Custom Shopify theme
A storefront built around your catalogue, not a template you fight.
A theme built or rebuilt from your design, with the sections your merchandising needs. Native Shopify structure throughout, so your team keeps editing pages without a developer.
Project pricing
From $5,250
That covers a section-level rebuild on your current theme. A full storefront with custom templates and metaobject-driven content runs to $19,000.
Send the brief and get a number back.
Describe the projectThe theme is a template with five years of patches on it
Most stores arrive here the same way. A theme was bought, then a page builder was installed to work around it, then an app for the size guide, another for a comparison table, another for the badges under the buy button. Each one adds a monthly fee and a script that loads on every page. The theme itself stops being updated, because an update would overwrite the patches, and merchandising cannot move a block before a campaign without booking developer time. Stores still on a vintage theme have it worse: sections work on the home page and nowhere else, dynamic sources and collection filtering are missing, and Shopify's own free vintage themes now get security fixes only.
What the build covers
A structure mapped to how you merchandise
Before any design work, templates and sections are laid out against what actually changes: the block swapped every campaign, the row edited weekly, the parts that have not moved in two years. Sections get presets, so a new landing page starts assembled instead of empty and nobody is choosing between forty untitled blocks.
Content that lives in the admin
Size charts, care instructions, delivery tables, badge rows: these become metafields and metaobjects rather than text baked into Liquid. Your team edits the record once and every product using it follows. It also means the content outlives the theme, which text typed inside a section does not.
Checked in the states that break
Every section is reviewed against an empty collection, a sold-out variant, the longest product title in the catalogue, a second currency, a second language and a phone. Most theme bugs a customer meets are not code failures. They are a layout that was only ever seen with three tidy demo products in it.
Why it is built this way
Native sections, not a page builder
A page builder app makes pages that belong to the app. Uninstall it and the page leaves with it, and while it is installed the store carries its script on every request. Sections and blocks are Shopify's own model: they live in your theme, they render with the rest of the page and they keep working after we are gone. That is the difference between renting a storefront and owning one.
Fewer apps by design
A size guide, a comparison table, a bundle picker and a lookbook are sections, not subscriptions. Apps earn their place where they do something a theme genuinely cannot: moderated reviews, subscriptions, loyalty, ERP sync. Where an app is the right answer you get told so instead of being sold a build, and where four apps are doing the work of one section, they come out.
How it runs
A read of what you have now: the theme's architecture version, which sections exist, which apps render anything on the storefront, and what your team edits in a normal week.
A written map of templates and sections, agreed before design work starts, saying what each one is for and what a merchandiser can change inside it.
The build happens on an unpublished copy of the theme, so nothing moves on the live store. You get a preview link that stays current throughout.
Checks on your real catalogue rather than demo content: empty states, sold-out variants, long titles, second currency, second language, mobile.
Publish, then a window for fixes while your team uses it for the first time and finds the things nobody spots in a review.
Background
What a custom Shopify theme actually means now
Three generations of theme, and which one you are on
Shopify names three theme architecture versions and the difference is not cosmetic. Vintage themes are the original model: sections on the home page only, no dynamic sources, no collection filtering, and Shopify's free vintage themes receive security fixes and nothing else. Online Store 2.0 brought sections to every template, JSON templates and content pulled from metafields. Theme blocks are the current version, used by the Horizon family, and add nested blocks a merchant can rearrange inside a section. Which version you sit on decides what is possible before anyone writes a line of Liquid, so it is worth knowing before you commission work.
The failure mode of a badly built custom theme
A custom theme can be worse than a template, and the pattern is recognisable. Content typed straight into Liquid instead of metafields. One enormous section per page, so the theme editor offers nothing to move. Settings named after the code rather than the purpose. No presets, so building a new page means starting from a blank template. It looks bespoke from the front and behaves like a locked PDF from the admin. The test is simple: can somebody who has never seen the code assemble a new landing page in an afternoon?
Where an app is genuinely the better answer
Not everything belongs in a theme. Moderated reviews with their email flows, subscriptions with their own billing, loyalty programmes, ERP and POS sync, tax and compliance tooling: these carry state and integrations that have no business living in a storefront. What does not need an app is presentation. Comparison tables, size guides, lookbooks, bundle pickers, announcement logic and badge rules are layout and data, and paying monthly for them is a common way to spend more on subscriptions than the build would have cost.
What you should own when the work ends
A theme in your store you can duplicate and roll back, the source it was built from, and a short document saying what each section expects and where its content lives. That last part is what makes the next developer cheap rather than expensive, and it is the part most often missing. Twenty four Shopify storefronts in the portfolio were built or rebuilt this way, selling into the United States, Poland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Italy and Ukraine.
Describe the project
Tell us what you have and what should change. Within two working days you get a written calculation: the scope broken into parts with a price against each, or the questions needed to write one. No discovery call in between.
Questions
Custom themes, asked and answered
Often it can be fixed, and you will be told which after the review rather than before it. A theme on a current architecture with a reasonable section structure is usually cheaper to extend than to replace. A vintage theme, or one where each page is a single hardcoded section, is where a rebuild starts paying for itself.
Horizon is the current architecture and supports theme blocks, which makes it the most flexible base for new work. Dawn is Online Store 2.0 and still a sound starting point. A paid theme can be kept when it is on a current architecture and its vendor still ships updates, though it does mean working around decisions somebody else made.
They get inventoried first. Some are replaced by a section and their subscription stops. Some stay because they do work a theme cannot. Some turn out to be installed but rendering nothing at all, which is common and worth finding either way.
That is what the structure work is for. Pages are assembled from sections in the theme editor, text and images live in the editor or in metafields, and you get a short note per section saying what it expects. If a routine change needs a developer every time, the structure was drawn wrong.
A section-level rebuild on an existing theme is usually weeks. A full storefront with custom templates, metaobject-driven content and several markets takes longer, and the estimate follows the review instead of preceding it.