Brand cloak. Your Shopify theme inspector sees your brand, not the checkout provider.

What the theme inspector sees without a brand cloak

The default pattern for a third-party Shopify checkout is a two-line paste: an inline stylesheet that hides Shopify Payments express buttons, plus a <script src> tag pointing to the third-party's hosted domain. Both lines advertise the provider. Anyone reading theme.liquid can see the provider domain in the src attribute. Anyone downloading the script can grep the shipped JS for provider brand strings, gateway names, endpoint paths.

Competitors doing store-teardowns look for exactly this pattern. Category monitoring tools (Ecomhunt-style scanners) index it. Would-be copycats read it to reverse-engineer your stack. For an operator whose stack is a competitive edge, that visibility is a leak.

What brand cloak does

The theme.liquid paste is reduced to a single <script src> tag under your own subdomain. The loader body served from that URL is Terser-minified and then javascript-obfuscator-processed at the moderate config. Function names are mangled. String literals are split, encoded and reassembled at runtime. Control flow is flattened. What ships to the browser is functionally identical JS that is not text-searchable for provider brand, gateway name, endpoint URL, store ID, or any of the other identifying fingerprints a third-party inspector would grep for.

The 22-marker leak audit runs on every deploy. Markers include: dusto, cascadecheckout, shopify-payment, apple-pay, shop-pay, buy_it_now, STORE_ID, REDIRECT_BASE, DROP_STAGING, TRACKING_ENDPOINT, dustoHideExpressCheckout, handleClick, fireAddToCart, postEvent, readCartCookie, reconstructFbcCookie, dynamic-checkout, additional-checkout, checkoutBaseUrl, morDomain, src/lib, and tracking/meta. All confirmed absent in production JS bundle before activation.

What the cloak does NOT hide

• The order record inside Shopify Admin — still visible to the store owner and to Shopify itself.
• The gateway settlement to your bank — still visible to your acquirer, your bank and the card networks (that is where the money moves).
• Your product catalog inside Shopify — Shopify's own platform scan reads this.
• Compliance-relevant transaction metadata sent to your acquirer as part of the standard authorization message.

Additional cloak layers on the same infrastructure

Brand cloak (theme + JS) is one of four cloak layers CascadeCheckout ships. The other three:

• Buyer-facing gateway brand cloak — checkout page served under your subdomain, buyer sees your brand not the gateway's
• Express-wallet suppression — Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay hidden so buyers land in the cascaded flow
• HTTP header cloak — X-Powered-By stripped, host stack not identified in response headers

What we do NOT do

• Not a bank. Not a payment processor. Not a merchant of record.
• Never hold funds. Never touch card data.
• Do not modify authorization data sent to your acquirer.
• Do not misrepresent your MCC — that is on your MID contract.
• Do not manage chargebacks — your gateway's dispute tools handle that.
• Do not underwrite the MID.

Frequent questions

What does brand cloak hide?

The identity of the checkout provider from anyone who opens Shopify's theme code editor or inspects the shipped JavaScript. The loader snippet is a single obfuscated line — no CascadeCheckout brand, no gateway name, no endpoint URLs are readable in the shipped source.

Why does brand cloak matter?

Buyers who inspect the page do not see a third-party checkout provider — they see your brand. Competitors scanning your store for your stack cannot easily identify what you run. Casual theme inspection reveals nothing about the underlying architecture.

How is the cloak built?

Terser plus javascript-obfuscator on the moderate config. Every deploy runs a 22-marker leak audit against the shipped JS. Markers include the CascadeCheckout brand, gateway names, endpoint paths, store IDs. All confirmed absent before production activation.

Does the cloak survive Shopify's own scan?

Shopify's platform scan reads product catalog, app permissions and storefront copy. The cloak operates on the checkout loader and shipped JS. Different surfaces. The cloak reduces third-party-inspector visibility of what checkout provider you use; it does not modify what Shopify's platform team sees when they scan your store.

Full cloak stack → · Hide checkout from SP → · Anonymous checkout →