Shopify Buy Button vs a Full Online Store

You have a website that already works. It ranks for something, people arrive on it, and you have no intention of rebuilding it just because you now want to sell something. Shopify's answer to that is a block of code you paste into a page — and the first thing search results tell you about that block of code is that it has been discontinued.

That is a collision between two different products with almost the same name. One of them is alive and included in every Shopify subscription plan; the other, a developer library called the JS Buy SDK, hit a critical deadline of July 1, 2025: Shopify said setups that made neither of the two changes it named would stop completing purchases. Sorting out which one you are dealing with is the difference between a shopping decision and a repair job, so this page starts there and then answers the real question underneath it: whether the button is enough, or whether what you actually need is a store.

The Quick Verdict

Five situations cover almost everybody who lands on this question. Find yours in column one; the rest of the page is the evidence underneath these five lines.

Two Things Called “Buy Button”

The Buy Button sales channel is something you switch on in your Shopify admin. It produces a block of HTML that you paste into a page on some other website, and the sale it generates runs through Shopify's checkout. Its status is not ambiguous: Shopify's Help Center states that the Buy Button sales channel is included in all Shopify subscription plans — with no plan carved out of that sentence.

The JS Buy SDK was a JavaScript library that developers used to build their own storefront and their own checkout flow against Shopify, in code, without ever opening the Buy Button channel. That is the thing Shopify deprecated. The two share a lineage and half a name, which is why a page about the second one reads, at a glance, like an obituary for the first.

If a developer built the buy flow on that page for you, in code, your part of this article is the triage section — what the deadline did and what the two documented ways out are; if somebody pasted a snippet out of a Shopify admin, the rest of this page is a straightforward comparison.

What One Embed Puts on Your Page

What the channel hands you is narrower than “a shop on your website”, and knowing exactly what it is comes before pricing anything. Generating the code and getting it into WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or a hand-written template is mechanical work, and our companion piece walks that part platform by platform. This page starts one step later: what the thing you pasted can and cannot do once it is there.

The cart underneath the embed is not limited to one product. Shopify documents the add-to-cart button type as one where customers can continue shopping and add additional products to the cart. So one embed does not lock a shopper into a single-item order: they can keep adding to the same cart before they check out, which is the difference between an embed and a row of isolated buy-now links. Carrying that cart across pages is something Shopify documents for a different object — the embedded cart, which it describes as a standalone cart that customers can use across pages. A cart that keeps its contents between clicks is the reason a handful of products can live on a content site without feeling like a handful of separate transactions.

Where the checkout appears is a setting on the button rather than fixed behaviour: Shopify lets you choose whether the checkout opens in a new browser window or in the same tab as your website, and states that the default is a new window. It is worth setting deliberately — the default is the option most people never touch, and it is the one that moves the shopper off the page you spent years building at the exact moment they decided to pay.

None of that requires seeing it built, but if the embed is still an abstraction, the six-minute tutorial below generates one and drops it onto a Squarespace, Wix and WordPress page in turn — the three hosts this comparison keeps naming. It answers “what does the code do”, not “should I use it”; the decision this article exists for stays in the sections above and below.

Already on Shopify? This Isn't Your Tool

There is one case where the answer is neither button nor store, and it catches merchants who are already on Shopify and simply want a product to sell from a blog post or a landing page inside their own theme. Shopify is unusually direct about it — this is the platform advising against its own feature, in its own documentation.

The same page names the alternative in the next breath: instead, consider using permalinks to pre-load the cart. A cart permalink is a link that arrives with items already in the basket, so the shopper lands in the checkout your store already runs rather than in a second one layered over the first. On your own Shopify store you are not missing a way to sell — you are one link away from the one you already have.

Where the Buy Button Stops

This is the section that decides the article. The gap that costs merchants time is not between expensive and cheap, it is between the channel is on my plan and the sale I need will actually complete. Part of that boundary Shopify states outright. The rest of it is silence — features the pages we read document in neither direction — and the two carry very different weight.

The limits Shopify documents

These four are quotable, dated and settled. Read the third one twice if the site in question is not actively maintained — it is the boundary that turns a five-minute job into an afternoon, two years from now, when somebody changes the brand colours. Shopify documents one way round it that is not a setting: editing the embed code in your page's source HTML, which its own page labels an advanced tutorial it does not support.

Source: Shopify Help Center — Buy Button FAQ, Create a Buy Button and Activating Apple Pay, read August 11, 2026.

Can you sell subscriptions through a Buy Button?

Subscriptions are usually where this decision stops being close, and the boundary is documented — but it sits on the product rather than on the button. A product that can only be bought as a recurring purchase has exactly one channel it is allowed to sell on.

Read the scope carefully, because it is narrower than “no subscriptions”: it covers subscription-only products without a one-time purchase option. Selling plans on the Buy Button channel more generally are not described one way or the other on the pages we read — see the boundary block above — so a product you intend to offer both ways is a question to settle with a test in your own admin. Either way, the recurring side of a business has its own mechanics, and the subscriptions guide covers them properly.

The limits nobody documents

Promotions are the first gap, and it is narrower than it looks. For a cart permalink, Shopify documents that when you create one you can select the product variants, quantities and discounts that you want to apply. What no Shopify page we have found describes is applying a discount code or a gift card at the level of the Buy Button embed itself — the surfaces we read are listed in the block above. That is not the same as saying it will fail; it means there is nothing published to plan a promotion around inside the embed, and a campaign whose whole mechanic is a code working inside an embed deserves a real test order before the email goes out.

Rules at the point of sale are the second. A minimum order value, a local delivery radius, shipping rates or tax settings configured for this channel alone — none of those are documented for the Buy Button on the pages we read. Shipping and tax still come from your store settings and are worked out at checkout, which is fine for a flat catalogue and awkward the moment your delivery promise depends on where the buyer lives.

Browsing is the third, and the one that quietly decides the article. The search box in the Buy Button channel is the one you use to find a product while creating a button; no page we have found describes a search or filter that a visitor gets inside an embed. Where a test in your own store is the honest answer, the price of running one is a Basic subscription at $39/month, month-to-month in USD — Shopify states the Starter plan isn't available to new stores. And if the answer you need is a catalogue people search and filter, that is not a gap in the button. That is a description of an Online Store.

Which plan do you need, and what does a sale cost?

The plan question has a shorter answer than most people expect: no particular plan. Because Shopify includes the channel in all of its subscription plans, what you are really choosing is a price, not a capability. Two plans bracket the decision for a site that wants an embed and nothing else — Starter and Basic, both quoted below in USD on month-to-month billing. Starter brackets it only for merchants already on it: Shopify states the Starter plan isn't available to new stores, and that a merchant who changes plan cannot revert back to it. If you are opening a store now, the floor is Basic; where the choice between the two is still open, it is settled by your monthly sales volume rather than by anything the channel can or cannot do, and the route-by-route arithmetic behind that crossover belongs to our guide Add Shopify to an Existing Website, linked earlier in this article.

Source: Shopify pricing for the Basic row, USD, month-to-month billing; the Starter row's $5 price and 5% surcharge come from an April 2026 archive snapshot of Shopify's own Starter page, which now redirects, and its 5% + 30¢ card rate from a July 2026 archive snapshot of this pricing page. Rates are the standard online card rates for each plan; the surcharge column applies only when payments run through a provider other than Shopify Payments.

Nothing about the button itself is surcharged. Shopify does state that you will be charged third-party transaction fees each time a customer makes a purchase using the Buy Button unless you also activate Shopify Payments — but that is the same condition that governs every other channel you sell through, not a penalty for embedding. The arithmetic of those surcharges across all the plans, and the cases where they are waived, belongs to the payment gateways guide.

One thing you get for nothing is visibility. Shopify's sales report documentation states that the Sales channel column displays the name of the channel or app the customer used to place their order, naming Online Store and Buy Button as its examples. So you can answer “is the embed actually working?” from the reports you already have, without tagging anything.

Which One Is Yours?

Six sections in, the honest position is that almost nobody decides this on one fact. A shop with four products and no promotions is a straightforward yes; the same shop with a subscription box in it, or a developer's checkout on the page, is a completely different answer — and neither of those shows up in the profile you matched at the top.

The table at the top answers by profile. This one answers by combination — what you are selling, what has to happen at the moment of sale, and who touches the code on that page, crossed together. Pick one of the four hard answers and the points stop mattering; pick two and the quiz takes the more urgent one first — an SDK checkout before anything else, then your own Shopify store, then a subscription.

If Your Checkout Was Built on the JS Buy SDK

This section is for a smaller group, and it is written in the past tense because the deadline has already gone. It applies if the buy flow on your site was built by a developer in code against Shopify's JavaScript library, rather than pasted out of the admin. What broke was any checkout still on the old JS Buy SDK when the deadline passed — neither switched to the Storefront API Client nor upgraded to v3.0 — and it broke on a date Shopify published in advance.

Three moments matter, and only the last one has consequences a shopper could see.

Both Shopify posts cited here — re-read on August 14, 2026 — name the same critical deadline date for the JS Buy SDK: July 1, 2025, which the changelog post pins at 11:00 AM ET. If you are trying to work out whether a site is affected, the date on the changelog is the one to check against, and the symptom it names is unambiguous: on a setup that made neither of the two changes, purchases stop completing.

One more date circulates in third-party write-ups — January 2026. It appears on neither of the two Shopify pages above, so treat it as someone else's number rather than a second cut-off to plan around.

Shopify published two ways out in the same post. The first is switching to the Storefront API Client, which it recommends, and which manages the API's authentication information and enables full access to globally-deployed carts. The second is upgrading to JavaScript Buy SDK v3.0, which it describes as letting merchants maintain their current setup with minimal changes for use cases that are supported by the Cart API. Which of the two suits you is a development decision rather than a merchandising one, and it sits inside the larger question of how much custom Shopify you want to own.

The Bottom Line

The question that brought most people here — “is the Buy Button still supported?” — turns out to be the wrong one, and answering it takes ten seconds: the channel is included in all Shopify subscription plans, and the deprecated thing is a developer library with a similar name. The question worth your time is the one underneath it, and it has nothing to do with support status.

Frequently Asked Questions