Does the legacy-script removal deadline affect stores that never installed custom checkout pixels in the first place?

The premise is almost always wrong, and in a specific way

"We never installed a custom checkout pixel" is usually true and usually irrelevant. The tracking on a mid-market Shopify checkout is rarely something anyone on the current team typed. It arrives by three routes, and only one of them involves a person opening a code editor.

Route two is the one that makes this question's premise fail. Shopify's developer documentation states that "apps are no longer able to create ScriptTags on any merchants' Thank You or Order Status pages" as of 1 February 2025, and that existing installations kept working until 28 August 2025 for Plus merchants and 26 August 2026 for non-Plus (shopify.dev, September 2026).

Read that as a merchant and it says: if you installed a tracking, review, survey, loyalty or affiliate app before February 2025, it may well have placed a script tag on your post-purchase pages without ever showing you a code box. That script tag is now gone. The app is still installed. The app is still billing.

The three populations, and what each one should actually check

1. Plus stores. Your date was 28 August 2025. If nobody checked then, you have been running with post-purchase tracking gaps for over a year, and any year-over-year comparison you build this autumn spans the break. This is the group most likely to ask the question in the belief that it does not apply to them.
2. Non-Plus stores. Your date was 26 August 2026. The gap is fresh and the reconciliation is easy, because the before-and-after periods are both recent and both comparable.
3. Stores with genuinely no post-purchase tracking. These exist and they are unaffected on this surface. They still have a different exposure: any storefront script delivered through a theme or an app that has not moved to a web pixel, and any app whose entire value was a post-purchase widget that no longer renders.

What to look for when you have no code to inspect

Since the premise is "we never wrote any," the audit is an inventory rather than a code review.

1. Open the Additional scripts field if your store still exposes it, and read it even if you expect it to be empty. Somebody's contractor was there.
2. List every installed app and sort by install date. Anything installed before February 2025 that claims to track, survey, review or attribute is a candidate.
3. For each candidate, find its current pixel. An app that migrated properly appears as an app pixel in Customer Events. An app that did not appear there, and still charges you, is the finding.
4. Check what visibly disappeared from the order status page. Review prompts, survey widgets, referral offers and loyalty enrolment blocks all used to live there. A missing widget is easier to spot than a missing event.
5. Compare last year's post-purchase-driven metrics to this year's, on Plus. Review submission rate and referral signups are the two that fall off a cliff without anyone filing a ticket.

Why nothing alerted you

Because nothing failed. A missing script tag is an absence, and absences do not throw errors. The checkout completes, the order is created, the customer gets their email. The only symptom is a number that is lower than it should be, in a report somebody looks at monthly, against a baseline that has already moved.

That is the honest reason this question keeps getting asked by stores that believe they are not exposed.

When this genuinely does not apply

• When the store launched after August 2026 and was built on Checkout Extensibility from day one.
• When post-purchase tracking was never in scope. Some merchants really do only run Shopify's native channel integrations, and those were never script tags.
• When every app on the list was installed after February 2025. Those apps could not have created a script tag on those pages at all.