
Are you a new web developer looking for a way to make great money? Then you should consider developing Shopify themes. If you weren’t aware, merchants pay top dollar for the best Shopify storefront themes. Themes are templates for how a Shopify store looks and feels.
How much do Shopify themes make?
On average, Shopify themes earn up to $11,000 per year for their creators. They’re a great way to make money, as you’re able to earn 100% of the revenue until you make your first one million dollars. After you make your first million then you will make 85% on the Shopify theme store.
If you want to learn more about how you can start making money designing themes, stay tuned. In this post, we’ll dive into everything you need to know about Shopify themes.
Understanding Shopify Themes
The Shopify Theme Store contains all the themes available for sale. Shopify will feature the newest and most popular themes on the front page. As you can imagine, getting listed on the front page is a considerable advantage.
That’s why there’s fierce competition for developers to get their themes listed.
The Theme Store is one of the first places merchants will visit when designing their page. Millions of users scour the themes in the store every day to find the perfect one for their needs.
So if you want to design a theme that sells, you’ll need to identify with what merchants want the most. Here are a few factors that you should strive to include in your theme:
- Flexible settings. These allow merchants have the freedom to add minor tweaks here and there. An ideal theme is one that a merchant can mix and mold to reflect their brand identity. Try to design a theme that has lots of editable areas where users can add their unique touches.
- A sleek appearance that’s not only appealing but also functional. Your theme needs to identify navigational elements, products, payment processing, and more. Try not to focus too much on making things look pretty. Instead, opt for a balance between beauty and practicality: the more accessible your theme is to use, the better.
- Features targeted at a niche audience. Lastly, it would be best if you designed themes for a specific niche or industry. That way, you can address crucial pain points and solve them through your design. That’s the most effective way to design a theme that consistently sells.
Planning Out Your Design

Before you sit down at the computer to start writing code, you need to plan things out first. A theme is going to have a lot of complicated elements, so you need a strong foundation. As with any planning phase, you should ask yourself a series of questions.
- Who do you intend on designing the theme for in particular?
- How long are you able to dedicate to its design?
- How are you going to research your target audience?
- What will make your theme stand out from the crowd?
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can start writing out a timeline. You can think of it as your theme roadmap. You should include:
- Research timeline
- Design timeline
- Release date
- Tasks in order of priority
That’s a great way to stay organized during the entire process. First, let’s look at the research portion.
Researching Your Target Audience
No web developer has the innate knowledge of what Shopify merchants want out of their themes. That’s why a research phase is a necessity. You need to understand how the merchants in your niche operate. That way, you can start to identify pain points to address in your theme.
Remember, you’re not developing your theme for one individual merchant. Instead, you want your theme to have the broadest appeal that it can.
Try to reach out to merchants in your target industry. Pick their brain for a bit and get to know what it’s like to sell their products. You can also turn to Facebook Groups and Reddit pages related to your industry.
It’s crucial not to neglect this phase, as it is truly the most important one. Working with the merchants in your field is the absolute best way to assess their needs. Once you’ve spent enough time with them, you can start working on the design.
Designing the Theme
Once you have an idea of the merchant needs you want to address, it’s time to start the fun part, the design. Now you can finally implement all the ideas that have been brewing in your head. You know the needs of your merchants, and now you can address them through your design.
Remember to make your theme as flexible as possible. That way, it can appeal to a large number of merchants around the world in your field.
It would be best if you focused on both UI and UX design here. UI refers to your user interface. That’s all the buttons, pages, forms, and interfaces that your page uses. The UX is the user experience, which is what it’s like to use your store.
UI design focuses on form and function. Your navigational layout should be straightforward. It’s essential not to get too complicated with it.
UX takes some research to do correctly. Try reaching out to the merchants you contacted during the research phase. Have them try out all the new features of your theme and see what they think. From there, you can tweak things until they’re picture-perfect. Adobe offers excellent software for creating web design mockups, to try it out visit this link.
Uploading Your Theme
Once you’ve perfected your design, it’s time to upload it to the Shopify Theme Store to start making money. Make sure to take rigorous quality assurance measures before submitting. Also, pay close attention to the Shopify Theme Store guidelines. Once your theme goes live, you can work on getting it listed. Also, you can market your theme as long as you funnel the sales back to the Shopify Theme Store.
Shopify Theme development with Coding Phase
If you are interested in a great course to learn liquid try out Shopify Theme Development by CodingPhase. Codingphase by Joe Santos teaches you all about the liquid programming language as you code alongside him to create a theme. I highly recommend this course as it’s easy to follow and has tons of useful information. We recommend subscribing to the diamond plan so you can have access to both the Shopify theme development courses and Shopify app development courses, while also getting access to a huge collection of programming courses you can take. You can also buy courses individually but you will end up spending more money than if you bought the diamond plan and got access to all of the Codingphase courses. If you want to get access to the Shopify theme development course and a huge collection of courses check out Codingphase at this link.
How Much Money Do Shopify Themes Make? ( quick video )
Closing Thoughts
Shopify themes are a fantastic way for developers to make money online. They take quite a bit of research and planning to do right, but they can be well worth it. How much do Shopify themes make each year? On average, around $11,000 per theme, but don’t limit yourself to that number. With a clever design, there’s no cap on what you can make with a Shopify theme. If you’d be interested in our guide on how to sell themes on Shopify visit this link here.
To get more Shopify developer tips see our developer posts here.