I’m running into a limitation in the partner dashboard and was hoping for some clarification or advice.
When I create a shop through the partner dashboard that hasn’t yet been transferred to a client, I’m unable to purchase a premium theme. However, I want to start implementing custom code for this client’s store.
The challenge is that the development process can take 3–6 months, but in order to proceed with a premium theme, the client would already need to start paying for the subscription.
Is there a way to apply custom code to a theme (especially a premium one) before the shop is transferred to the client? Or are there any recommended workarounds for this situation?
Any tips or best practices would be greatly appreciated.
Good question. The constraint you’re hitting is expected: paid themes can be added to a dev/client transfer store as a free trial (you can customize settings via the theme editor that way), but you can’t edit theme code or publish without purchasing the theme, and purchasing requires the store to be on a paid Shopify plan.
Right now, the best thing to do is purchase the theme on behalf of the client, bill them for the cost, then hand off the store and remove your payment information once they take over. This is the official guidance from our Partner Program FAQ for this exact scenario. Worth flagging that the theme itself is a one-time purchase (not a recurring subscription) tied to the store license, so it’s a single fee rather than an ongoing cost.
If buying upfront isn’t on the table, the next-best option is to build customizations on top of a free base theme (Dawn or the Skeleton reference theme) during development, then layer the same patterns onto the premium theme once it’s purchased post-transfer. That works best when the customizations aren’t deeply tied to the premium theme’s specific structure.
Hope this helps! Let me know if I can clarify anything on our end here.
Hey @Alan_G - as you’ve described is our ordinary procedure that we’ve been doing for years , however in the last week the option to actually set up a payment method on a client transfer store (prior to transferring) is missing. When we click on the ‘billing’ link in the settings menu it won’t load and reverts back to the ‘general’ settings page.
For us, this has also been an issue for a week now. I’ve escalated it with Shopify; they’ve indicated they’re working on it, but unfortunately there’s still no solution so far.
Thanks for your screenshot and information. When we try to click the Billing button, it just takes us back to the Setting page. We can’t actually access the Billing page to add our details unfortunately.
@Vlaaibaar_VOF - thanks for confirming things are working again on your end, and for sharing the screenshot.
@Carmel_Wooding@adamwooding - if the Billing link is still bouncing you back to General settings, that’s behaving like a separate admin UI issue from the original theme purchase question. To look into it on our end, can you share:
The myshopify.com URL of the dev/transfer store where you’re hitting this
Whether it reproduces in an incognito window or different browser
Any console errors that come up when you click the Billing link
Whether you’re accessing as the Partner org owner or as a staff/collaborator
Happy to move this to a DM if you’d rather not share the store URL or account details publicly, just let me know.
With those, I can take a look internally and see if others are hitting the same redirect behaviour. If it’s blocking your billing setup right now and you’d like a faster path, reaching out to Shopify Support directly through help.shopify.com in parallel isn’t a bad idea since they can pull up account-specific context.
Hi @Alan_G , thank you so much for your reply and assistance. Just a quick update on this: We created a new Client Transfer store and in the new store everything works correctly. The other store that isn’t working was created the exact same way, so we’re unsure what is wrong with that one. The only thing we can think of is that it was created during the transition period when Shopify was moving from the partner dashboard to the new dev dashboard
I think this issue is now resolved. Thank you all for your time and assistance
No worries @adamwooding - appreciate you letting us know this is resolved. I can’t say for sure without seeing specifics, but it’s possible that it could have been a one-off DB state inconsistency or something like that. I can solve out the thread for now, but if you or any other folks reading this thread see something like this pop up again, just ping me here and we can take a look.
