Yep, same here. We had to make some really hard decisions and let go of 80% of our team in June. It’s sad because we had a pretty ambitious roadmap, both for new features on our existing themes and for completely new ones.
Also had an ambitious roadmap up until June. Now pretty much convinced that it’s no longer worth it investing anything substantial into Shopify.
The decline for us actually started around February/March. We kept hoping things would get back to a sustainable level, but by May it was pretty obvious they weren’t going to. The store just kept getting flooded with more themes and presets, with seemingly no regard for what that was doing to existing partners.
April and May were usually our strongest months, so when even those were bad, that’s when we realized we simply couldn’t sustain the team we had anymore. For five straight months, revenue wasn’t even enough to cover salaries and the rest of our costs, let alone make a profit. I personally didn’t pay myself just to keep things going. That’s how bad it got.
Some might argue that part of the problem is on us for relying too much on the Theme Store. But Shopify’s own terms made diversification difficult by design. Themes have to be sold exclusively through the Theme Store, so we couldn’t build a second sales channel around the same products. The transaction and customer relationship also largely stayed inside Shopify, which meant we never had the same ability a normal product business has to build an independent customer base and fall back on it when things change.
The decline in theme sales doesn’t seem to be limited to the Shopify Theme Store. I recently checked some of the most popular Shopify themes on ThemeForest, and the top three themes currently get around 20–30 sales each per week. In August last year, they were getting around 70–90 sales per week.
Their prices are also much lower, at around $60 (they were roughly $80 last year), so I don’t think the cost-of-living crisis is the main driver behind the decline.
What about Canvas: “Opening the Aperture on Online Store Design”? Do you think there will still be opportunities to work with Shopify, particularly through the Theme Store, or do you think themes will eventually become obsolete?
There will be for sure. Now the question is: is it worth it spending the effort for a company that might cancel you anytime without a notice?
Nobody knows how things will become, but I think the answer is: no.
At this stage you’re fighting against shopify and sweating hard whenever you see a changelog dropping. That’s very stressful work environment.
So if you aren’t already invested in the ecosystem already, I would recommend working on something else.
I don’t think there’s going to be a Theme store in 8-12 months anymore…