Shopify retired checkout.liquid, and a lot of stores lost purchase tracking without anyone noticing for weeks.

If your store has been around a few years and nobody has deliberately rebuilt tracking recently, it is worth ten minutes to check whether yours survived.

What changed and why it broke things

For years, custom tracking on Shopify checkout lived in a file called checkout.liquid. Any script you needed on the thank you page went in there.

Shopify replaced that with checkout extensibility, which does not allow arbitrary scripts in the same way. The old file stopped working. Any tracking that depended on it stopped with it.

The replacement is Custom Pixels, configured inside Shopify rather than pasted into a template. It is a better system. It is also a completely different one, which is why so many stores fell through the gap during the transition.

Check whether your store is affected

Three quick tests.

1. Compare the numbers. Pull last month’s orders from Shopify, then purchases from GA4 and conversions from Google Ads. If the ad platforms are dramatically lower, that is your answer.

2. Place a test order. Use a discount code to make it cheap. Watch GA4 realtime while you complete checkout. A purchase event should appear.

3. Look at the trend. Find the date your tracked conversions dropped. If it lines up with a Shopify checkout update, you have a cause and a date.

A partial drop rather than a total one is common. Tracking on product and cart pages often keeps working perfectly while the purchase event is the only thing missing, which makes the problem harder to spot.

Rebuilding it with Custom Pixels

Custom Pixels live in Shopify admin under Customer events. You add a pixel, write the code that listens for checkout events, and Shopify runs it in a sandbox.

Things worth knowing before you start:

• It runs in a sandbox. Your pixel cannot reach the main page, which is deliberate and means some older tricks do not work.

• You subscribe to events such as checkout completed, rather than watching for a page URL.

• Customer consent is handled by Shopify, which is genuinely useful, because the pixel respects the shopper’s choices without extra work.

• Data is structured and reliable, which is a real improvement on scraping values out of a page.

If you use Google Tag Manager, you can load it from within a custom pixel, but the sandbox changes how it behaves. Do not assume your existing container will simply work in there.

The mistake to avoid

The most common problem after a rebuild is not missing tracking. It is doubled tracking.

Stores end up with Shopify’s own Google and Meta integrations reporting purchases, plus a custom pixel reporting the same purchases, plus sometimes a leftover app doing it as well. Revenue looks fantastic and none of it is real.

After any rebuild, place one test order and count the events. One purchase should produce exactly one event per platform. If you see two, work through the duplicate purchase event checklist.

What to check after the rebuild

• Purchase events appear once per order in GA4.

• Revenue matches Shopify for the same period, within a few percent.

• Google Ads conversions are recording again.

• Meta is receiving purchase events with customer data attached.

• Refunds are handled, because unreported refunds inflate your ROAS.

One last thing

Historic data does not repair itself. The weeks where tracking was broken stay broken in your reports.

Write down the date you fixed it so that nobody compares this quarter against the gap and reaches a dramatic conclusion about the business.

Need this fixed properly?

If your Shopify store lost purchase tracking during the checkout migration, rebuilding it properly is usually a same day job. I set up and repair tracking for ecommerce stores and lead generation businesses, so the numbers in your ad accounts match the money in your bank account.

Have a look at what I do, or book a call and we can go through your setup together.