If I purchase a premium theme on my dev site will it be transferred to client?
I haven’t attempted to transfer the site with a premium license.
If I purchase a premium theme on my Shopify Partner dev site will the license be transferred to the client upon site transfer?
If license transfer is not possible, how do you all handle premium themes and building out client sites for transfer?
Troubleshooting
Just a point of clarity: Do you mean literally a Shopify “Dev” site? Or do you mean a Shopify site that happens to be for your “Dev” purposes? If the former, you can’t transfer Dev sites. If the latter, read on…
There are no mechanisms for transferring themes from Store A to Store B. In fact, we’ve tried. We got hit with DMCA complaints from the theme owner without any support from Shopify or the theme owner explaining this exact situation: We purchased the theme for our Store A’s development purposes (even password protected), but it’s actually being used on Store B (the LIVE store).
I find this to be a dishonest move by both the Theme Authors and Shopify when we’ve tried to be fair and honest.
The end result is that you must purchase the theme again as the license is fixed to the store under which you purchased the theme from. I hope Shopify reconsiders this in the future.
The story is different if you transfer the entire STORE itself to the client. The license will tag along.
As a theme partner, everything around licensing is controlled entirely by Shopify. We don’t have any say or impact on how, when or if Shopify will transfer a license. It’s something that we wish we had a bit more control over.
With that said, Shopify does allow you to transfer a theme license in one scenario. Shopify support should be able to walk you through the steps. You have to permanently close the store that the theme was originally purchased, purchase the theme on the new store (client’s store) and then they will refund the original purchase. Either way Shopify should be able to guide you through the steps.
@RobW36 It’s a Shopify Dev site under our Partners account. So if we build out the full site and transfer it to our client, they’ll have the license?
What if they have an existing site with live store data? I’m assuming we need to export the store data, import it into staging, and then perform the transfer. Does this sound correct?
@Jonathan_Moore We are most likely going to purchase it on our Shopify dev site and then see if the license transfers over when we transfer it to our client. We followed the Shopify Partner dashboard steps and created a site “For Client Transfer”. If that doesn’t work we’ll request a refund and re-purchase the license in the client’s site.
I find this all surprising, considering other CMS themes make the transfer process way easier. There should be 2 license keys one for live and one for dev.
Theme purchases are final and non-refundable, so that won’t work. You’ll need to purchase the theme using the client’s account, export it, work on it in the dev store, and then transfer the ZIP back to the client’s store when it’s ready.
@opal This doesn’t sound like the easiest solution as per Shopify’s support. You can create a transferrable dev site that can be given to the client upon project completion. Any theme purchased on this transferable dev site will go with the account to the customer.
Any data from our clients’ old Shopify site is going to be exported and imported into the new site.