How can I add an age verification step at checkout for my online alcohol store?

Store Design

Topic summary

An Australian alcohol retailer needs to implement date-of-birth verification at checkout to comply with liquor licensing laws, which require age verification at the point of sale agreement (checkout), not just a pop-up warning.

Available Solutions:

  • Shopify Plus: Allows editing checkout.liquid to add custom age verification, but costs ~$2000 USD/month—prohibitively expensive for small businesses
  • Third-party apps: Multiple age verification apps exist in the Shopify App Store, but most only offer pop-ups rather than checkout integration
  • Workarounds: Suggestions include repurposing the “company name” field at checkout to collect birth dates, though this doesn’t enforce proper date formatting

Recent Developments:

Shopify Checkout Extensibility now enables app blocks that can be added to checkout without Shopify Plus. One solution mentioned verifies government-issued IDs (including AU/NZ licenses and passports) and can apply minimum age restrictions with white-label customization.

Key Challenge:

Compliance requires not just verification but also storing age data with purchase records. Many existing solutions fail to meet regulatory requirements for age-restricted products (alcohol, tobacco, vaping), leaving small businesses struggling to find affordable, legally compliant options without upgrading to expensive enterprise plans.

Summarized with AI on November 6. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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Hi Thuisbier

Great sugestion how ever the only issue is the fact it is formated for wording. So a customer still can just type a few words and not even a birth date for it to approve. Unfortunately Licensing still will not approve this format unles you physically have to put in a birth date and have that input also captured and recorded. And Shopifys answer seems to be to just upgrade to plus which is not achievable for small businesses. Sadly it is getting to the point where we are going to have to go to the horrid process of swapping to a different website platform as they are not very small business friendly. And the other sugestion is to buy an app which to do everything licensing is asking is also on a costly monthly plan. Very frustrating.