Shopify recently rolled out a change to their checkout system that will be welcomed by many in the Shopify community: the ability for customers to no longer be directed to checkout.shopify.com to complete their purchase. Instead, customers will stay on a merchant's own domain to checkout.
Since the early days of Shopify, this has been a frustration for merchants and it's been a factor in the historic perception that Shopify isn't for Medium Business merchants. Customers want to feel like they're getting a holistic experience on an ecommerce store ‚ going off-domain to checkout might have been somewhat acceptable years ago back in the —paying with PayPal— days but customers have elevated their expectations since then.
Another added benefit of checking out on your own domain is that it makes analytics setup, tracking and maintenance a bit easier.With the previous checkout setup on Shopify, Google sometimes categorized traffic that made a purchase and navigated to checkout as if it came in from a referral source in analytics, in spite of the fact that users never actually left the site. While there were known workarounds to compensate for that, checkout on one domain now will make the extra work unnecessary ‚ making setup and and configuration of Shopify stores an easier process. As with most new features within the Shopify ecosystem, this checkout improvement was rolled out to all merchants and doesn't cost anything extra to be implemented.
Despite these checkout improvements, the same restrictions still apply though, about customizing the checkout experience for regular Shopify merchants. Other than branding and colors, Shopify merchants will still all have the same checkout experience, which has been widely tested and optimized across thousands of Shopify stores worldwide. Shopify Plus is still the only route for actually customizing the checkout experience in a more significant way.
And speaking of Shopify Plus, merchants on there can now also get free Extended Verification (EV) SSL certificates installed on their site. These add another layer of security on site and indicates to customers that merchants value the security of personal information.
Overall, this is a great improvement to see for the Shopify Plus community, as the platform continues to make aggressive inroads into Medium Business ecommerce merchants.