Since August 27, it seems new merchants appear to see a change to the ‘Discover themes’ area in admin.
Previously there was a prominent ‘Explore more themes’ card linking to the Theme Store. This has now been replaced by another free Shopify theme, Dwell, leaving only the much smaller ‘Visit Theme Store’ button at the top.
For third-party theme developers, this is concerning. We’re already competing with a growing selection of excellent free Shopify themes, and this change removes one of the clearest discovery routes into the paid Theme Store.
This may seem like a small UI change, but it could have a significant impact on Theme Store traffic and developer sales.
Could the Themes team clarify the thinking behind this change and whether its impact on third-party theme discovery is being monitored?
One of the bigger issues for Theme Store developers is that there are already very few clear paths within the Shopify admin that encourage merchants to browse the Shopify Theme Store.
Replacing such a prominent “Explore more themes” entry point with another Shopify-built free theme makes that discovery problem even greater. The Theme Store is home to a large ecosystem of third-party developers who have invested significant time and resources into building, maintaining, and supporting themes specifically for Shopify merchants. This change prevents third-party themes from being given a reasonable opportunity to be discovered.
I’d really like to understand whether Shopify is measuring the effect this change has had on Theme Store visits, theme trials, and purchases, and whether maintaining healthy discovery of third-party themes was considered as part of the decision?
I think it would be valuable for Shopify to explain how it sees merchants discovering the Theme Store going forward. If prominent discovery routes within the admin continue to be reduced, it raises an important question about the long-term role Shopify intends the third-party Theme Store ecosystem to play.
Yet another nail in the coffin for the Theme store.
At some point, the numbers simply stop working. There are only so many merchants buying themes, and every new theme or preset is competing for a piece of that. Reduce discovery on top of that and it gets harder and harder to justify spending years maintaining a theme as a serious business.
If this keeps going, more established themes will probably end up becoming side projects simply because they can no longer support full-time teams. Merchants lose out too when that happens.
I genuinely wonder whether anyone at Shopify is tracking how sales for established theme partners have changed YoY. A lot of issues have been raised since the Theme Store redesign, but not much has actually changed.
Since the closure of the Partners Slack, having any meaningful direct conversation with Shopify and the Theme Store team has become impossible. At this point, I am not even sure whether there is still a dedicated Theme Store team. It increasingly feels like the whole thing is just running on autopilot .
I really hope someone at Shopify starts looking at what this is doing to the whole theme ecosystem and what’s going to happen in the long run. It’s a shame to see the Theme Store getting worse while Shopify seems to not care.
Yes, they’re tracking theme sales over time and they’re aware of the revenue destruction of legacy partners (like us). My hope after discussing it with Atlee Clark was that she was cooking on improving the situation, but that change above does not look good. Unfortunately, we’ve had to look elsewhere for revenue and for our futures in product design and development. It’s become too hard to make a living doing this.
Well, doesn’t seem like Atlee Clark’s cooking anything good.
We’ve been saying this for years now, so none of this is really new. And from Shopify’s point of view, I can see why it might not be much of a priority. They still get their 15% + 2.9% cut either way, so there isn’t much incentive to worry about what happens to individual theme businesses.
The problem is that by the time they realize something is wrong and the quality of the store has really deteriorated, it may already be too late to undo the damage.
We’ve basically made the same decision. Themes will still get fixes from time to time, but we’re not going to keep pouring resources into them simply because the money no longer justifies the effort.
Same for support. We used to go out of our way to help merchants with things that weren’t really related to the theme at all. Now we just support what we’re required to under the Partner terms, and that’s it.
Shopify looks after its own interests. At some point, we have to do the same.
Frankly speaking, I don’t see much logic in squeezing theme partners out of the market.
The theme ecosystem is already under a lot of pressure because of the new theme submission rules.
At the same time, established theme vendors still have an obligation to support and update thousands and thousands of stores using their themes.
I understand the overall idea: Shopify probably wants most store owners to use Horizon, customize it with AI, and leave only a smaller part of the market to theme partners who offer specific designs and features.
But if the theme ecosystem starts to collapse, millions of stores using themes from large vendors could end up in a situation where they paid for a theme that is no longer supported or updated.
For me, that looks like a perfect recipe for disaster.
Is there anyone from the Shopify team here who could help clarify the situation and explain what the long-term plan for theme partners is?
After dotdev i was under the impression that Shopify will bring back trafic to the theme store, since they basically broke the funnel in the first place, with unbalanced attention to their Horizon theme. Such changes go in the opposite direction
It’s been going this way for four years now, I don’t see anything temporary about it.
And even if things somehow improve, which I honestly doubt, that doesn’t fix the situation we’re in right now. Sales already don’t justify keeping a full team anymore, and we’ve had to make some pretty hard decisions based on what the business can actually support today.
After so many years of building our livelihoods around Shopify’s rules and limitations, it’s hard not to feel like the rug is being pulled out from under us. The store keeps getting flooded and neglected, and we’re the ones left dealing with the falldown.
Meanwhile, Shopify quietly moved away from the partner relationship the Theme Store was built on, leaving us alone with lower sales in an increasingly diluted market, while still being stuck with an unsustainable one-time purchase model and basically free lifetime support obligations.
I also agree with fellow theme partners. Since the Theme Store redesign, there haven’t been any motivating improvements in the sphere. I already notice quite a few unsupported themes in the store, and their number will seem to grow.
We did some research on this, and the numbers showed that around 15% of themes hadn’t received any updates for more than six months. So i think store owners who bought this themes simply wasted their money.
I’m sure those who joined this thread update their themes and introduce new features regularly and would appreciate some visibility in the store for their efforts.
Instead, the day our new theme received a major update from 1.0 to 2.0, packed with new features, it drastically dropped in the relevance rating by 90 points!
The bigger problem here is: how is a merchant supposed to know about, discover, and shop the Theme Store if the visual prompts that lead them there are gradually being removed?
At this point, outside of a now much smaller button within the Shopify admin and a link buried in the Shopify footer, what is actually telling a merchant that the Theme Store even exists?
That matters. A change like this may appear incredibly small from inside Shopify. To the team responsible, it might simply be a UI adjustment — perhaps one whose wider impact isn’t immediately obvious. But when these small changes reduce the visibility of the Theme Store, they can have very real consequences for the partners whose businesses depend on merchants being able to discover it in the first place.
Small UI decisions can have consequences far beyond the pixels being changed. For Shopify, this may be a minor decision. For the partners on the other side of it, the impact will affect businesses, employees, and livelihoods.
I am really hopeful that Shopify will comment on this to offer some clarity
At DotDev, Eytan shared a few statistical insights from the past year. Theme store traffic was down, but conversions from that traffic were up since the redesign launched last July. Vanessa attributed some of that traffic decline to the removal of the prompt to visit the theme store when merchants install a new theme. I’m surprised to see that this direction has been taken further with the removal of another theme store discovery point in the admin. Many merchants still want premium themes that are ready-to-go straight out of the box. Even with AI, this business still has a place in the ecosystem.
I absolutely love Shopify and I worry that they are neglecting an area that could have compounding negative consequences. It’s more than just our theme businesses suffering. Echoing what others in this thread have said, with the current business model of a one-time purchase and lifetime support alongside shrinking visibility for discoverability by new customers, we can’t afford to invest in existing merchants like we used to if our businesses can’t justify spending time on the theme part of our business. Besides the negative impact of not being able to deliver updates as regularly to merchants, I’ve heard from several agency and freelance developers too who are frustrated that they aren’t able to rely on theme updates like they used to. They rely on them as foundations to build from, and to guide them on the best way to implement new features, including UI and UX. Theme partners provide a lot of value to the ecosystem beyond a one-time purchase by a merchant for a store. Losing our engagement affects merchants, partners, and I fear affects trust and faith in Shopify overall.
What I find interesting is whether Shopify managment team has really planned for what happens if a few major theme vendors leave the market or go out of business.
There are hundreds of thousands of merchants who have paid hundreds of dollars for high-quality themes and depend on those vendors for updates, compatibility, and support. If that support disappears, merchants will not see it only as a vendor problem. It can easily become a Shopify problem too.
Theme vendors are also some of the most effective contributors to the Shopify ecosystem. They invest their own money into new ideas, test what merchants actually need, provide support, and keep improving products year after year.
That is why pushing theme partners out in favor of a more standardized, AI-powered frontend feels risky. AI is useful, but replacing a diverse ecosystem with a more generic frontend could reduce innovation and choice in the long run.
A stronger approach would be to use AI to make themes better and easier to customize, while still keeping successful theme partners motivated to invest in the platform.
It’s really sad to see what’s happening. A lot of the theme developers I know have either been laid off or have had to significantly reduce their teams. We’ve had to do the same.
A few years ago we had a good-sized team of talented people building new themes, improving our existing ones and providing merchant support. We were completely committed to Shopify and genuinely saw ourselves as long-term partners in the ecosystem.
The Theme Store has supported some brilliant independent businesses and some incredibly talented designers and developers over the years. It’s difficult watching many of those teams disappear and seeing how hard it has become to build a sustainable business around theme development.
I completely understand that the platform and market have to evolve, but I hope there’s still a place in Shopify’s future for independent theme developers to build sustainable businesses, invest in their products and provide the level of support merchants deserve.
