The Whop + Shopify integration, explained.

Why there’s no “Whop” option in Shopify’s payment settings

Shopify’s payment provider list is a closed set. A processor has to be onboarded by Shopify as a gateway to appear there, and Whop isn’t one of them. So the usual mental model — “install an app, pick the gateway, done” — doesn’t apply here.

That leads a lot of people to conclude the two can’t be connected. They can. The connection just happens one step earlier in the funnel: instead of swapping the gateway inside Shopify’s checkout, you swap the checkout.

What the integration actually does

Think of a Shopify store as two things bolted together: a storefront (theme, products, cart, apps, fulfilment) and a money path (checkout page plus payment processing). The integration separates them.

The storefront stays exactly where it is. The money path moves onto a checkout page on your own domain, which renders Whop’s payment form and charges the card through your own connected Whop account.

• Stays on Shopify: products, collections, theme, cart, inventory, discounts you sync, fulfilment, order history, confirmation emails, every app that reads orders.
• Moves to Whop: the card form, the charge, the money, the payout relationship, subscription billing and renewals.
• New in the middle: the checkout page itself — one page, on your domain, that you control.

The flow, step by step

Under the hood there are five moving parts. Understanding them makes the whole thing far less mysterious — and makes it obvious what breaks if one is misconfigured.

• 1. A script tag on the storefront watches for “Add to cart” and “Check out” and routes the shopper to your checkout instead of Shopify’s.
• 2. The cart is posted to the checkout service, which looks up your store and builds a Whop checkout configuration using your own Whop API key.
• 3. The shopper lands on your branded one-page checkout, enters their address and email, and picks a shipping method. Totals are recalculated server-side.
• 4. They pay in an embedded Whop card form. Apple Pay and Google Pay show up here too, once your domain is verified in Whop.
• 5. Whop fires a webhook the moment the charge succeeds. That webhook creates the paid order in Shopify over the Admin API, with the customer, line items, shipping and totals attached — and asks Shopify to send its own order-confirmation email.

What you need before you start

Nothing exotic, but all four have to exist or the connection will half-work in confusing ways.

• A Shopify store you can install a script on (any plan — you don’t need Plus).
• A Whop account of your own, approved to take payments, with an API key.
• A Whop webhook pointed at your checkout provider, with payment and membership events enabled. This is the step people most often get wrong — a webhook aimed at a URL that redirects will silently deliver nothing.
• A subdomain for the checkout, e.g. checkout.yourstore.com, pointed at the checkout host with a CNAME.

Subscriptions and free trials

This is where running on Whop gets genuinely interesting rather than merely different. Whop’s renewal plans handle recurring billing natively, so a subscription or free trial doesn’t need a separate Shopify subscription app taking its own cut.

A renewal plan carries a billing period, a recurring price, an optional trial length, and an optional one-off amount charged today for anything in the cart that isn’t a subscription. When a renewal is charged later, the webhook creates a fresh Shopify order for that cycle, so your fulfilment workflow sees a normal order every month.

The honest caveats

Anyone selling you this without caveats is selling you something. Three things genuinely change.

• Shop Pay and Shopify’s accelerated wallets don’t apply to a checkout that isn’t Shopify’s. You get Apple Pay and Google Pay through Whop instead, but returning-customer Shop Pay one-tap is gone.
• Apps that inject themselves into Shopify’s checkout — checkout UI extensions, some upsell and tax apps — won’t run, because that checkout is no longer in the path. Apps that read orders afterwards are unaffected.
• You are choosing your own payment processor rather than using Shopify Payments. That’s something merchants are able to do, but it’s a decision to make deliberately, and Whop has its own risk rules like any processor.