Episode 188 - Store Branding in the Checkout and Account Pages

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: You are listening to the Shopify Solutions podcast, a podcast for Shopify store owners that brings you concrete examples on how to build and grow your e commerce brand. Your host is Scott Austin. He owns a Shopify agency called Jade Puma. In this podcast, Scott will share his e commerce insights and best practices with you.

Speaker C: Hey Scott Austin here. I've had a cold for the past week, so if my voice is a little froggy, please forgive me. Today, we're tackling a topic that can quietly make or break a customer's trust right at the finish line. Brand consistency. Specifically, we're talking about applying your brand identity to your checkout and customer account pages, the two parts of an online store that merchants can forget to brand, and the two parts where lots of brands just assume they have zero control at all. By the end of this episode, you you'll know exactly what you can control, what you can't, and you'll have a clear checklist of things to go look at in your own store. Let's set the scene. You've spent countless hours customizing your homepage, your product templates, and your collections. Every color is on brand, the typography is dialed in, and the photography looks great. Then a customer clicks checkout and bam. They're dropped onto a page that looks like a generic stark white default form. The fonts are wrong, your colors are completely gone, and your logo is nowhere to be found. That handoff is incredibly jarring, and it matters more here than almost anywhere else on your site, because checkout is the single highest intent page you have. This is the exact moment a browser becomes a buyer. Any visual hiccup that makes someone pause and think wait, am I still on the right website? Is friction you are paying for in abandoned carts? In ecommerce, jarring experiences degrade trust. So why does this happen? Why is the checkout the one place you can't just open your regular theme editor and style to your heart's content? The short answer is that the checkout isn't actually part of your theme. Your theme controls your storefront, your landing pages, your products, your cart drawer. But the moment a customer hits checkout, Shopify takes over and renders everything on its own hosted, highly secured infrastructure. That's why you can switch store themes whenever you want without ever breaking your checkout. Historically, the only way to deeply modify these pages was by editing a file called checkout Liquid. And honestly, that old approach caused real headaches. Custom checkout code introduced security vulnerabilities, slowed down page load speeds, and tended to break during platform updates. When a checkout breaks, your entire business stops taking money. So Shopify made the reasonable decision to lock these pages down for the sake of security, PCI compliance and rock solid uptime. But here's why this is worth your attention right now. That old system is officially dead. Shopify fully retired checkout liquid for plus stores in August 2025 and standard plans reach final retirement in August 2026. So we are right at the finish line. If you still have old tracking scripts or legacy code hiding in there, they are stopping for good. In its place, Shopify bu checkout extensibility. Along with it, they introduced a unified branding system and a single editor, officially called the Checkout and Accounts Editor that covers your checkout, your thank you page, your order status page, and your new customer account pages all in one spot. The big idea here is set it once, apply, uh, it everywhere. You define your brand's look in a single place, and it automatically flows across all those downstream experiences without touching a line of code. However, we don't yet live in a perfect world, so there are some inconsistencies between pages that we'll cover Today. I'm going to focus entirely on what you can do on a standard Shopify plan, Basic grow or advance, because that's where the vast majority of merchants live. I'll give a quick nod to Shopify plus features at the end, just so you know they exist, but you don't need a Plus account to build a cohesive brand experience. Almost everything we're about to cover is available to you right right now. To get started, head into your Shopify admin and go to Settings in the lower left of the screen. Click Checkout the six item in the menu, then click the Edit button next to the active configuration. This launches the specialized Checkout and Accounts editor. It will look similar to Theme Customization Preview on the right Settings panel on the left, but remember, it's also its own distinct environment. Up uh, at the top you'll see a page selector dropdown. This lets you toggle between previews of your checkout, your thank you page, your order status page, your sign in page, and your other customer account pages. Get comfortable moving around in there because everything we configure today lives in this single dashboard. Let's start with an easy Win your logo. Please don't leave this as standard header text. Upload a crisp, high resolution transparent PNG so it sits cleanly on the background. Unfortunately, you can't use an SVG logo in here. You can control the logo size and its position left, center or right in the checkout header. I try to set these to be as similar to those on the store to create some consistency. Here's a best practice Preview your logo on mobile, not just desktop A logo that looks perfectly balanced on a wide monitor can easily end up being cramped or giant on a smartphone screen, and the overwhelming majority of your checkouts are are happening on phones. The settings are the same across desktop and mobile, so find a compromise or balance that works for both screens. Next up are your colors. The editor now allows you to build a reusable brand color palette where you define your hex codes once and then assign them to different elements like backgrounds, buttons and links. To see why this matters, imagine you run a luxury coffee roastery. Your storefront uses deep espresso browns Aquatic, a creamy off white background and elegant serif typography to convey a premium artisanal quality. If a customer gets to your checkout and suddenly encounters bright default blue buttons and standard Arial font, their subconscious instantly registers ah, a disconnect. But if you take five minutes in this editor, you can shift the background to that creamy off white, turn the primary buttons into your signature espresso brown and match the headings selling that premium experience carries all the way through the exact millisecond they hand over their credit card. It tells them yes, you are still in the right place.

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Speaker C: When setting up your palette, keep three rules in mind. 1. Guide the action Use your boldest, most recognizable brand color exclusively for the things you want customers to click, like your primary action buttons that guides the eye directly toward pay now. 2. Prioritize contrast over flair. These pages exist for people to read small text and type numbers accurately. If your brand color is a soft, pale pastel, do not use it for body text. Keep text on high contrast backgrounds. 3. Don't skip the error state when someone fat fingers their credit card number or zip code, the error messages need to jump out immediately. Pick a distinct, clearly visible color for error states so customers can instantly see what to fix instead of getting frustrated and bailing for typography. You can select fonts for your headings and body text directly from Shopify's extensive built in library. Because it's a broad library, you can usually get remarkably close to your main storefront's look, though here in the Checkout and Account pages editor, you can only select the font, but you can't select the weight. So if your headings are normally bold Roboto, you'll have to use regular Roboto here. So go ahead and pick something cohesive, ideally the exact same font family you use on your site or a very close cousin. A big limitation for standard plans is that you can't upload your own custom proprietary font files. That's an advanced capability reserved for Shopify plus via the branding API, but for 99% of the brands, the native font library is more than enough to look on brand you can adjust the layout of the header to more closely match what your store has. Set the logo position and background color here to match the store, and you'll see the ability to also adjust the layout of the footer to be full width with its own background color. But you'll notice that your settings will be gone the next time you come into the editor. This is a bug in the editor. Adjusting the footer layout is a plus only feature, which I think is a poor decision on Shopify's part. So even though the editor lets you adjust it, those setting changes will not get saved. Now an important platform update to keep in mind is regarding backgrounds. As of February 5, 2026, Shopify officially disabled the ability to add background images to the checkout header or the main content area. Background colors are still completely fair game here though, but background images in those two specific regions are gone. I think that's a good move by Shopify. Busy background images behind form fields all almost always hurt readability and harm conversions far more than they help branding. Keeping these areas where people are reading and typing clean, quiet and neutral. Let your logo, colors and typography do the heavy branding lifting here. Simple wins at uh, checkout branding is the foundation, but you can also add functionality on a standard plan. You can install apps from the App Store and add their blocks to your thank you and order status pages. Think order tracking, review request or post purchase offers. That's a real native capability you have right now without upgrading. What you can't do on a standard plan is drop app blocks or custom content into the core checkout steps themselves. The information, shipping and payment steps. That uh, deeper layer is reserved for Shopify Plus. But for most brands, branding the whole experience plus enhancing the uh, thank you and order status pages is more than enough. Now for the part that delivers the most bang for the least amount of effort, your customer account pages. Because Shopify uses a unified branding system, much of the visual styling you just configured for your checkout, your logo, your palette, your fonts automatically inherits over to your new customer account pages. Also, that visual continuity is helpful. When a customer logs in to check a tracking number and the portal matches your store, it quietly reinforces security and professionalism. But let's be completely transparent about the current limitations here. That inheritance is purely visual styling out of the box Shopify's native customer account pages are incredibly bare bones when it comes to actual functional content. You can't natively add much of your own content or branded sections to the account dashboard. Your logged in customers land on a functional but ultimately empty page. That gap is why we built our app Customer Accounts Toolbox. It also allows you to break past those native content limitations and and inject your own custom text, helpful links, tracking tools, support resources, or even targeted merchandising right in front of your logged in customers. It turns the generic placeholder page into a valuable, fully branded extension of your store. If you want to maximize that space, you can find it right now in the Shopify App Store under Customer Accounts Toolbox. If you are running on Shopify plus, you unlock a deeper architectural layer. Plus, merchants can utilize the Branding API for advanced styling, and they can drag and drop custom app blocks and bespoke content directly into the core checkout steps. But if you're on a standard plan, don't sweat it. The tools we just walked through give you everything you need to look like a top tier brand. One final best practice don't just trust the Editor Preview. Go see it the way the customer does. Open an incognito window, go to your own store, add a product to the cart, and run yourself through the entire live sequence on both a desktop computer and a mobile phone. Check the checkout page, look closely at the thank you page, view the order status page and then create an account and log in to audit the account portal. Confirm that your logo scales correctly and your text contrast looks perfect. It takes five minutes and it's the only foolproof way to catch tiny visual mismatches that the desktop Editor preview might hide. To wrap things up today, a, uh, cohesive design language across your entire store builds massive trust and systematically removes friction at the two highest stakes moments of the customer journey, the exact second someone hands over their hard earned money and the moment they return to manage their relationship with your business. If your checkout and account pages look like they belong to a completely different website, you're injecting needless hesitation into your funnel. So here's your action item for today. Log into your Shopify admin, open up the checkout and Accounts editor and audit what your customers are actually seeing. Run down this four point checklist. 1. Logo Is it uploaded? High resolution and perfectly sized for mobile phones? 2. Colors have you established your brand palette and is your aerostate color highly visible? 3. Typography are, uh, your fonts cohesive with Your main storefront? 4. Accounts Log in As a customer, does that portal feel like a continuation of your brand experience? If you spot gaps and let's be honest, most stores have at least a few, it's ah, a quick bit of work with a massive long term payoff for your brand equity and your conversion rates. Go make those pages consistent with the rest of your brand. Thanks for listening.

Speaker B: You've been listening to the Shopify Solutions podcast with Scott Austin. This podcast is brought to you by Jade Puma, a Shopify focused agency located in San Diego, California. If you like what you heard, please leave a review and subscribe on itunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to work with Scott on your brand, email him@scottadepiuma.com.