Can an inaccessible checkout get your store sued?

Yes. The purchase path is the most-cited flow in ADA website demand letters, because it is where a blocked user suffers the clearest harm: they cannot buy. Unlabeled discount and email fields, error states screen readers never announce, and keyboard traps in cart drawers are the specific patterns named again and again. Shopify's hosted checkout helps, but everything before it is yours.

Why plaintiffs focus on the purchase path

A demand letter needs a story of concrete harm, and a shopper who cannot complete a purchase is the cleanest version of it. Filers test the same sequence on every store: pick a variant, open the cart, apply a discount, reach checkout. Each step is mechanical to test, which makes failures easy to document with screenshots and screen reader recordings.

What Shopify covers and what it does not

Shopify maintains its hosted checkout to a strong accessibility standard, and that genuinely removes risk from the final payment step. Everything upstream belongs to the merchant: product templates, variant selectors, cart drawers, quick views, account pages, and any checkout extensions or pixels you installed. Most cited failures live in that upstream zone.

The fixes are small and specific

Purchase-path failures are mechanical: a missing label, a focus order that skips the cart close button, an error message rendered as color only. Each one is usually a few lines of markup. The hard part is knowing they exist, which is what daily purchase-path monitoring with component-level attribution is for.