How do I customize the Shopify checkout page?
Short answer: Shopify’s checkout is a locked box unless you go through checkout extensibility. On Shopify Plus an app block drops your own content inside it, and Smart Checkout Widgets adds gifts, upsells, trust badges and custom fields to the checkout page without touching checkout.liquid. Free to install, 5.0 stars across 4 reviews.
Here is the part most guides on how to customize the Shopify checkout page still get wrong: they were written for a checkout that no longer exists. checkout.liquid is gone. Shopify’s own theme docs put it bluntly, it is “unsupported for the Information, Shipping, and Payment checkout steps”, and it was sunset for the Thank you and Order status pages on August 28, 2025. Script tags on those two pages went the same way for Plus stores that day, and for everyone else on August 26, 2026. Which was eleven days ago.
So if a badge, a shipping note, or a tracking snippet quietly disappeared from your thank-you page in the last two weeks, that’s why. Nothing broke. It was scheduled.
We build Shopify apps ourselves (variant images and combined listings), and when we write up a partner app we hold it to the standard we’d want applied to our own listing: every number below comes from Smart Checkout Widgets’ own App Store listing, its documentation, and Shopify’s developer docs, checked on September 6, 2026. Where the app can’t do something, we say so.
In this post
- What can you actually change in the Shopify checkout?
- What is Smart Checkout Widgets?
- The twelve widgets, and why every plan gets all of them
- How do checkout gifts work?
- How do you hide or rename a payment method?
- How much does Smart Checkout Widgets cost?
- Where it isn’t the right pick
- FAQ
What can you actually change in the Shopify checkout?
Three separate things, and they carry three different plan requirements. Merchants mix them up constantly, then conclude “checkout customization needs Plus,” which is only a third true.
| What you want to change | How it works | Plan needed |
|---|---|---|
| Content inside the checkout steps (badges, banners, fields, gifts, upsells) | Checkout UI extensions, placed as app blocks in the checkout editor | Shopify Plus |
| Which shipping and payment methods a buyer sees | Shopify Functions (delivery and payment customization) | All plans |
| Content on the Thank you and Order status pages | Checkout UI extensions on the post-purchase targets | All plans |
That first row is Shopify’s rule, not an app’s. Their docs for checkout UI extensions say it in one line: extensions “for the information, shipping, and payment steps are available only to stores on a Shopify Plus plan.” No app gets around it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something that will break.
But rows two and three are the ones worth shouting about, because they need no Plus plan at all. Hiding cash on delivery over a certain cart value, renaming “Standard Shipping” to something a human understands, putting a returns explainer on the thank-you page: a store on the cheapest Basic plan can do every one of those. We covered the method side of this in our guide to the best Shopify checkout rules apps, including the free native route most stores never find.
What is Smart Checkout Widgets?
Smart Checkout Widgets is a Shopify app by Thought Bulb, a studio based in Warsaw, launched on February 12, 2024. It covers all three rows of that table from one admin: content widgets inside checkout, rules for shipping and payment methods, and widgets on the Thank you and Order status pages. It’s listed in two App Store categories, Checkout and Upsell and bundles, which tells you what it’s for. It carries 5.0 stars across 4 reviews.
Four reviews. Let’s not skate past that. We’ll come back to what a small review count does and doesn’t tell you, because it’s the single most important thing to weigh here, and the honest answer isn’t the one you’d expect.
“great app, allows us to add cart checkout options per customer, and great service and help with getting it setup”
UK Office Furniture, United Kingdom, February 2026, Smart Checkout Widgets on the Shopify App Store
Setup runs through Shopify’s checkout editor rather than the app. You install it, open Settings, then Checkout, then Customize, drop the app block where you want content to appear, and save the profile. After that, widgets you create in the app publish to checkout the moment you save them. You don’t republish the checkout profile every time. Place the block once, then iterate.
The twelve widgets, and why every plan gets all of them
Twelve widget types, and here’s the part we think is the app’s actual differentiator: every widget is on every plan. The plans differ by monthly order volume, not by feature. That’s a pricing model we wish more apps copied, and we say that as people who have agonized over our own plan tiers more than once.
| Widget | What it does |
|---|---|
| Trust badges | A badge row with your own images and labels: secure payment, returns, guarantees |
| Payment icons | Shows the card and wallet icons you accept |
| Custom banner | A highlighted message block for shipping cut-offs or promotions |
| Custom content | Free-form rich content where a banner is too rigid |
| Accordion | Collapsible sections (returns policy, delivery FAQs) that don’t crowd the page |
| Consent check | A checkbox buyers must tick, for terms or age confirmation |
| Custom fields | Extra inputs captured at checkout and written onto the order |
| Line item fields | Per-product inputs: engraving text, gift notes |
| Line item options | Lets buyers change variant or quantity from inside checkout |
| Cart value progress | A progress meter toward a threshold, such as free shipping |
| Upsell | Offers additional products in checkout |
| Gifts | Automatic or coupon-triggered free products |
Two of those deserve more attention than they get. Line item options lets a shopper fix the wrong size from inside checkout instead of backing out to the product page, and backing out is where carts die. Consent check quietly solves an age-verification or terms requirement that otherwise sends merchants shopping for a second app. Buying four apps to cover four widgets is how a checkout gets slow, which is the argument for putting all twelve widget types behind one checkout app block instead. Free to install up to 100 orders a month.
Worth knowing where a checkout upsell sits relative to everything else you might already run. It fires later than a cart drawer offer and earlier than a post-purchase one, and it’s the only one of the three that can’t be dismissed by leaving the page. Our roundup of the best Shopify upsell apps sorted by where the offer fires maps the whole sequence, and if you’re deciding between bundling and upselling in the first place, we’ve argued elsewhere that they’re different jobs that only look alike.
How do checkout gifts work?
Two trigger types, and they behave differently enough that picking the wrong one costs you money. An automatic gift lands when the cart meets a rule you set, a spend threshold or the presence of particular products, and the buyer does nothing. A coupon gift is tied to a discount code: apply the code, get the gift; remove the code, lose the gift.
Automatic is the one to reach for. Codes need distribution, they get shared to coupon sites, and they punish the shopper who didn’t find them. If you’re running codes anyway, our free discount code generator will at least keep them tidy and non-guessable.
Then there’s customer choice, which is the feature we’d actually install this for. Instead of one fixed gift, you offer several and let the shopper pick their own reward at checkout, with a cap on how many they take, so a “pick 2 of 6” promotion stays inside its margin. Run the numbers before you set that cap; our profit margin calculator will tell you in about thirty seconds whether a two-item gift at a $120 threshold is generosity or a slow leak.
Now the gotcha, and full credit to Thought Bulb for putting it in their own documentation rather than letting merchants discover it in an order export. Price your gift variants normally in your catalog. The app discounts the gift at checkout. If you set the variant to zero in the catalog instead, there’s no price left to discount, so a gift that fails to be removed gets given away at zero rather than reverting to full price. That’s the kind of detail vendors usually bury, and its presence in public docs says something about how the app is run.
If gift-with-purchase is the whole reason you’re here and you’re not on Plus, read our walkthrough of how to add a free gift with purchase on Shopify first. Shopify’s native Buy X get Y discount can make a gift free, but it never shows the offer anywhere, which is the entire problem.
How do you hide or rename a payment method?
This is the part that works on every Shopify plan, and it’s the most underused feature in the whole category. Three actions, applied to shipping methods or payment methods: rename, show or hide, and reorder. Rules run through Shopify Functions, so they survive theme updates and checkout changes without you doing anything.
What triggers a rule is a condition, and the condition set is genuinely deep. Cart total, subtotal, quantity, order weight. Customer tag, logged-in state, order count, lifetime spend. Whether the cart holds a digital or physical product, a product tag, a collection. Country, state, city, postal code. Day of week, or a specific date. Combine them with Always, Any, All, None, or Any not.
Four behaviors from the docs will save you an afternoon of confusion, so here they are in one place. Text conditions take comma-separated lists, so PL, DE, FR is one condition and not three. Customer conditions never match a guest checkout, because there’s no customer record to read. Missing data never matches, including negative conditions, so “city is not Warsaw” is false when no city has been entered yet. And weight is always in grams, whatever unit your variants use.
One thing no app can do, and the docs say so plainly: Shopify won’t let you hide the “Pick up” delivery method itself. Individual pickup locations, yes. The tab, no. Hide every location and you may be left with an empty tab. That’s a platform limit. If a competitor’s marketing implies otherwise, that’s marketing. For a non-Plus store that only needs the rules half of this, our BeSure Checkout Rules review covers a narrower alternative built for exactly that job.
How much does Smart Checkout Widgets cost?
Three plans, billed in USD through Shopify every 30 days. Starter is free to install. Growth and Advanced both carry a 7-day free trial, and annual billing saves 20%.
| Plan | Monthly | Yearly | Monthly orders | Widgets included |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free to install | Free to install | Up to 100 | All 12 |
| Growth | $29 | $278.40 | Up to 1,000 | All 12 |
| Advanced | $59 | $566.40 | Unlimited | All 12 |
Read the middle column against your own order count and the model gets clear fast. A store doing 90 orders a month runs the whole feature set for nothing. At 1,100 orders you’re on Advanced at $59 and you stop thinking about limits forever. Compare that to Shopify Plus itself, which shopify.com lists at from $2,300 a month (our Shopify pricing breakdown and plan comparison tool put that next to the lower tiers) and the app is a rounding error next to the plan it requires.
One behavior to know before you scale into it: go over your plan’s order limit and widgets keep running until you’re 25% past it, then they switch off. Upgrading turns them back on automatically, with no support ticket and no reconfiguration. A grace band instead of a cliff, which is the correct design and not what most apps do.
Where it isn’t the right pick
Back to those 4 reviews. Most people read a small review count backwards: they treat it as a quality signal. It isn’t. It’s a sample size, and 4 reviews tells you almost nothing either way. What tells you something is that the app launched in February 2024, so it’s been live for more than two and a half years. This isn’t a week-old app fishing for early adopters. It’s a small app with a small user base and a perfect record across it, which is a different risk profile entirely.
“Great widget, very useful and it simply works! Highly recommended!”
WAAY Protein Shakes, Poland, February 2026, Smart Checkout Widgets on the Shopify App Store
Three honest limits. If you’re not on Plus, you get the shipping and payment rules plus the Thank you and Order status widgets, and nothing inside the checkout steps themselves, so measure the app against that smaller half before you install. The listing is English only, which matters if your admin team isn’t. And an app that touches checkout gets deep permissions by nature: orders, discounts, Shopify Functions, and customer data including geolocation and IP. That’s what the job requires, but read the data access section on the listing yourself rather than taking our word for it.
Can we get annoyed about something for a second? Shopify spent years telling merchants that checkout is where conversion is won, then locked the ability to change it behind a plan that starts at $2,300 a month. Not the advanced stuff. A trust badge. A shipping cut-off notice. The moments before someone types a card number are exactly where doubt shows up, and merchants below Plus are told to just have faith. It’s the single least defensible line Shopify draws, and it hasn’t moved in years.
The other half of the honest answer: checkout merchandising can only work on a shopper who got that far. Nothing you place in checkout rescues a product page that lost them at the color picker. If your variants share one gallery, color swatches and per-variant images decide whether they ever see a checkout, and if your colorways live as separate products, combined listings stop the catalog fragmenting under them. That’s the half we build for. This app is the half after it.
Setup steps, the full conditions reference, and the troubleshooting notes we quoted above live in the Smart Checkout Widgets documentation, and the plan details are on smartcheckoutwidgets.com.
Frequently asked questions
Which app should I use to customize the Shopify checkout page?
Smart Checkout Widgets, by Thought Bulb, covers the three things merchants actually ask for: content inside checkout (gifts, upsells, trust badges, custom fields), rules that rename, hide or reorder shipping and payment methods, and widgets on the Thank you and Order status pages. It holds 5.0 stars across 4 reviews and is free to install up to 100 orders a month.
Can you customize the Shopify checkout without Plus?
Partly. Shopify’s docs restrict checkout UI extensions on the information, shipping and payment steps to Plus stores, so no app can add content there on a lower plan. Shipping and payment method rules run on Shopify Functions and work on every plan, and so do content widgets on the Thank you and Order status pages.
Is checkout.liquid still supported?
No. Shopify’s theme docs list checkout.liquid as unsupported for the Information, Shipping and Payment steps, and it was sunset for the Thank you and Order status pages on August 28, 2025. Script tags on those pages ended the same day for Plus stores and on August 26, 2026 for everyone else. Checkout extensibility is the replacement.
How much does Smart Checkout Widgets cost?
Starter is free to install and covers up to 100 orders a month. Growth is $29 a month or $278.40 a year, up to 1,000 orders. Advanced is $59 a month or $566.40 a year with unlimited orders. Annual billing saves 20%, and both paid plans include a 7-day free trial. Every widget is on every plan; the plans differ only by order volume.
Can it add a free gift automatically at checkout?
Yes. An automatic gift is added when the cart meets your rule, such as a spend threshold or a specific product being present, with no code for the buyer to enter. You can also offer several gifts and let the shopper pick, capping how many they may take. Price gift variants normally in your catalog, because the app discounts them at checkout.
What happens if I go over my plan’s order limit?
Widgets keep running until your store passes 25% over the plan’s monthly order limit, then they are disabled. Upgrading re-enables them automatically, with no need to contact support or reconfigure anything. Shipping and payment rules and your saved configuration are unaffected by the pause.
Will my checkout rules survive a Shopify update?
Yes. Rules are stored against your shop and applied by Shopify Functions at checkout, so theme changes and checkout template updates don’t affect them. Uninstalling stops widgets and rules immediately, and reinstalling restores your settings, so an accidental uninstall is recoverable.
Related reading
- Best Shopify checkout rules apps in 2026, plus the free native way
- How to add a free gift with purchase on Shopify
- Shopify checkout links: pre-filled carts that convert
- Add color swatches to your Shopify product pages
- Shopify combined listings explained
Go look at your own checkout right now, as a buyer, on a phone. Count what’s there to reassure someone about to hand over a card number. On most stores the honest answer is nothing, because for a decade there was no way to put anything there. There is now. Whether you use Smart Checkout Widgets on its free Starter plan or something else, the empty checkout is a choice you’re making now, not a limitation you’re stuck with.
Umid
Co-Founder at Craftshift