Skip To Checkout Review (2026)Free, and It Hides Your Funnel

Pricing (2026)

✓ Pricing re-verified 19 Oct 2026

Free, and free is the only plan. The listing carries no pricing table at all: no paid tier, no usage meter and no surcharge tied to your Shopify plan. The app has been on the App Store since 29 November 2019 and carries Shopify's Built for Shopify badge, which is the store's own bar for performance, design and integration. One of the 34 reviews on the listing on 18 September (36 on 19 October) alleges being billed twice, which is worth knowing about an app the listing prices at nothing; we cannot verify that claim from the outside, and the listing shows no charge to make. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.

Category context: E-commerce. Across the 49 tools in this category that we researched with a public US-dollar price, the median entry price is $19 a month (lowest paid plan as listed, per seat where the vendor prices per seat). Compare pricing conditions in the Software Cost Atlas →

The honest knock

The vendor's own help article confirms that bypassing Add To Cart and Start Checkout makes your add-to-cart rate read lower, and recommends watching overall sales trends instead — so the feature is sold on conversion while switching off the funnel that would show it. Skipping the cart also bypasses the page where shipping thresholds, discount codes and cart upsells normally work. For a free widget the permissions are broad: view and edit customers, products, store analytics, Shopify Functions and the online store, plus customer device and activity data.

And because there is no paid tier there is no support contract behind it; what you get is the vendor's goodwill, which a six-year run and a 4.6 average suggest is real, but is not something you can buy more of. The app also carries at least three different names across the listing, the help centre index and its own setup article, which makes it harder to know what you are running.

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The video version of this review, from our YouTube channel.

What Skip To Checkout does

Free Shopify app from Effective Apps that puts a sticky add-to-cart bar on product pages and can send the shopper straight to checkout, skipping the cart. It also hides PayPal, Apple Pay or the add-to-cart and buy-now buttons when you want a single path to payment. Free is the only plan and there is no usage meter. Built for Shopify, on the App Store since November 2019.

What buyers report about Skip To Checkout

Hands-on: not tested by usReported by buyers: the Shopify App Store listing, read September 2026

Themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in September 2026. We have not run Skip To Checkout ourselves, so this is other buyers' experience rather than ours. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.

There is nothing to buy, so the real decision is whether to switch on the cart skip

Nothing here costs money, which removes the usual question and leaves a sharper one. This app does two things that look like one feature, and they carry very different risk. The sticky add-to-cart bar is the safe half. It keeps the buy button in reach while the shopper scrolls, inherits your theme's fonts and colours, and can sit at the top or bottom, full-width or floating, always visible or only once the shopper scrolls, on mobile, desktop or both.

Turn it off and your store is exactly as it was. Skipping the cart is the half that deserves a decision, and the vendor's own documentation is the best argument for treating it carefully. Their help article 'Does the Skip To Checkout functionality affects analytics reports?' states plainly that standard analytics track Add To Cart, then Start Checkout from Cart, then Complete Order, and that this feature bypasses the first two steps, so your add-to-cart rate will read lower than before.

Their advice is to focus on overall sales trends instead. That is honest of them, but read what it costs you: the funnel you would use to judge whether skipping the cart actually helped is the same funnel the feature stops recording. Skipping the cart also removes the page where shipping thresholds, discount codes and cart upsells normally do their work. If any of your average-order-value machinery lives in the cart, this quietly turns it off.

The permissions are the other thing to weigh for a free app. The listing's data-access panel asks to view customer device and activity data, and to view and edit customers, products, store analytics, Shopify Functions and the online store. That is a broad grant for a sticky bar, and broader than the same vendor's other widgets ask for.

How to actually use Skip To Checkout

The vendor's walkthrough is short. Open the app from your Shopify admin, go to App Settings, find the Sticky Add To Cart Bar section and click Customize in Theme Editor. In the theme editor open App Embeds, switch the app's embed toggle on, switch 'Enable Sticky Add To Cart Bar' on underneath it, and save. Note that the help article calls the app 'Stik AI Sticky Add To Cart/Buy Now Bar' while the App Store listing calls it something else again, so match on the vendor name rather than the app name when you go looking for the toggle.

The setting that matters is Button Click Action: Skip to checkout, or Standard add to cart. Start on Standard add to cart and leave it there for a week, with the bar itself switched on. The bar and the cart skip are independent, and only one of them changes how your funnel records. Ship both at once and you will not be able to tell which one moved your numbers.

Before you switch the skip on, write down your current add-to-cart rate. The vendor tells you it will fall for measurement reasons rather than real ones, and you will want the earlier figure to hand when it does. Then judge the change on completed orders and revenue, because those are the only numbers the feature leaves intact. If you are using the hide-buttons feature to list products online that you only sell in person, test it on those products specifically.

One reviewer running exactly that setup hit problems with hide-add-to-cart on certain products, and had them resolved by support.

Visit Skip To Checkout →

Frequently asked questions

It is free — so what is the one-star review about being charged twice?

The listing on apps.shopify.com/cart-auto-update, read again on 19 September 2026, carries no pricing table at all: no paid tier, no trial, no usage meter, nothing to upgrade to. Against that sits a June 2025 one-star from a UK store, Eurotesir, that says in broken English that it was charged twice and never used the app. Effective Apps did not reply to that review in public, although it did reply at length to a March 2024 one-star on the same listing. Nothing on the page explains what could generate a charge for an app with no plans. We cannot resolve it from the outside, and it is the only complaint of its kind among 34 reviews — but if a card charge from a free app would be a problem for you, ask support what it was before you install.

What does a free app this small need access to?

More than you might expect, and the permissions are the feature list read backwards. The listing's data-access panel says it views device and activity data — IP address, browser and operating system, browsing behaviour and a client ID cookie — plus the store owner's name, email, phone and address. It edits store analytics through web pixels, Shopify Functions through payment customizations, and your Online Store through script tags and the theme. Each has a job: payment customizations is what hides Apple Pay and PayPal, the script tag and theme access is what draws the sticky bar, the web pixel is what watches behaviour. It is a coherent grant rather than a greedy one, but it is a wide grant, and combined with what the cart skip does to your funnel metrics it means the app both changes and observes the part of the store you judge it on.

The listing says 4.6 stars — is that a rating of the app I would install today?

Only partly. The app is sold now as a sticky add-to-cart bar with a cart skip, but the slug is still cart-auto-update, and so is most of the review history. Of the roughly 27 reviews that carry any text, only four are from 2024 or later; the rest run from 2020 to 2023 and many of them praise a different feature — a cart page that recalculates when a shopper changes a quantity, so nobody has to press Update. The warmest reviews on the listing are about that. The ten most recent ratings are almost all star-only, several from stores that had the app installed for five to twenty minutes. So the 4.6 is real, and it is mostly a rating of an older, smaller app and of the support behind it.

Will it work with my theme and my other apps?

Probably, but the vendor does not promise it. Effective Apps' troubleshooting articles for its Shopify apps, read in the help centre on 19 October 2026, name theme or app conflicts as a known reason the skip-to-checkout feature stops working: custom themes or third-party apps may interfere with it, alongside errors in the store's own code or conflicts with other scripts. That matters more here than for a cosmetic app, because a broken skip sends shoppers nowhere rather than to the cart. The app is free, so the test costs nothing but care: after enabling the App Embed, add a product on your live theme from both desktop and mobile and confirm it lands on checkout, and repeat that after installing any other cart or checkout app.

Is this a hands-on review of Skip To Checkout?

This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.

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