Create A Shopify Direct Checkout Link In 3 Steps

Imagine it’s the last few hours of your promotion and what you really want to do is make it easy for last minute purchases – someone can click on the link you send them and have the product they really want added to their cart and be taken straight to the checkout page to enter their payment method and get what the need.

Sounds good, right?

Well, you can create a Shopify direct checkout link and use these links in sales channels like email campaigns, social media posts, or webinars to skip the shopping cart and go direct to checkout.

Just make sure that wherever you use these handy links your customers know that they will go straight to checkout – a quick note or call to action like “click here to add this to your cart and go straight to checkout” will make it a smooth transition.

What Are Shopify Direct Checkout Links?

Checkout links, also known as Cart Permalinks, are links that you can form in a variety of ways to bypass the normal process of going to your store, navigating to a product page, adding the product to the cart, and then going to checkout.

Checkout links add a product or products to the customers cart and goes directly to checkout. No need for a cart button or jumping through multiple steps before purchasing.

You can even customize the link to add multiple products, variants, discounts, checkout fields, and more.

It’s a great way to help customers get what they want quickly, boost conversion rate, and simplify checkout.

Manually Creating Checkout Links In Shopify Admin

First things first – let’s make a simple link that adds one product to the cart and takes someone directly to checkout.

The easiest way to do this is to log into your Shopify store and navigate to the product you want to use.

Select the product and copy the product ID into a notepad:

Then, form a URL with your Product ID like this:

https://YourStoreURL.com/cart/ProductID:1

A few notes:

• The “:1” at the end is how many of that product to add, at the time of writing it must be included
• If this URL does not work, it is likely an issue with the Product ID. You’ll need to find the “variant ID” by going back to the admin page of the product and adding “.xml” to the URL and hitting enter. Scroll down to variant ID and copy that, replace in the URL and test.
  • Here’s what the XML page will look like and what you’re looking for:

Customizing Your Checkout Link

Now that you’ve formed the basic direct to checkout link, what else can you do?

The answer is…a lot!

Including:

• Applying coupon codes and discounts
• Adding more than 1 of the same product
• Adding more than 1 type of product
• Conversion tracking
• Adding checkout parameters like name, email address, city, zip code, country, and more

Let’s take a look at the most often used customizations.

Adding a discount code

Adding a discount code to your checkout link is pretty straightforward. 

This is a great way to incentivize the purchase with a simple discount that you can set up beforehand in the backend of your Shopify store.

You’ll need to add the following to your link: 

?discount=COUPONCODE

Once clicked, it will again take the user straight to checkout but will automatically apply the discount – just make sure that you’ve already created the code in Shopify and have tested that it works. 

The final URL will look like this:

https://YourStoreURL.com/cart/ProductID:1?discount=COUPONCODE

Adding more than 1 of the same product

We mentioned this above, but to increase the amount of products automatically added to the checkout process, just adjust the number after the Product ID like this:

ProductID:2 (or 3, or 10, or whatever you want)

The final URL will look like this:

https://YourStoreURL.com/cart/ProductID:2

Adding more than 1 product

What if you want to add 2 different products?

In this case, you form the same base URL but add the second product after the first, so that the final URL will look like this:

https://YourStoreURL.com/cart/ProductID:1,ProductID2:1

Just add another “,ProductID:1”, for each additional product you want to add. Adjust the number after the colon (“:”) for how many of each product you want to add.

Adding Product Variants

As mentioned in the first section where we created the base link, you’ll need to view the XML data to get your product ID. If you have multiple variations of the product, this is where you can view them all and select the product variant you need.

Then form the checkout URL using the variant that you want.

Summary: Creating Shopify Direct Checkout Links

Using these links and making sure to let customers know what will happen when they click on them will make for a great customer experience that you can use in marketing emails, cart abandon emails, and other messages for customers. For reference, you can find the Shopify doc here.

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, using these links in a well thought out manner can help with conversion optimization by boosting conversions and improving the user experience.

If you’ve been asking yourself “How do I create a checkout link in Shopify” you’ve now got the answer and it’s time to implement!

Want to see how to create direct checkout links in WooCommerce? Click Here.