Shopify Checkout Extensibility: What it means for your analytics

TLDR: Shopify Plus now requires that tracking take place from within a special iFrame. If your tracking scripts currently scrape data directly from the checkout or thank-you pages, you’ll need to update your code to instead receive data provided by Shopify’s customer events API.

The prior method of tracking called “additional scripts” will be officially deprecated and disabled starting August 28, 2025.

Shopify has unveiled Checkout Extensibility for Shopify Plus. This is a step towards both code encapsulation and improved enforcement of privacy / user-consent compliance.

What’s different?

You probably are used to placing your tracking scripts directly on the page you want to track.. and you should be! That’s normal. Using GTM? Same thing. It’s JavaScript placed on a webpage. Piece of cake.

What isn’t normal is that Shopify is moving towards a new model where all tracking scripts will be run NOT on the page, but inside an iframe instead. This iframe is called the Checkout Extensibility Sandbox.

Within the sandbox, your scripts won’t know anything about the webpage that they intend to track. So if your tracking implementation previously grabbed values from elements on the page – like the items in the shopping cart or the user’s email address – you’ll need to scrap that rewrite them.

So how will I get conversion data?

When you use Checkout Extensibility, Shopify will provide your scripts with certain data in JSON format about the customer’s actions and transactions.

Why this is a good thing.

When a user clicks the “No, don’t track me” button to indicate that they do not give their consent. Who’s enforcing that on the backend? A lot of times nobody.

Many shopify users are beginners, entrepreneurs and side-hustlers who likely aren’t aware of GDPR compliance laws, or don’t have the development resources to keep up. So when they want to track something, they’re likely to plop in whatever third-party script they’ve found online or been asked to embed by third-party tool.

Checkout Extensibility is Shopify stepping in as the platform to take control of data-protection compliance and doing the right thing by users. If a user has opted-out of tracking their data will not be passed through to the sandbox.