Shopify Checkout is Shopify’s native payment gateway. It’s both highly secure and easy to use, which makes it one of Shopify’s most valuable selling points.
Shopify Checkout supports both sides of a transaction: customers submit an order request, input payment details and select a shipping option, and merchants choose to accept or query the order through a centralized system.
Shopify Checkout also provides its Partners a lucrative development opportunity. The payment gateway is fully functional as a stand-alone, however, Shopify strongly encourages third-party developers to build and market their own Shopify apps to improve and diversify the checkout process.
Read on to find out why Shopify Checkout is such a great product, and which additional third-party apps we recommend.
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Shopify Checkout is the best payment gateway found in ecommerce today.
Here are some of the many features and functions of Shopify Checkout that position them as market leaders.
1. Flexibility
As the world of ecommerce evolves, Shopify releases annual upgrades and new features in order to meet the changing needs of global users.
While Shopify’s native product is a powerful system in and of itself, Checkout owes much of its flexibility and versatility to third-party app developers, who are free to build any additional features as they see fit. Not only is this a great advantage to their user base, but also to the developer community: once vetted, Shopify supports the sale of these third-party apps through their own app store.
2. Speed
To this day, Shopify Checkout has processed over 2.5 billion orders. This system is top of the line in terms of speed, which not only means happier customers, but results in more sales conversions too.
3. Trust
In 2021, Shopify overtook Amazon as the busiest ecommerce platform. The numbers are staggering. Over 300 million customers have used Shopify Checkout, which represents $100 billion in sales across 2.5 billion orders.
In other words, Shopify supports a vast network of loyal customers worldwide.
4. Close rate
High customer satisfaction equates larger sales. This is a well-known fact in all branches of commerce, which is why businesses of all sizes invest in raising their customer satisfaction.
Shopify’s checkout experience is both simple and fast. This minimizes the window for prospective customers to quit out of impatience, get side-tracked with another task, or simply change their minds mid-purchase.
Shopify’s accelerated checkout system, known as Shop Pay, further increases the conversion rate of Shopify stores because it beats the speed of third-party payment processors by a whopping 60%.
For SaaS businesses, subscription revenue is the single best way to boost income. Shopify Checkout allows merchants to sell subscriptions as well as one-off products, which brings in an ongoing revenue stream.
Subscription sales also open up a whole other dimension of opportunities for third-party app developers.
I’m old enough to be surprised that 70% of shoppers make their purchases on their mobile phones, but the fact of the matter is, that’s just the world we live in. Shopify understands their user base well; their checkout process not only works on mobile, but is actually optimized specifically for mobile.
This means less faff for consumers, resulting in higher sales conversions than for checkout systems that refuse to acknowledge that the days of desktop buyers are fading.
Shop Pay is a great way to pay on Shopify Checkout, but it is only one of many supported payment methods. Others include Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
Customers can also use popular local methods of payment, multiple currencies, and digital wallets.
Shopify not only collects a broad range of data on customer behavior, but also gives merchants free access to all the information the platform has gathered.
The best way to action this data is through Baremetrics. Baremetrics integrates with Shopify directly, and plugs all your financial information into your dashboard to create personalized insights into your business. Try it out for yourself with Baremetrics’ free trial.
While the full functionality of Shopify Checkout is offered as a part of Shopify’s user plan, there are many third-party apps available via the Shopify app store to make the checkout process even better.
Here are some of our favorites. App names, prices and ratings were checked on the Shopify App Store on October 16, 2026.
Cartly Slide Cart Drawer (formerly One-Click Checkout)
Cartly replaces the default cart with a slide-out cart drawer and still lets customers skip the cart page and go straight to checkout. This app is perfect for any shoppers in a hurry.
Pricing is based on order volume: free for up to 20 total store orders, then $16.99/month (up to 100 monthly orders), $24.99/month (up to 300) and $49.99/month (up to 750), each with a 14-day free trial.
Cartly scores an average of 4.9/5 stars from 94 reviews.
Feature tiles from the 2021 One-Click Checkout listing (app since renamed to Cartly Slide Cart Drawer).
Warnify Pro Warnings (formerly Product Warnings on Checkout)
Warnify allows merchants to create popup warnings for different products in their shop. These could relate to shipping delays, sold-out products, or items available for pre-order, for example.
Warnify has a free plan, an Unlimited plan at $9.95/month and a Premium plan at $17.95/month.
Its overall rating is 4.8/5 from 239 reviews.
Feature tiles from the 2021 Product Warnings on Checkout listing (app since renamed to Warnify Pro Warnings).
Sticky Add to Cart Booster (formerly MultiBuy Sales Booster)
Its Multibuy feature is designed to allow customers to buy multiples of a single product, or to add many different products quickly, without clicking through to the individual product pages.
They offer a single Premium plan at $2.99/month, with a 5-day free trial.
This app scores 5/5 stars from 5 reviews.
Feature tiles from the 2021 MultiBuy Sales Booster listing (app since renamed to Sticky Add to Cart Booster).
Users who have some coding experience can also customize Checkout manually using Shopify’s Storefront API. Shopify offers custom storefronts as part of their plan, and has included a comprehensive guide on how to use this tool here.
Shopify Unite 2021 was one of the biggest Shopify Unite events in company history. Numerous substantial updates were announced, including Shopify Hydrogen and Oxygen for Shopify app developers, as well as a brand new version of the Shopify Partners dashboard.
One of the biggest changes affecting Shopify Partners was the revenue share change. App developers paid 0% revenue share on their first million in revenue every year, and only 15% thereafter (in 2025 Shopify made the $1,000,000 threshold a lifetime amount that no longer resets), positioning Shopify as the most profitable platform for their partners compared to their competitors.
Shopify Checkout also got a makeover; here are some of the updates we’re most excited about.
Go big or go home, right? To give you an idea of how much the through-put of Shopify Checkout has improved, picture the sales frenzy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Shopify now enables every shop to process that same volume at any moment. That’s almost 40,000 purchases per minute for every shop!
Secure app-building with Checkout Extensions
Shopify Unite has a long tradition of optimizing their platform for the benefit of merchants and Shopify Partners alike. In some cases, a single feature update caters to both ends of that user spectrum. This is the case for Checkout Extensions.
With Checkout Extensions, it has become much easier to customize Shopify Checkout. This not only opens the process up to more app development opportunities, but also provides merchants with many new options, such as in-cart upselling or including a donation button with a purchase.
Update (checked October 16, 2026): Shopify Scripts has since been retired. Shopify's Help Center says that as of June 30, 2026, Shopify Scripts has been deprecated and Scripts still published on a store have been deactivated. Shopify now points merchants and developers to Shopify Functions to recreate these customizations. The rest of this section describes Scripts as they were announced at Unite 2021.
Shopify Scripts allowed developers to add a range of new functions to their stores, including in the checkout process. Shopify Scripts executed within Shopify, so could be scaled up at volume.
For example, a developer could create an app that displays estimated carbon emissions of different shipping methods, so customers can enforce environmentally conscious choices.
For merchants who wish to develop a different style of checkout, Shopify Scripts also allowed developers to change the overall look and flow of this process as well.
Shopify’s new Payments Platform replaces their legacy system of integrations, so that payment processors can connect with the Shopify platform more easily.
As a result, Shopify Partners can now create payment gateway apps. Shopify merchants will be able to spread to more niche markets, as well as sell in more locations across the globe.
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