Shopify cart permalinks alternative: Checkout Links

Cart permalinks are one of Shopify's most underrated features. A URL like yourstore.com/cart/12345:1,67890:2?discount=SUMMER pre-loads two variants into the cart and applies a code — no app needed, no setup, no monthly fee.

For a small enough store with a small enough campaign cadence, that's a complete solution. Most merchants who eventually look at Checkout Links started with permalinks and grew out of them. This page is the honest version of what that growth looks like.

At a glance

When cart permalinks are still the right call

Three cases where permalinks beat installing anything:

• One-off, short-lived links. A single static "buy this one product" link sent to a single newsletter. Spending five minutes on a permalink beats paying $25/mo.
• You're comfortable with the URL format and you don't need analytics. If you're a technical merchant who can hand-build permalinks and you're fine using Shopify's native order reports for attribution, you don't strictly need anything else.
• Strict no-app policy. Some Plus stores have governance rules limiting third-party apps. Permalinks are first-party, no install required, no review needed.

For everyone else, the friction starts somewhere predictable.

Where Checkout Links pulls ahead

1. Edit the link without breaking the URL

The biggest pain in permalinks is that the URL is the configuration. If you change a product's variant ID, swap a discount, or pivot a campaign, the existing URL points at the wrong cart. Anyone who shared it (in an email, on a printed flyer, in a QR code) is now sending traffic to a 404 or a stale cart.

Checkout Links separates the URL from the configuration. yourstore.com/a/link/abc123 stays the same; you change what's behind it.

2. The discount is invisible to the customer

A permalink with ?discount=SUMMER still sends the customer to checkout with a discount-code field, and the code in the URL. Some customers see the code and copy/paste it into another browser tab to share. Others wonder why the field is showing them a code they didn't type.

Checkout Links applies cart-line and delivery discounts via Shopify Functions when the link opens. No code is ever shown to the customer.

3. Analytics by link, source, and UTM

Permalinks land in Shopify's standard analytics — you see orders, but you can't tell which permalink campaign produced them without manually appending UTMs and reconciling them later.

Checkout Links logs every click, every checkout, every dollar attributed to the specific link, source, and UTM combination — in a Shopify-native dashboard.

4. Expiry, usage limits, passcodes

A permalink works forever once it exists. There's no built-in way to expire it after 24 hours, cap it at 100 uses, or gate it behind a passcode.

Checkout Links has all three as link-level settings.

5. Customer pre-fill and cart attributes

The permalink URL format encodes products and a discount and nothing else. Checkout Links can also pre-fill the customer's name, email, and shipping address (when you know them — e.g. from a Klaviyo email recipient), drop arbitrary attributes onto the cart, and attach a note.

6. QR codes that are actually branded

Permalinks can be encoded into QR codes via any external generator, but the QR is generic. Checkout Links generates a branded QR for every link automatically.

How it works

Drop in Checkout Links on top of your existing Shopify store. Your permalink URLs keep working — Checkout Links just adds a parallel URL space with the extra capabilities. Most merchants migrate gradually: new campaigns use Checkout Links, old permalinks continue to function until they age out naturally.

Try Checkout Links

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Related reading: How to create a payment link on Shopify, One-click checkout on Shopify, Shopify Buy Button alternative.