart and checkout validation Function APIs, and web pixels; Shopify’s help centre on checkout and accounts customisation by plan, the checkout and accounts editor, checkout style, checkout apps, Thank you and Order status customisation options, payment and delivery customisations, Checkout Blocks, upgrading non-Plus Thank you and Order status pages, pixels and customer events, Shopify Scripts and moving from Scripts to Functions; and Shopify’s developer changelog on Shopify Scripts deprecation. All checked 4 October 2026.