By Jon Elson
05 Aug 2024 · 5 Min Read
In February 2023 Shopify announced that the ‘checkout.liquid’ file is being deprecated with a new ‘checkout extensibility upgrade’ replacing its function. This upgrade certainly has its purpose, most notably being that Shopify wants to reduce the amount of custom code that can be deployed during the checkout process making everything more secure and safer for the customer.
This is not the full extent of the deprecation also, Shopify has announced that the 28th of August 2025 is the deadline to upgrade order confirmation pages, indicating the deprecations of custom code being applied to confirmation pages.
The problem.
From a tracking perspective, if you are currently using Google Tag Manager (GTM) to track GA4, Google Ads, Meta or any other marketing and analytics tools throughout the checkout process you may need to review how this will be affected after the 13th August 2024. GTM may currently be deployed via the checkout.liquid file being deprecated, resulting in a loss of data.
It is equally important to review how your marketing and analytics tags are deployed for order confirmation pages before the 28th of August 2025.
Customer events.
A feature of Shopify’s extensibility upgrade is ‘customer events’. This feature is found within Shopify’s admin console and enables you to deploy custom scripts (or pixels) within an iframe throughout the website, allowing you to ‘subscribe’ to specific user events. A typical example of this is the ‘page_viewed’ call back function which once evoked could be used to send a GA4 page_view event, dataLayer push or similar.
Shopify have various API’s and events that can be utilised within ‘customer events’ to track activity throughout the funnel;
Next steps.
Like many e-commerce and website development platforms, there are multiple methods of reaching the same result. Whichever method is best is very much dependent on your requirements, situation and desired outcome. As such, comprehensively assessing your current marketing and analytics tracking is the optimal place to start.
Fortunately, Bind Media have got you covered with our comprehensive analytics health check. These health checks won’t just focus on the deprecation of the checkout.liquid file but assess your entire website analytics landscape, giving you a clear implementation plan to supercharge your analytics capabilities.
Focusing on the extensibility upgrade specifically, having assessed your requirements, situation and desired outcome we’d make our recommendation, whether that’s an integration, iframe scoped dataLayer or custom script.
To save time we’ve already developed a custom script that can be deployed directly as a pixel and address all the primary focus areas of a full GA4 e-commerce build including built-in user consent checks (allowing for cookieless pings where applicable). To accompany this script if required, additional Google Ads & Meta pixels are available to track campaign performance within the marketing platforms.
Solution.
As alluded to earlier, whichever method is dependent on your situation, however, there are three primary schools of thought for ensuring the longevity of your analytics and marketing tracking.
Integrations & Apps.
The simplest solutions can be the most effective. The first school of thought is to utilise Shopify’s built-in integrations and apps. These out-of-the-box solutions are quick to implement and can ensure data is flowing through into your marketing and analytics platforms. The primary limitation of these however is its customisation. For example, custom events, parameters and dimensions are likely out of scope. Equally, these integrations and apps can be limited to a ‘basic’ consent implementation resulting in no cookieless ping data or conversion modelling capabilities.
GTM/ dataLayer.
One school of thought for the checkout.liquid deprecation would be to reconstruct GTM and your dataLayer events as a pixel to fire via the customer events functionality. This route can certainly reach the desired outcome however it is important to recognise that GTM will be deployed within an iframe which can severely limit your ability to access window variables and use GTM’s preview tool for debugging.
It is equally important to note that this was not how GTM was designed to be deployed. The implementation of GTM involves a script being hardcoded to the head and body tags of the web page as opposed to being injected as a script (potentially after the fact). This can result in only partial functionality of GTM as well as any tracking related to page load speed etc being compromised.
Gtag.
A third school of thought is to deploy gtag and any other marketing pixels required via customer events directly instead of deploying them via GTM. This route is arguably more efficient as you do not have to deploy all the dependencies associated with GTM however it is more code-intensive on an ongoing basis.
Limitations.
Customer events is no GTM.
As the headline suggests, there are several limits to customer events that do not make it close to a replacement for GTM and therefore worth considering when deciding how much of the customer event functionality to invoke. These limits include but are not limited to;
- No built-in ‘advanced’ consent checks
- No easy means of deploying trigger groups
- Sandboxed javascript
- No built-in error handling or debugging
Shopify event API.
Whereas the ‘analytics’, ‘browser’ and ‘init’ API’s cover all primary KPI’s of a GA4 build, there is a hard limit to the level of customisation that can be done outside of this. A typical use case we have seen that cannot be accounted for in the API documentation is tracking individual and subscription purchases separately. Equally, some functionality problems are noted for some DOM events whereby form completes and click events are not invoking the related callback function, resulting in no custom scripts firing.
If you'd like to review how this will affect your business or if you're interested in our comprehensive analytics health check, feel free to reach out to our tech team for a chat.