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Julia DennisThe most underrated niche in web design is Shopify. Here's why
✍ Written by Julia Dennis, Shopify Expert ⏱ 8 min read Key Takeaways Shopify is web design's least crowded niche: there are roughly 7.5 Shopify designers per 1,000 Shopify stores, versus around 40 on Webflow and 11 on Squarespace (my 2025 BuiltWith count). Shopify runs nearly a third (and growing) of US online stores, so demand for specialists stays healthy year after year. A Shopify store is business infrastructure directly tied to revenue. So, owners hire pros earlier on and highly value the work that they do. You don't need to code in order to specialize in Shopify if you have the right pre-built section library at your disposal. With this, it becomes more of a positioning decision than a technical skill one. Most Shopify design work sits in the $2,500 to $15,000 range, and ongoing retainers are where the real income stability comes from. Shopify is the most underrated niche in web design because it has the lowest designer competition of any major platform while serving one of the biggest, hungriest client bases online. When I counted the amount of stores on a particular platform vs. the amount design studios designing on that platform (using BuiltWith's 2025 data), Shopify came out to roughly 7.5 designers for every 1,000 stores. This was the lowest of anything I looked at, which is cool given that Shopify runs close to a third of all US online stores. There's huge demand, a short line of specialists, and clients whose whole business depends on their Shopify site. I didn't start out as a Shopify specialist, nor did I come from a "traditional" web development background. After getting into branding, I dipped my toes in the web design waters building sites on Wordpress and Squarepsace for service-based businesses like hairdressers (and my 2017-era wanna be travel blog, lol). Then, a branding client asked me if I could build her a custom gift-boxing site on Shopify. I said yes (yay, I get to try out a new platform!) and opened its backend for the first time. Cue the existential crisis that happened when I came to realize that Shopify's designer was...different from Squarespace, to put it mildly. There was a lot going on in there. I had to detangle how the Theme is separate from the pages are separate from the backend data (and this was back in the days before Shopify 2.0 when you couldn't even design layouts on non-Home pages without custom code). It doesn't actually take THAT long, or THAT much brainpower, to find your away around the Shopify admin, but your first couple of hours in it feel a bit scavenger hunt-y. This slight learning curve is where the Shopify design opportunity lies, though. Not to toot my own horn, but if someone who's very techie like me felt way in over their head when opening the platform for the first time, the store owners feel it much more. This is a big reason so many of them who are moving off marketplaces like Etsy and onto Shopify are looking for help. Shopify has the lowest designer competition of a LOT of our favorite platforms Here's the part I don't see anybody talking about: Shopify is the least crowded niche in many of the big web design players today. There are millions of stores and relatively very few designers who focus on them. Most designers feel more comfortable staying generalists and treating eCommerce as just one of the offerings on their menu of services. When I ran the numbers through BuiltWith, there were roughly 5 million Shopify stores and only around 40,000 design studios serving them. That works out to about 7.5 designers per 1,000 stores, lower than every other platform I checked. One caveat to note (that actually makes my point hit home even harder): Shopify's partner count lumps in app developers and tech partners, so the real design-studio number is fuzzy and probably even thinner than it looks. 7.5 designers per 1,000 stores on Shopify Shopify's designer-to-store ratio in my 2025 BuiltWith count, the lowest of any major platform, next to about 40 on Webflow and 11 on Squarespace. Platform Designers per 1,000 sites What that means for you Shopify ~7.5 Least crowded of the major platforms WordPress ~9 Premium work pays, commodity work races to the bottom Squarespace ~11 Plenty of freelancers, but most owners just DIY Showit ~34 Tiny pond, packed with template shops Webflow ~40 Lots of designers chasing the same sites, competing on quality There's an old analogy I love for this. Let's say you woke up tomorrow and for some reason HAD to sell a million hot dogs this year. It'd be a silly mistake to obsess over the branding of your hot dog stand when it's really about where you park the damn thing. Basically, you want to plant yourself where the crowd is hungry. Shopify is that spot: a big, hungry client base with a shallow pool of designers to choose from. Shopify Stores Are Business Infrastructure, So Owners Hire Sooner A Shopify store is business infrastructure (you can kinda liken a Shopify storefront to a literal cash register). It's in charge of a whole bunch: inventory, checkout, merchandising—not to mention potentially 100% of a client's revenue—so the stakes are at a totally different level from a service-based site that acts more like a brochure to drive leads. Because the store is their revenue, owners care more about the details: things like conversion rate, product discovery, checkout friction, and average order value. So, they hire a pro sooner and view them more as a trusted partner, because there's serious money riding on whether the work sells. Drag-and-drop website platforms are generally more surface-level than Shopify. Think of a Shopify store like an iceberg where the storefront design is the tip (the part everyone sees). Under the water you'll find a bigger-than-expected system of apps, inventory, and data. Store owners are more likely to want to reach out for help when there's this magnitude of complexity. It also helps that Shopify goes far beyond just a DIY crowd. Squarespace, Wix, and to some extent Showit are built and marketed for do-it-yourselfers. While still somewhat DIY-friendly, Shopify is complex enough that a lot of founders decide it's worth bringing someone in. 1 in 3 ~1 in 3 US online stores run on Shopify Shopify holds close to a third of the US eCommerce software market, and the designer-services side is projected to grow from about $0.6 billion in 2026 to roughly $1.5 billion by 2035 (industry projections). That growth rate beats the stock market. That combination is rare: low designer competition, a giant base of stores, and owners who keep investing in the site because it makes them money. It's why I'd point any designer considering where to specialize toward eCommerce, and specifically toward the platform behind so many $100k-per-year Shopify stores. You Don't Need to Code to Specialize in Shopify Here's the myth that keeps designers out: that Shopify means needing to learn how to code. Although knowing a bit of HTML/CSS with a sprinkle of Liquid can certainly help your Shopify capabilities, you no longer need to know how to code to win high-end Shopify projects. Because of this, specializing in Shopify boils down to positioning. It's you saying "this is what I do" and marketing your studio as the one who solves this problem. Client resonate with this way more than how much Liquid you know. Most designers coming from more of a graphic or general web design background and get started in Shopify end up in what I (not so) lovingly call theme jail. You pick a theme, style it, maybe add a custom font with a little CSS, and you're stuck with whatever sections that theme comes with. It's a valid approach, but there's friction and a lot more restrictiveness than what you're used to on a drag-and-drop builder. Custom sections are how you make your prison break from theme jail. They're unique layouts that go beyond theme defaults, and used to require knowledge of HTML/CSS/Javascript/Liquid to get up and running. Now, a pre-built section library changes that requirement. With it you can copy, paste, and reuse fully custom sections without touching Liquid, so you can hand a client a totally custom store that no other brand has. It's why I built The Section Studio: a library of custom-coded Shopify sections you copy, paste, and reuse, so you can build a totally custom store without writing code or hiring a developer. Pair it with Shopify's free Dawn theme and theme selection stops mattering (all while saving $$ on each project). Clients love this, because paying thousands for a designer and getting a lightly styled theme is...kind of a bummer. Telling them "this is a totally custom site, no one else will have this" is a strong selling point. Shopify Design Is Harder for AI to Replace If AI has you nervous about the future of design work, specializing is what's going to help you rest easy at night. AI is coming for the generalists before the specialists. It can spit out a layout that functions and looks kinda good, but it has no taste and no real subject-matter-expert point of view. Why it matters A platform like Shopify, with its own architecture, apps, and conversion patterns, is much harder for a general AI model to fudge than a five-page service site. Where the Money Is in Shopify Design Most Shopify design work (for first-time founders, marketplace migrators, and small businesses) lives between $2,500 and $15,000 a project. Big-agency projects can be many, many multiples of this, but are fewer and further between. You can build a steady and strong income in this range way before you take on a $20,000-plus enterprise build. Client type Typical budget Why they're worth knowing First-time founders $1,500-$6,000 The biggest group by volume, but they need the most hand-holding Marketplace migrators (off Etsy or Amazon) $4,000-$10,000 Proven product, photos and copy ready, easy to prospect Refresh / redesign $6,000-$15,000 Existing store, existing revenue, quick wins Scaling brands $15,000-$30,000 They know what they want and invest in growth Enterprise / Shopify Plus $25,000-$100,000+ The big kahunas, with the most pressure to get it right The trick to staying profitable here is scope. Getting started in Shopify, you should be clear on the fact that you only touch the frontend design. "Backend warehouse" stuff like inventory, shipping, taxes, and payments stay with the client. Think of yourself as the interior designer for the store. It'd be weird for you to go start printing shipping labels in the back. You can most definitely (and probably should) start to layer more adjacent Shopify services into your offerings like bulk product management, app installs, and even email flows, but for the beginning focus on mastering one area before you spread yourself too thin. Scope tip On your first few Shopify discovery calls, make it clear to the client that you only touch the design built into Shopify, and refer out or separately quote anything operational. Two things I never touch: taxes and payments. Sales tax runs on state-by-state nexus rules, and payments means handling someone's bank details, so I say a (way more polite) "heck no" to these each time. Then, you've got the chance to build some real income stability after launch. A store is a living business, so there's always a next season, or a new collection, or a conversion tweak to make. Booking clients for ongoing retainers to support them with these items means your business doesn't restart from zero every time a project ends, and you can even turn your process into digital products you sell on Shopify for a second income stream. How to Start Specializing in Shopify Getting into Shopify design doesn't take a bootcamp or a developer background. Here's the path I'd take if I were starting over in 2026. Make Shopify your thing Say it loud and proud: you're the Shopify person. Positioning is what turns strangers into referrals, and people start sending you eCommerce work once they know it's your specialty. Build with Dawn plus a section method Skip the coding headache and learn Shopify's free Dawn theme and a copy-paste section workflow so you can build an abundance of custom sites without writing Liquid. Make two or three portfolio stores Design and fully build a few marketplace-migrator-style stores. Clients hire what they can see, so your eCommerce work generally has to exist before the first client does. Scope front-end-first, then add retainers or add-ons Package a fixed build, keep operations out of scope, and seed the benefits of ongoing work from day one so retainers feel natural at launch. Frequently Asked Questions Is Shopify a good niche for web designers in 2026? Yes! Shopify is one of the least crowded, most viable niches in web design. It runs close to a third of US online stores, the store count keeps growing, and there are far fewer designers specializing in it than on platforms like Webflow or Squarespace. Because a Shopify store is tied to a client's revenue, owners hire professionals sooner and value the work more. Do you need to know how to code to design Shopify stores? No, you don't need to code in order to specialize in designing on Shopify. Specializing is a positioning decision that leans on marketing more than code, and you can build fully custom storefronts using a solid theme plus a pre-built section library that you copy and paste without writing Liquid. Knowing you can deliver a custom look without a developer is what lets you keep the whole design fee. How much can you charge for Shopify web design? Most Shopify design work falls in the $2,500 to $15,000 range per project, which is where first-time founders, marketplace migrators, and small businesses fall. Larger scaling brands and Shopify Plus builds run higher, often $15,000 to $100,000 and up. The real income stability comes after launch, from ongoing retainers for seasonal updates and conversion work. Is Shopify design less competitive than Webflow or Squarespace? Yes. When I counted stores against design studios using BuiltWith in 2025, Shopify had roughly 7.5 designers per 1,000 stores, the lowest of any major platform, compared to around 40 on Webflow and 11 on Squarespace. Fewer specialists chasing a bigger, higher-stakes client base is the core reason Shopify stays underrated. Will AI replace Shopify web designers? AI is coming for generalist web design work well before it affects specialists. It can generate a page layout that functions, but it has no taste or point of view, and eCommerce clients feel the difference when a store is built to sell. Specializing in a complex platform like Shopify, with its own architecture and conversion patterns, is one of the better hedges against AI commoditizing your work. How do I get my first Shopify design client? Build two or three portfolio stores for real or fictional brands so buyers can see your eCommerce work, then position yourself publicly as the Shopify person. Marketplace migrators coming off Etsy or Amazon are the easiest first clients because they already have a proven product, photos, and copy. Referrals and footer credits on the sites you build, plus talking about your work on LinkedIn, tend to bring the next clients faster than cold outreach. What is the difference between a Shopify theme and a custom Shopify build? A Shopify theme is the pre-built foundation that handles the cart, checkout, product pages, and structure, while a custom build adds branded sections and layouts that go beyond the theme's defaults. Styling a theme alone leaves you in what I call theme jail, limited to the sections the theme comes with. Custom sections, which you can add without coding using a section library, are the premium layer clients happily pay for. Explore The Section Studio
Julia DennisThe most underrated niche in web design is Shopify. Here's why
✍ Written by Julia Dennis, Shopify Expert ⏱ 8 min read Key Takeaways Shopify is web design's least crowded niche: there are roughly 7.5 Shopify designers per 1,000 Shopify stores, versus around 40 on Webflow and 11 on Squarespace (my 2025 BuiltWith count). Shopify runs nearly a third (and growing) of US online stores, so demand for specialists stays healthy year after year. A Shopify store is business infrastructure directly tied to revenue. So, owners hire pros earlier on and highly value the work that they do. You don't need to code in order to specialize in Shopify if you have the right pre-built section library at your disposal. With this, it becomes more of a positioning decision than a technical skill one. Most Shopify design work sits in the $2,500 to $15,000 range, and ongoing retainers are where the real income stability comes from. Shopify is the most underrated niche in web design because it has the lowest designer competition of any major platform while serving one of the biggest, hungriest client bases online. When I counted the amount of stores on a particular platform vs. the amount design studios designing on that platform (using BuiltWith's 2025 data), Shopify came out to roughly 7.5 designers for every 1,000 stores. This was the lowest of anything I looked at, which is cool given that Shopify runs close to a third of all US online stores. There's huge demand, a short line of specialists, and clients whose whole business depends on their Shopify site. I didn't start out as a Shopify specialist, nor did I come from a "traditional" web development background. After getting into branding, I dipped my toes in the web design waters building sites on Wordpress and Squarepsace for service-based businesses like hairdressers (and my 2017-era wanna be travel blog, lol). Then, a branding client asked me if I could build her a custom gift-boxing site on Shopify. I said yes (yay, I get to try out a new platform!) and opened its backend for the first time. Cue the existential crisis that happened when I came to realize that Shopify's designer was...different from Squarespace, to put it mildly. There was a lot going on in there. I had to detangle how the Theme is separate from the pages are separate from the backend data (and this was back in the days before Shopify 2.0 when you couldn't even design layouts on non-Home pages without custom code). It doesn't actually take THAT long, or THAT much brainpower, to find your away around the Shopify admin, but your first couple of hours in it feel a bit scavenger hunt-y. This slight learning curve is where the Shopify design opportunity lies, though. Not to toot my own horn, but if someone who's very techie like me felt way in over their head when opening the platform for the first time, the store owners feel it much more. This is a big reason so many of them who are moving off marketplaces like Etsy and onto Shopify are looking for help. Shopify has the lowest designer competition of a LOT of our favorite platforms Here's the part I don't see anybody talking about: Shopify is the least crowded niche in many of the big web design players today. There are millions of stores and relatively very few designers who focus on them. Most designers feel more comfortable staying generalists and treating eCommerce as just one of the offerings on their menu of services. When I ran the numbers through BuiltWith, there were roughly 5 million Shopify stores and only around 40,000 design studios serving them. That works out to about 7.5 designers per 1,000 stores, lower than every other platform I checked. One caveat to note (that actually makes my point hit home even harder): Shopify's partner count lumps in app developers and tech partners, so the real design-studio number is fuzzy and probably even thinner than it looks. 7.5 designers per 1,000 stores on Shopify Shopify's designer-to-store ratio in my 2025 BuiltWith count, the lowest of any major platform, next to about 40 on Webflow and 11 on Squarespace. Platform Designers per 1,000 sites What that means for you Shopify ~7.5 Least crowded of the major platforms WordPress ~9 Premium work pays, commodity work races to the bottom Squarespace ~11 Plenty of freelancers, but most owners just DIY Showit ~34 Tiny pond, packed with template shops Webflow ~40 Lots of designers chasing the same sites, competing on quality There's an old analogy I love for this. Let's say you woke up tomorrow and for some reason HAD to sell a million hot dogs this year. It'd be a silly mistake to obsess over the branding of your hot dog stand when it's really about where you park the damn thing. Basically, you want to plant yourself where the crowd is hungry. Shopify is that spot: a big, hungry client base with a shallow pool of designers to choose from. Shopify Stores Are Business Infrastructure, So Owners Hire Sooner A Shopify store is business infrastructure (you can kinda liken a Shopify storefront to a literal cash register). It's in charge of a whole bunch: inventory, checkout, merchandising—not to mention potentially 100% of a client's revenue—so the stakes are at a totally different level from a service-based site that acts more like a brochure to drive leads. Because the store is their revenue, owners care more about the details: things like conversion rate, product discovery, checkout friction, and average order value. So, they hire a pro sooner and view them more as a trusted partner, because there's serious money riding on whether the work sells. Drag-and-drop website platforms are generally more surface-level than Shopify. Think of a Shopify store like an iceberg where the storefront design is the tip (the part everyone sees). Under the water you'll find a bigger-than-expected system of apps, inventory, and data. Store owners are more likely to want to reach out for help when there's this magnitude of complexity. It also helps that Shopify goes far beyond just a DIY crowd. Squarespace, Wix, and to some extent Showit are built and marketed for do-it-yourselfers. While still somewhat DIY-friendly, Shopify is complex enough that a lot of founders decide it's worth bringing someone in. 1 in 3 ~1 in 3 US online stores run on Shopify Shopify holds close to a third of the US eCommerce software market, and the designer-services side is projected to grow from about $0.6 billion in 2026 to roughly $1.5 billion by 2035 (industry projections). That growth rate beats the stock market. That combination is rare: low designer competition, a giant base of stores, and owners who keep investing in the site because it makes them money. It's why I'd point any designer considering where to specialize toward eCommerce, and specifically toward the platform behind so many $100k-per-year Shopify stores. You Don't Need to Code to Specialize in Shopify Here's the myth that keeps designers out: that Shopify means needing to learn how to code. Although knowing a bit of HTML/CSS with a sprinkle of Liquid can certainly help your Shopify capabilities, you no longer need to know how to code to win high-end Shopify projects. Because of this, specializing in Shopify boils down to positioning. It's you saying "this is what I do" and marketing your studio as the one who solves this problem. Client resonate with this way more than how much Liquid you know. Most designers coming from more of a graphic or general web design background and get started in Shopify end up in what I (not so) lovingly call theme jail. You pick a theme, style it, maybe add a custom font with a little CSS, and you're stuck with whatever sections that theme comes with. It's a valid approach, but there's friction and a lot more restrictiveness than what you're used to on a drag-and-drop builder. Custom sections are how you make your prison break from theme jail. They're unique layouts that go beyond theme defaults, and used to require knowledge of HTML/CSS/Javascript/Liquid to get up and running. Now, a pre-built section library changes that requirement. With it you can copy, paste, and reuse fully custom sections without touching Liquid, so you can hand a client a totally custom store that no other brand has. It's why I built The Section Studio: a library of custom-coded Shopify sections you copy, paste, and reuse, so you can build a totally custom store without writing code or hiring a developer. Pair it with Shopify's free Dawn theme and theme selection stops mattering (all while saving $$ on each project). Clients love this, because paying thousands for a designer and getting a lightly styled theme is...kind of a bummer. Telling them "this is a totally custom site, no one else will have this" is a strong selling point. Shopify Design Is Harder for AI to Replace If AI has you nervous about the future of design work, specializing is what's going to help you rest easy at night. AI is coming for the generalists before the specialists. It can spit out a layout that functions and looks kinda good, but it has no taste and no real subject-matter-expert point of view. Why it matters A platform like Shopify, with its own architecture, apps, and conversion patterns, is much harder for a general AI model to fudge than a five-page service site. Where the Money Is in Shopify Design Most Shopify design work (for first-time founders, marketplace migrators, and small businesses) lives between $2,500 and $15,000 a project. Big-agency projects can be many, many multiples of this, but are fewer and further between. You can build a steady and strong income in this range way before you take on a $20,000-plus enterprise build. Client type Typical budget Why they're worth knowing First-time founders $1,500-$6,000 The biggest group by volume, but they need the most hand-holding Marketplace migrators (off Etsy or Amazon) $4,000-$10,000 Proven product, photos and copy ready, easy to prospect Refresh / redesign $6,000-$15,000 Existing store, existing revenue, quick wins Scaling brands $15,000-$30,000 They know what they want and invest in growth Enterprise / Shopify Plus $25,000-$100,000+ The big kahunas, with the most pressure to get it right The trick to staying profitable here is scope. Getting started in Shopify, you should be clear on the fact that you only touch the frontend design. "Backend warehouse" stuff like inventory, shipping, taxes, and payments stay with the client. Think of yourself as the interior designer for the store. It'd be weird for you to go start printing shipping labels in the back. You can most definitely (and probably should) start to layer more adjacent Shopify services into your offerings like bulk product management, app installs, and even email flows, but for the beginning focus on mastering one area before you spread yourself too thin. Scope tip On your first few Shopify discovery calls, make it clear to the client that you only touch the design built into Shopify, and refer out or separately quote anything operational. Two things I never touch: taxes and payments. Sales tax runs on state-by-state nexus rules, and payments means handling someone's bank details, so I say a (way more polite) "heck no" to these each time. Then, you've got the chance to build some real income stability after launch. A store is a living business, so there's always a next season, or a new collection, or a conversion tweak to make. Booking clients for ongoing retainers to support them with these items means your business doesn't restart from zero every time a project ends, and you can even turn your process into digital products you sell on Shopify for a second income stream. How to Start Specializing in Shopify Getting into Shopify design doesn't take a bootcamp or a developer background. Here's the path I'd take if I were starting over in 2026. Make Shopify your thing Say it loud and proud: you're the Shopify person. Positioning is what turns strangers into referrals, and people start sending you eCommerce work once they know it's your specialty. Build with Dawn plus a section method Skip the coding headache and learn Shopify's free Dawn theme and a copy-paste section workflow so you can build an abundance of custom sites without writing Liquid. Make two or three portfolio stores Design and fully build a few marketplace-migrator-style stores. Clients hire what they can see, so your eCommerce work generally has to exist before the first client does. Scope front-end-first, then add retainers or add-ons Package a fixed build, keep operations out of scope, and seed the benefits of ongoing work from day one so retainers feel natural at launch. Frequently Asked Questions Is Shopify a good niche for web designers in 2026? Yes! Shopify is one of the least crowded, most viable niches in web design. It runs close to a third of US online stores, the store count keeps growing, and there are far fewer designers specializing in it than on platforms like Webflow or Squarespace. Because a Shopify store is tied to a client's revenue, owners hire professionals sooner and value the work more. Do you need to know how to code to design Shopify stores? No, you don't need to code in order to specialize in designing on Shopify. Specializing is a positioning decision that leans on marketing more than code, and you can build fully custom storefronts using a solid theme plus a pre-built section library that you copy and paste without writing Liquid. Knowing you can deliver a custom look without a developer is what lets you keep the whole design fee. How much can you charge for Shopify web design? Most Shopify design work falls in the $2,500 to $15,000 range per project, which is where first-time founders, marketplace migrators, and small businesses fall. Larger scaling brands and Shopify Plus builds run higher, often $15,000 to $100,000 and up. The real income stability comes after launch, from ongoing retainers for seasonal updates and conversion work. Is Shopify design less competitive than Webflow or Squarespace? Yes. When I counted stores against design studios using BuiltWith in 2025, Shopify had roughly 7.5 designers per 1,000 stores, the lowest of any major platform, compared to around 40 on Webflow and 11 on Squarespace. Fewer specialists chasing a bigger, higher-stakes client base is the core reason Shopify stays underrated. Will AI replace Shopify web designers? AI is coming for generalist web design work well before it affects specialists. It can generate a page layout that functions, but it has no taste or point of view, and eCommerce clients feel the difference when a store is built to sell. Specializing in a complex platform like Shopify, with its own architecture and conversion patterns, is one of the better hedges against AI commoditizing your work. How do I get my first Shopify design client? Build two or three portfolio stores for real or fictional brands so buyers can see your eCommerce work, then position yourself publicly as the Shopify person. Marketplace migrators coming off Etsy or Amazon are the easiest first clients because they already have a proven product, photos, and copy. Referrals and footer credits on the sites you build, plus talking about your work on LinkedIn, tend to bring the next clients faster than cold outreach. What is the difference between a Shopify theme and a custom Shopify build? A Shopify theme is the pre-built foundation that handles the cart, checkout, product pages, and structure, while a custom build adds branded sections and layouts that go beyond the theme's defaults. Styling a theme alone leaves you in what I call theme jail, limited to the sections the theme comes with. Custom sections, which you can add without coding using a section library, are the premium layer clients happily pay for. Explore The Section Studio
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Julia DennisWhy "Stay Flexible" Is Risky Advice for Web Designers Right Now
✍ Written by Julia Dennis, Founder of Bungalow Creative ⏱ 7 min read Key Takeaways "Stay flexible" sounds safe, but for web designers in 2026 it usually means staying invisible and competing on price. Generic web design is the work AI tools now do in minutes, so generalists are competing against free. Specializing sharpens your pricing and your referrals without shrinking your market. You can niche down by platform, customer, and outcome while still keeping creative range inside that lane. The designers winning right now sell repeatable systems and assets on top of their hours. "Stay flexible" is the most expensive advice a web designer can follow in 2026. It sounds safe, but in practice it means staying a generalist who takes any platform, any client, and any project, which is the work that now costs $500 instead of $5,000 because a founder can generate a passable version of it with AI before lunch. Flexibility without a point of view is how you end up the cheapest option in every room. Skills still matter, obviously. The problem is that being good at everything reads as being known for nothing, and "known for nothing" is the first thing the market stops paying for. The designers doing well right now made a specific bet on a platform, a customer, and a problem, then built a repeatable client process around it. Here's why generic flexibility got risky, and how to specialize without forcing yourself into a corner. What "Stay Flexible" Really Costs Web Designers in 2026 The hidden cost of staying flexible is that 30-50% of your energy goes into re-learning context on every project instead of getting faster at one thing. A WordPress site this month, a Squarespace sales page next month, a custom landing page after that, and you never build the muscle memory that lets you charge premium rates. Range feels like security, but it caps how good and how fast you can get, because you never repeat anything enough to master it. Flexibility also wrecks your pricing power, because clients can't tell if you're a specialist or a beginner who hasn't picked a focus yet. When your portfolio says "I do everything," buyers default to the safest assumption, which is that you're a generalist they can negotiate down. A focused portfolio removes that doubt before the first call. 3x Higher project rates Narrowing my studio to Shopify roughly tripled my project rates over two years without adding a single new service, just by getting clearer about who I'm for. Why Generalist Designers Do the Easiest Work to Automate AI came for the generic parts of design first, which is the territory a flexible generalist lives in all day. A simple multi-page site, a templated layout, a basic responsive build—that's the work a non-designer can now prompt their way through in about ten minutes, so it's the work that gets commoditized first. The judgment layer is what survives. It's platform-specific: knowing why a Shopify product page converts, how to structure metafields so a merchant can maintain the site without calling you, or when a Shopify versus Webflow decision will cost a founder six months of pain is the knowledge that only shows up after you've built the same kind of thing 10+ of times. ⚠️ If a tool can do 80% of your offer in ten minutes, the market will eventually price your offer at the remaining 20%. Specialization is how you make sure that 20% is the valuable part. Specializing Sharpens Your Pricing Without Shrinking Your Market Niching down shrinks your competition far more than it shrinks your client pool, and it makes you the obvious choice for the clients who matter. There are fewer "Shopify designer for skincare brands" than "web designers", and that's what you want. Specialists win referrals because people can describe them in one sentence. "She builds Shopify stores for product brands" travels through a network far better than "she does websites". After committing to that sentence, I've watched leads roll in while I slept, and it's the same reason building a $100k/year Shopify store as a designer comes down to repeatability more than raw talent. Try this positioning Rewrite your headline from what you can do to who you do it for. "Web designer & developer" becomes "I build design-led Shopify stores for product brands." The second one is narrower, and it's the one that gets you hired at your rate. How to Niche Down Without Boxing Yourself In Specializing still lets you build whatever you want, as long as you point your marketing, your portfolio, and your pricing at one clear lane. A Shopify specialist can still design branding, photography direction, custom sections, and email just for one kind of client. The lane is for your positioning, and your creativity gets to roam inside it. The move that protects you is choosing a lane with room to grow. Platforms like Shopify support everything from a first theme-based store to fully custom builds, so you can serve a founder's whole journey without ever leaving your specialty. You get focus and longevity at the same time. Review your last 10 projects Find the overlap in industry, budget, or outcome. The pattern you've already been hired for is usually the niche you should commit to. Commit to one platform Pick the platform where your ideal clients treat their site as a revenue engine. Depth on one beats shallow familiarity with five. Name the outcome you sell Things like "more conversions", "a brand that looks expensive", "a store the owner can run alone". Sell the result you create, and the deliverables follow naturally. Find range inside the lane Stay versatile in service of one customer, so growth doesn't requires abandoning your positioning. Build Assets That Earn Beyond Your Hours The most durable version of specializing is turning your repeated work into assets you can reuse and sell. When you build the same kind of thing over and over, you start to see the patterns, and those patterns become templates, component libraries, and products that earn money outside of your billable hours (the part that changed my whole business!). That's the thing "stay flexible" never gets you to, because you can't systematize work you never repeat. This is why I built a library of custom-coded Shopify sections instead of rebuilding the same layouts by hand on every project. Each build makes the next one faster, and the system itself becomes something I can sell. The same logic is why so many designers also sell digital products alongside client work. Factor Flexible Generalist Positioned Specialist Pricing power Competes on price against AI and freelancers Charges premium for proven, specific outcomes Referrals Vague ("she does websites") Sharp ("she builds Shopify stores for product brands") Speed Re-learns context every project Reuses systems, gets faster each build AI exposure High, generic work is automated first Low, judgment and craft are the moat Income shape Capped at hours sold Hours plus reusable assets and products Designer move productize Stop hanging out in Shopify theme jail and kinda hating it. The Section Studio is the library of custom sections I've built over the years doing Shopify, and that asset is what gives my specialty real leverage because I'm able to achieve super-custom storefronts incredibly fast. Frequently Asked Questions Should web designers specialize or stay generalists? Specialize. In 2026, generic web design is the work AI tools handle fastest and cheapest, so a generalist competes directly with free. A designer who is known for one platform, one industry, or one outcome gets sought out by name and charges 2-3x more for the same hours. Specializing is mostly a positioning decision, and you can still keep plenty of range inside your chosen platform. Is niching down risky for freelance web designers? Niching down feels risky because it looks like you're turning away work, but the bigger risk is being forgettable to everyone. When you pick a lane, your referrals get sharper because people can describe in one sentence what you do. Most designers I've watched niche down end up with more leads within 6-12 months. Will AI replace web designers in 2026? AI replaces the commodity layer of web design while the judgment layer stays firmly human. Generating a passable landing page now takes a non-designer about 10 minutes, so the work that was already generic disappears first. Designers who own strategy, conversion, and platform-specific craft become more valuable as the easy stuff gets automated. How do I choose a niche as a web designer? Pick the intersection of a platform you'll go deep on, a customer you understand, and a problem you can prove you solve. Look at your last 10 projects and find the overlap in industry, budget, or outcome, then lean into it on purpose. My breakdown of how to build a $100k/year Shopify store shows what committing to one platform unlocks. Does specializing mean I have to turn down work? Not at the start. Specializing changes how you market and what you eventually say no to, but you can keep taking adjacent work while you build the reputation. Over time you'll want to refer out projects that don't fit, because every off-niche job dilutes the story clients tell about you. I'm early in my career. Should I still specialize? Yes, just hold it loosely. Early on you're allowed to experiment to find your lane, and broad exposure helps you figure out what kind of work you enjoy. If you're still building the foundation, my guide on becoming a designer covers skills first, and the moment you spot a pattern in the work you love and win, commit to it. Explore The Section Studio
Julia DennisWhy "Stay Flexible" Is Risky Advice for Web Designers Right Now
✍ Written by Julia Dennis, Founder of Bungalow Creative ⏱ 7 min read Key Takeaways "Stay flexible" sounds safe, but for web designers in 2026 it usually means staying invisible and competing on price. Generic web design is the work AI tools now do in minutes, so generalists are competing against free. Specializing sharpens your pricing and your referrals without shrinking your market. You can niche down by platform, customer, and outcome while still keeping creative range inside that lane. The designers winning right now sell repeatable systems and assets on top of their hours. "Stay flexible" is the most expensive advice a web designer can follow in 2026. It sounds safe, but in practice it means staying a generalist who takes any platform, any client, and any project, which is the work that now costs $500 instead of $5,000 because a founder can generate a passable version of it with AI before lunch. Flexibility without a point of view is how you end up the cheapest option in every room. Skills still matter, obviously. The problem is that being good at everything reads as being known for nothing, and "known for nothing" is the first thing the market stops paying for. The designers doing well right now made a specific bet on a platform, a customer, and a problem, then built a repeatable client process around it. Here's why generic flexibility got risky, and how to specialize without forcing yourself into a corner. What "Stay Flexible" Really Costs Web Designers in 2026 The hidden cost of staying flexible is that 30-50% of your energy goes into re-learning context on every project instead of getting faster at one thing. A WordPress site this month, a Squarespace sales page next month, a custom landing page after that, and you never build the muscle memory that lets you charge premium rates. Range feels like security, but it caps how good and how fast you can get, because you never repeat anything enough to master it. Flexibility also wrecks your pricing power, because clients can't tell if you're a specialist or a beginner who hasn't picked a focus yet. When your portfolio says "I do everything," buyers default to the safest assumption, which is that you're a generalist they can negotiate down. A focused portfolio removes that doubt before the first call. 3x Higher project rates Narrowing my studio to Shopify roughly tripled my project rates over two years without adding a single new service, just by getting clearer about who I'm for. Why Generalist Designers Do the Easiest Work to Automate AI came for the generic parts of design first, which is the territory a flexible generalist lives in all day. A simple multi-page site, a templated layout, a basic responsive build—that's the work a non-designer can now prompt their way through in about ten minutes, so it's the work that gets commoditized first. The judgment layer is what survives. It's platform-specific: knowing why a Shopify product page converts, how to structure metafields so a merchant can maintain the site without calling you, or when a Shopify versus Webflow decision will cost a founder six months of pain is the knowledge that only shows up after you've built the same kind of thing 10+ of times. ⚠️ If a tool can do 80% of your offer in ten minutes, the market will eventually price your offer at the remaining 20%. Specialization is how you make sure that 20% is the valuable part. Specializing Sharpens Your Pricing Without Shrinking Your Market Niching down shrinks your competition far more than it shrinks your client pool, and it makes you the obvious choice for the clients who matter. There are fewer "Shopify designer for skincare brands" than "web designers", and that's what you want. Specialists win referrals because people can describe them in one sentence. "She builds Shopify stores for product brands" travels through a network far better than "she does websites". After committing to that sentence, I've watched leads roll in while I slept, and it's the same reason building a $100k/year Shopify store as a designer comes down to repeatability more than raw talent. Try this positioning Rewrite your headline from what you can do to who you do it for. "Web designer & developer" becomes "I build design-led Shopify stores for product brands." The second one is narrower, and it's the one that gets you hired at your rate. How to Niche Down Without Boxing Yourself In Specializing still lets you build whatever you want, as long as you point your marketing, your portfolio, and your pricing at one clear lane. A Shopify specialist can still design branding, photography direction, custom sections, and email just for one kind of client. The lane is for your positioning, and your creativity gets to roam inside it. The move that protects you is choosing a lane with room to grow. Platforms like Shopify support everything from a first theme-based store to fully custom builds, so you can serve a founder's whole journey without ever leaving your specialty. You get focus and longevity at the same time. Review your last 10 projects Find the overlap in industry, budget, or outcome. The pattern you've already been hired for is usually the niche you should commit to. Commit to one platform Pick the platform where your ideal clients treat their site as a revenue engine. Depth on one beats shallow familiarity with five. Name the outcome you sell Things like "more conversions", "a brand that looks expensive", "a store the owner can run alone". Sell the result you create, and the deliverables follow naturally. Find range inside the lane Stay versatile in service of one customer, so growth doesn't requires abandoning your positioning. Build Assets That Earn Beyond Your Hours The most durable version of specializing is turning your repeated work into assets you can reuse and sell. When you build the same kind of thing over and over, you start to see the patterns, and those patterns become templates, component libraries, and products that earn money outside of your billable hours (the part that changed my whole business!). That's the thing "stay flexible" never gets you to, because you can't systematize work you never repeat. This is why I built a library of custom-coded Shopify sections instead of rebuilding the same layouts by hand on every project. Each build makes the next one faster, and the system itself becomes something I can sell. The same logic is why so many designers also sell digital products alongside client work. Factor Flexible Generalist Positioned Specialist Pricing power Competes on price against AI and freelancers Charges premium for proven, specific outcomes Referrals Vague ("she does websites") Sharp ("she builds Shopify stores for product brands") Speed Re-learns context every project Reuses systems, gets faster each build AI exposure High, generic work is automated first Low, judgment and craft are the moat Income shape Capped at hours sold Hours plus reusable assets and products Designer move productize Stop hanging out in Shopify theme jail and kinda hating it. The Section Studio is the library of custom sections I've built over the years doing Shopify, and that asset is what gives my specialty real leverage because I'm able to achieve super-custom storefronts incredibly fast. Frequently Asked Questions Should web designers specialize or stay generalists? Specialize. In 2026, generic web design is the work AI tools handle fastest and cheapest, so a generalist competes directly with free. A designer who is known for one platform, one industry, or one outcome gets sought out by name and charges 2-3x more for the same hours. Specializing is mostly a positioning decision, and you can still keep plenty of range inside your chosen platform. Is niching down risky for freelance web designers? Niching down feels risky because it looks like you're turning away work, but the bigger risk is being forgettable to everyone. When you pick a lane, your referrals get sharper because people can describe in one sentence what you do. Most designers I've watched niche down end up with more leads within 6-12 months. Will AI replace web designers in 2026? AI replaces the commodity layer of web design while the judgment layer stays firmly human. Generating a passable landing page now takes a non-designer about 10 minutes, so the work that was already generic disappears first. Designers who own strategy, conversion, and platform-specific craft become more valuable as the easy stuff gets automated. How do I choose a niche as a web designer? Pick the intersection of a platform you'll go deep on, a customer you understand, and a problem you can prove you solve. Look at your last 10 projects and find the overlap in industry, budget, or outcome, then lean into it on purpose. My breakdown of how to build a $100k/year Shopify store shows what committing to one platform unlocks. Does specializing mean I have to turn down work? Not at the start. Specializing changes how you market and what you eventually say no to, but you can keep taking adjacent work while you build the reputation. Over time you'll want to refer out projects that don't fit, because every off-niche job dilutes the story clients tell about you. I'm early in my career. Should I still specialize? Yes, just hold it loosely. Early on you're allowed to experiment to find your lane, and broad exposure helps you figure out what kind of work you enjoy. If you're still building the foundation, my guide on becoming a designer covers skills first, and the moment you spot a pattern in the work you love and win, commit to it. Explore The Section Studio
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Julia DennisWhy booking web design clients feels harder in 2026 (and what's changed)
✍ Written by Julia Dennis, Bungalow Creative ⏱ 6 min read Key Takeaways Booking web design clients feels harder in 2026 because the market structurally changed. A slow season isn't the cause (and just posting more won't reverse it). Four forces came into play at once: saturation, a $12-to-$1,200-template flood, AI commoditizing generic design, and bookings that now depend on trust and referral. The old generalist playbook (post more, stay flexible, compete on polish + price) underperforms now specifically because it was built for a market that doesn't really exist anymore. AI and templates replaced average, on-trend design, while the specific point-of-view work that strong designers create became more valuable than ever. Discoverability is shrinking while trust online disintegrates, so the designers staying booked are the ones a past client can describe in a single sentence. If booking web design clients feels harder in this year, you're not imagining it, and waiting for the season to turn won't necessarily fix it. The market structurally changed: there are more designers than ever, a client has a wealth of $12 to $1,200 templates to choose from instead of hiring you, and AI now generates "good enough" generic design for free. The work that does get booked runs on trust and referral rather than on simply being found. The old generalist playbook—post more, stay flexible, take any project—was built for a market that no longer exists. This isn't your fault. Four forces in the industry changed at once, and posting harder into the same crowded, Meta-surpressed feed can't out-run any of them. I've watched super talented designers blame themselves for a drop that was at the macro level the whole time, the same way I've seen brands blame their photos when the real problem was their underlying brand strategy. Web design got crowded, and it happened fast The barrier to calling yourself a web designer has never been lower. The first force is plain saturation - the field filled up with people offering roughly the same service in roughly the same visual language. There's significantly more supply with only marginally more demand, leading to a predictable squeeze that web designers are feeling. While saturation obviously adds competition, it also adds sameness—a feed full of designers whose portfolios, packages, and "book a discovery call" buttons come across as pretty interchangeable to the potential client scrolling past at speed. ◆ When every portfolio looks current, looking current stops being a differentiator. I made the same argument about brands chasing the trend cycle in my piece on how to create a timeless brand, and it applies just as cleanly to designers. Clients can now self-serve a $12 to $1,200 lookalike With the abundance of website templates out there, a client can launch something that looks really designed without hiring a designer. This means that "I just need it to look professional" stopped being a reason to book you. There are some seriously good plug and play website templates out there (more here on why I think there's a huge gap in the Shopify template market). Good enough that the baseline expectation of "make it look clean and modern" is now something a non-designer can buy off a (digital) shelf. A template reliably gets a brand to "looks fine". It rarely catches the expensive branding mistakes a designer would have flagged, but most clients can't see that until much later, which means it doesn't stop them from buying the template in the first place. AI made "good enough generic" essentially free The third force is AI, and it commoditized exactly the tier of design that used to pay the bills: the safe layout, the predictable hero, the on-trend palette, the competent-but-forgettable middle of the road. To put it bluntly: AI is weak at taste. It has no unique point of view, because it's literally trained on all the data that we can chuck its way. But: it's exceptional at average. So any brief that amounts to "just make it look nice and modern" is now close to free to fulfill, and clients are increasingly aware of this. What AI can't fake the durable part AI can generate a competent layout in seconds. What it can't do in seconds: replicate a designer who deeply has experience with and understands one kind of client, one industry, one recurring problem, and bring real judgment to it. At the same time the generic got automated, the specific got more valuable. Booking now runs on trust and referral, not discoverability 30-40% of Google searches now return an AI Overview(I personally feel like it's way more than this!). Regardless, this eats the cold discoverability designers used to rely on. Being referred personally is more important than ever. The fourth force is the fact that getting booked has largely moved from being discoverable to being trusted—and those are NOT the same skill. Referrals don't run on talent rankings or Reel views. They run on a clear and repeatable sentence: "she's THE ONE you've got to reach out to for this". If that sentence can't easily roll off of your past clients' (or your network of service provider friends') tongues, that means it's not clear enough where your deep expertise lies to beget a healthy stream of referrals. Being talked about is a brand outcome you can engineer on purpose. Why the old generalist approach structurally underperforms now Put the four forces together and you start to realize that the old approach might actually be actively working against you. The old generalist move Why it underperforms in 2026 Post more, more often While it's important to "get the reps in" and stay visible, your 12 GPT-written (yes, we can tell) carousels and newsletters a week start to kind of reek of desperation. And they all sound the same. Stay flexible, take any project Reads as "no clear specialty" and "just freelancing to keep the lights on" which is precisely the thing a referral can't repeat in one sentence. By spreading yourself thin, you don't get the chance to gain deep, AI-proof subject matter expertise. Compete on style and price Style is easy to come by nowadays. All one has to do is browse the 9000 template shops available. Better yet—Claude can link up via an MCP to most web builders, so the "fill in the template" part is also now basically free. Wait to be found Cold discoverability is shrinking while trust and referrals become steadily more valued. None of these were bad advice in the past. They were correct for a market with fewer designers, no template flood, no AI, and a search results page you could win if you put some elbow grease into it. Things have just changed, and changed FAST. The designers that are still booked to the brim in 2026 are known for something specific Let's say there's a client looking to build a specific kind of site in a specific kind of industry. Which one is she more likely to choose: a designer who's style she really likes, or a designer who's style she really likes AND has portfolio pieces up the wazoo showing how they approached this same type of problem again and again? We all feel that AI is lacking in its unique perspective—you know how ChatGPT is such a "yes-man" and you can pretty much lead it to say anything you want? The antidote to that (that's super valuable and will get you booked as a web designer) is repeated projects in the same domain that allow you to grow deep expertise. As a generalist, you're just skimming the surface of the things that you touch, and it's costing you competitively when your potential inquiry has your investment guide open alongside a Claude Max subscription. That said: don't tunnel yourself so narrowly into one thing that you actually LACK perspective from other sources of inspiration. That's important too. But we want clients to have a super clear, super trustworthy perspective on the thing that's our main jam. In next week's blog post: given all this, what can you be unmistakably known for? Frequently Asked Questions Why is it so hard to book web design clients in 2026? Booking web design clients is harder in 2026 because four structural forces changed at once: the field got saturated with lookalike designers, clients can self-serve a GREAT website template for $12 to $1,200, AI now generates competent generic design for free, and booking has moved from being discoverable to being trusted and referred. Together they break the old generalist approach, the same way a muddy positioning harms even the most stellar designers. Is it just a slow season or has the web design market really changed? It's a structural change in how clients buy design, and it won't bounce back the way a slow quarter does. A slow season recovers on its own when demand returns, but saturation, templates, AI, and the move towards referral-based booking are permanent changes in how clients buy design. If the same effort that booked you out two years ago now returns crickets, that's the market re-pricing generalist work, not a temporary dip. Are templates and AI really replacing web designers? Templates and AI are replacing generic design, while designers with a clear point of view occupy a different category. A nice template and an AI layout both produce increasingly competent, average, on-trend work in minutes, which is exactly the middle-of-the-road tier that used to be billable. The craft, taste, and specific judgment strong designers bring is the part neither can fake, and it's the part clients still pay (and pay well) for. Do I just need to post more on social media to get clients? Posting more definitely helps in a handful of cases, but rarely fixes the root cause of a booking problem in 2026. Adding lookalike, thin content gives the algorithm more of the thing it can't tell apart from everyone else (and frustratingly pushes to like, only 20 people). Volume helps only after a person can clearly articulate in one sentence what YOU do specifically, which is a positioning problem more than a posting problem. How do web designers get clients now if not through discoverability? Web designers get clients now primarily through trust and referral rather than being found cold (all of my web design friends are seeing the same lately). The designers booking up are the ones a past client or adjacent service provider can describe in a specific, memorable way. Does niching down or specializing fix this? Being known for something specific is doing most of the heavy lifting for the designers still booked out, but how you choose that focus, and whether "niche" is even the right word, deserves its own conversation. The TLDR answer is that legibility beats generality in a saturated market. I'm digging into exactly what to do about it next week, so this post stops at the diagnosis on purpose. What does it mean for a designer to be "legible"? A legible designer is one a client can describe accurately in about three seconds. Legibility is what makes you referable and easy to choose, because your deep expertise in a particular area is displayed front and center. It's a reputation outcome you can engineer on purpose, the same way a brand decides how it wants to be recognized after a rebrand. More from the studio journal
Julia DennisWhy booking web design clients feels harder in 2026 (and what's changed)
✍ Written by Julia Dennis, Bungalow Creative ⏱ 6 min read Key Takeaways Booking web design clients feels harder in 2026 because the market structurally changed. A slow season isn't the cause (and just posting more won't reverse it). Four forces came into play at once: saturation, a $12-to-$1,200-template flood, AI commoditizing generic design, and bookings that now depend on trust and referral. The old generalist playbook (post more, stay flexible, compete on polish + price) underperforms now specifically because it was built for a market that doesn't really exist anymore. AI and templates replaced average, on-trend design, while the specific point-of-view work that strong designers create became more valuable than ever. Discoverability is shrinking while trust online disintegrates, so the designers staying booked are the ones a past client can describe in a single sentence. If booking web design clients feels harder in this year, you're not imagining it, and waiting for the season to turn won't necessarily fix it. The market structurally changed: there are more designers than ever, a client has a wealth of $12 to $1,200 templates to choose from instead of hiring you, and AI now generates "good enough" generic design for free. The work that does get booked runs on trust and referral rather than on simply being found. The old generalist playbook—post more, stay flexible, take any project—was built for a market that no longer exists. This isn't your fault. Four forces in the industry changed at once, and posting harder into the same crowded, Meta-surpressed feed can't out-run any of them. I've watched super talented designers blame themselves for a drop that was at the macro level the whole time, the same way I've seen brands blame their photos when the real problem was their underlying brand strategy. Web design got crowded, and it happened fast The barrier to calling yourself a web designer has never been lower. The first force is plain saturation - the field filled up with people offering roughly the same service in roughly the same visual language. There's significantly more supply with only marginally more demand, leading to a predictable squeeze that web designers are feeling. While saturation obviously adds competition, it also adds sameness—a feed full of designers whose portfolios, packages, and "book a discovery call" buttons come across as pretty interchangeable to the potential client scrolling past at speed. ◆ When every portfolio looks current, looking current stops being a differentiator. I made the same argument about brands chasing the trend cycle in my piece on how to create a timeless brand, and it applies just as cleanly to designers. Clients can now self-serve a $12 to $1,200 lookalike With the abundance of website templates out there, a client can launch something that looks really designed without hiring a designer. This means that "I just need it to look professional" stopped being a reason to book you. There are some seriously good plug and play website templates out there (more here on why I think there's a huge gap in the Shopify template market). Good enough that the baseline expectation of "make it look clean and modern" is now something a non-designer can buy off a (digital) shelf. A template reliably gets a brand to "looks fine". It rarely catches the expensive branding mistakes a designer would have flagged, but most clients can't see that until much later, which means it doesn't stop them from buying the template in the first place. AI made "good enough generic" essentially free The third force is AI, and it commoditized exactly the tier of design that used to pay the bills: the safe layout, the predictable hero, the on-trend palette, the competent-but-forgettable middle of the road. To put it bluntly: AI is weak at taste. It has no unique point of view, because it's literally trained on all the data that we can chuck its way. But: it's exceptional at average. So any brief that amounts to "just make it look nice and modern" is now close to free to fulfill, and clients are increasingly aware of this. What AI can't fake the durable part AI can generate a competent layout in seconds. What it can't do in seconds: replicate a designer who deeply has experience with and understands one kind of client, one industry, one recurring problem, and bring real judgment to it. At the same time the generic got automated, the specific got more valuable. Booking now runs on trust and referral, not discoverability 30-40% of Google searches now return an AI Overview(I personally feel like it's way more than this!). Regardless, this eats the cold discoverability designers used to rely on. Being referred personally is more important than ever. The fourth force is the fact that getting booked has largely moved from being discoverable to being trusted—and those are NOT the same skill. Referrals don't run on talent rankings or Reel views. They run on a clear and repeatable sentence: "she's THE ONE you've got to reach out to for this". If that sentence can't easily roll off of your past clients' (or your network of service provider friends') tongues, that means it's not clear enough where your deep expertise lies to beget a healthy stream of referrals. Being talked about is a brand outcome you can engineer on purpose. Why the old generalist approach structurally underperforms now Put the four forces together and you start to realize that the old approach might actually be actively working against you. The old generalist move Why it underperforms in 2026 Post more, more often While it's important to "get the reps in" and stay visible, your 12 GPT-written (yes, we can tell) carousels and newsletters a week start to kind of reek of desperation. And they all sound the same. Stay flexible, take any project Reads as "no clear specialty" and "just freelancing to keep the lights on" which is precisely the thing a referral can't repeat in one sentence. By spreading yourself thin, you don't get the chance to gain deep, AI-proof subject matter expertise. Compete on style and price Style is easy to come by nowadays. All one has to do is browse the 9000 template shops available. Better yet—Claude can link up via an MCP to most web builders, so the "fill in the template" part is also now basically free. Wait to be found Cold discoverability is shrinking while trust and referrals become steadily more valued. None of these were bad advice in the past. They were correct for a market with fewer designers, no template flood, no AI, and a search results page you could win if you put some elbow grease into it. Things have just changed, and changed FAST. The designers that are still booked to the brim in 2026 are known for something specific Let's say there's a client looking to build a specific kind of site in a specific kind of industry. Which one is she more likely to choose: a designer who's style she really likes, or a designer who's style she really likes AND has portfolio pieces up the wazoo showing how they approached this same type of problem again and again? We all feel that AI is lacking in its unique perspective—you know how ChatGPT is such a "yes-man" and you can pretty much lead it to say anything you want? The antidote to that (that's super valuable and will get you booked as a web designer) is repeated projects in the same domain that allow you to grow deep expertise. As a generalist, you're just skimming the surface of the things that you touch, and it's costing you competitively when your potential inquiry has your investment guide open alongside a Claude Max subscription. That said: don't tunnel yourself so narrowly into one thing that you actually LACK perspective from other sources of inspiration. That's important too. But we want clients to have a super clear, super trustworthy perspective on the thing that's our main jam. In next week's blog post: given all this, what can you be unmistakably known for? Frequently Asked Questions Why is it so hard to book web design clients in 2026? Booking web design clients is harder in 2026 because four structural forces changed at once: the field got saturated with lookalike designers, clients can self-serve a GREAT website template for $12 to $1,200, AI now generates competent generic design for free, and booking has moved from being discoverable to being trusted and referred. Together they break the old generalist approach, the same way a muddy positioning harms even the most stellar designers. Is it just a slow season or has the web design market really changed? It's a structural change in how clients buy design, and it won't bounce back the way a slow quarter does. A slow season recovers on its own when demand returns, but saturation, templates, AI, and the move towards referral-based booking are permanent changes in how clients buy design. If the same effort that booked you out two years ago now returns crickets, that's the market re-pricing generalist work, not a temporary dip. Are templates and AI really replacing web designers? Templates and AI are replacing generic design, while designers with a clear point of view occupy a different category. A nice template and an AI layout both produce increasingly competent, average, on-trend work in minutes, which is exactly the middle-of-the-road tier that used to be billable. The craft, taste, and specific judgment strong designers bring is the part neither can fake, and it's the part clients still pay (and pay well) for. Do I just need to post more on social media to get clients? Posting more definitely helps in a handful of cases, but rarely fixes the root cause of a booking problem in 2026. Adding lookalike, thin content gives the algorithm more of the thing it can't tell apart from everyone else (and frustratingly pushes to like, only 20 people). Volume helps only after a person can clearly articulate in one sentence what YOU do specifically, which is a positioning problem more than a posting problem. How do web designers get clients now if not through discoverability? Web designers get clients now primarily through trust and referral rather than being found cold (all of my web design friends are seeing the same lately). The designers booking up are the ones a past client or adjacent service provider can describe in a specific, memorable way. Does niching down or specializing fix this? Being known for something specific is doing most of the heavy lifting for the designers still booked out, but how you choose that focus, and whether "niche" is even the right word, deserves its own conversation. The TLDR answer is that legibility beats generality in a saturated market. I'm digging into exactly what to do about it next week, so this post stops at the diagnosis on purpose. What does it mean for a designer to be "legible"? A legible designer is one a client can describe accurately in about three seconds. Legibility is what makes you referable and easy to choose, because your deep expertise in a particular area is displayed front and center. It's a reputation outcome you can engineer on purpose, the same way a brand decides how it wants to be recognized after a rebrand. More from the studio journal
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Julia DennisThe biggest gap in the template market right now is Shopify: here's why
✍ Written by Julia Dennis, Shopify Expert ⏱ 11 min read Key Takeaways Webflow, Framer, Squarespace, and Showit all have massive indie template ecosystems. Shopify has roughly 230 Theme Store themes and an Etsy category flooded with low-quality knockoffs. Most Shopify merchants end up in one of three places: Dawn plus apps, a $180-$400 Theme Store theme, or a $5,000-$50,000 custom build. The middle tier has been hollow for years. The gap is about legacy distribution: for a decade, selling Shopify templates meant either the Theme Store or building a full Liquid theme from scratch. Dawn is Shopify's MIT-licensed reference theme—you can legally build derivative templates on it and sell them as commercial products. Shopify maintains a whole catalog of other MIT-licensed themes too. Important: Horizon is NOT MIT-licensed. Its license prohibits selling templates derived from it. For products you sell, stick with Dawn or the MIT-licensed catalog. A commercial-license section library (like The Section Studio) plus an MIT-licensed base theme collapses the technical theme-building capability that used to require a software company's infrastructure. If you've been anywhere near design Twitter, Substack, or the creator Instagram ecosystem in the last two years, you've watched template marketplaces explode on every major platform except one. Webflow has Relume and Flowbase and hundreds of indie designers clearing $20K-$100K a year in template sales. Framer blew up in 2023-2024 and now has a cottage industry of designers making that their full income. Showit has a whole Instagram economy of indie designers running six-figure template businesses for photographers and creative brands. Squarespace has a smaller but polished universe of kit shops. Shopify—which powers more eCommerce stores than every other platform combined—has a Theme Store with around 230 themes (most of them owned by a handful of big vendors) and an Etsy category that, if you've ever tried to buy from it, you know is mostly Canva templates dressed up as "themes." I've been building Shopify stores for over a decade, and for most of that time, merchants have cycled through the same three options: install Dawn and patch it with apps, buy a $180-$400 Theme Store theme that 50,000 other stores are also running, or invest $5,000-$50,000 in a custom build. The Webflow-templates-for-Shopify equivalent—the $200-$600 tier where you get something that actually feels custom without hiring a team—hasn't really existed. I wrote about the broader gap and the opportunity it represents for designers already. This piece is about the other side: why the gap has been so stubborn in the first place, and why I think it's finally starting to close. What the template market actually looks like in 2026 Before I get into why Shopify is the outlier, it's worth being specific about what "a thriving template market" actually means on the platforms that have one. Because when I say Shopify is behind, I'm not being vague about it. On Webflow, the template ecosystem is massive. Flowbase, BRIX, Wizard, and dozens of independent designer shops sell templates in the $49-$299 range and often do six figures in revenue off a single template. Webflow's official template marketplace has roughly 1,900 templates at last count, and the indie market off-platform is several times that. On Framer, the template explosion started in late 2023. I watched designers build full businesses off Framer templates within the span of 18 months. Framer's official marketplace now lists thousands of templates. The indie designers selling direct often outearn the official marketplace sellers because their brands travel. The category has heat. On Squarespace, the market is smaller but functional. GoLive, Avelã Creative, Big Cat Creative, and a handful of other indie kit shops have built meaningful businesses selling Squarespace designer kits in the $300-$1,200 range. The Squarespace official template library is tiny, but the off-platform indie ecosystem fills the gap. And then there's Showit, which might be the single best comparison for what Shopify is missing. Showit is a drag-and-drop site builder popular with photographers, service-based brands, and creative entrepreneurs, and its indie template market is one of the most mature I've watched on any platform. Tonic Site Shop alone has sold templates to 18,000+ customers at the $1,000-plus tier. With Grace and Gold claims 11,000+ small business customers. Northfolk, Davey & Krista, Foil & Ink, Create with Danielle—the list of indie shops just keeps going, and most of these designers market almost entirely on Instagram. Pricing spans $275 on the accessible end to $1,500-plus for premium shops. It's a full blown ecosystem built by solo designers and small studios, and it exists because Showit is super accessible: no code, no review process, and no Liquid. A buyer drops the template into their Showit account, swaps content, and launches. Thi template-to-launch experience is definitely more frictionless than that of Shpoify's. ~230 Shopify Theme Store themes Most owned by 6-8 large vendors. Compare this to Webflow's 1,900+ official templates and the thousands more in the indie market. Now for the Shopify picture: the Theme Store has about 230 themes. Roughly 70% of them are owned by a small number of established vendors: Archetype, Out of the Sandbox, Pixel Union, Maestrooo, Switch, and a few others. They're serious vendors, and I've installed plenty of their themes on client work with great results. A handful of large catalogs, a thin layer of indie work, and then a huge drop-off into the Etsy bargain bin where the average "Shopify template" listing is a few non-responsive Canva hero templates and a dream. Why Shopify's template market has historically lagged behind Shopify is more technical to build templates for than Webflow or Showit. Liquid, commerce data models, performance constraints, variant and inventory logic—all of that adds real weight, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. But designers who can handle Liquid haven't been selling templates either, which tells me the bigger blocker has mostly been something else: distribution. For most of the last decade, if you wanted to sell a Shopify template, you had two paths forward, and both kept indie designers out of the market. Here's what that looked like. 1. The Theme Store was the only built-in distribution channel If you wanted to reach Shopify merchants through an official marketplace, your route was the Theme Store. And the Theme Store is a seriously full-business commitment: months of review, Lighthouse performance audits, accessibility testing, ongoing update maintenance every time Shopify publishes a platform change, and support SLAs for every store that installs your theme. That's full-blown software company territory. The economics also reward vendors with a catalog, which is why the Theme Store concentrates around six or seven established names. 2. Off-platform, the only alternative was building a full theme from scratch Before Online Store 2.0 changed the economics in 2021, if you wanted to sell a Shopify template off the Theme Store, the model meant building your own full theme in Liquid from the ground up. Your own section architecture, your own schema, your own settings, and your own component library all needed to be custom-coded. The technical floor to sell a functional, competitive product was high enough that most designers that could do it well looked at the workload and picked something like Wordpress or Webflow instead. 3. The Etsy bargain bin poisoned the category Go search "Shopify template" on Etsy right now. You'll find thousands of listings priced between $9 and $39, and based on the ones I've reviewed, maybe 5-10% are functional templates. The rest are basically Dawn with a few Canva templates thrown in there (terrible for accessibility + SEO). 💡Design talent was never the missing piece. A talented Shopify designer can absolutely build a beautiful storefront template. What's kept the indie template market lacking is that the only paths forward used to be "apply to Shopify's gated store" or "build a full Liquid theme from scratch"—a distribution problem sitting on top of a real technical one. Squarespace or Showit template designers don't deal with this on their platforms. What the template gap looks like in 2026 Here's the template market broken down across platforms. Platform Indie template market Typical price range Merchant experience Webflow Thousands of indie templates plus Flowbase, BRIX, etc. $49-$299 Buy, clone to workspace, customize visually. Live in hours. Framer Thousands of templates, booming indie designer scene $49-$249 Remix in Framer, publish same day. Squarespace A decent amount of indie template shops $300-$1,200 Install kit, import content, tweak and launch. Showit Massive Instagram-driven indie market because of the low barrier to entry $275-$1,500+ Drop template into Showit account, swap content, launch. Shopify ~230 Theme Store themes. Handful of indie shops. Etsy chaos. $180-$400 (Theme Store), $9-$39 (Etsy—mostly unusable) Install theme, realize it looks like every other store, either live with it or pay for custom. Shopify is where the unsaturated opportunity is. The $275-$1,500 middle tier—the price zone Showit designers have been serving for years—has had almost nobody in it on the Shopify side. The market is there and the buyers are there. What's been missing is the base infrastructure to sell a template product without becoming a software company. The accessible path: Dawn plus a commercial-license section library Dawn is Shopify's free, official, OS 2.0-native reference theme. It's maintained by Shopify, performance-optimized, WCAG-compliant out of the box, and released under an MIT license. The MIT license is the piece that matters for anyone wanting to build Shopify templates for sale: it explicitly allows you to use Dawn, modify it, and ship derivative themes as commercial products you sell to other people. You don't have to build your theme from scratch in Liquid, and you don't have to go through the Theme Store. Dawn handles the hard parts so you can focus on the design: think of it as the electrician and you're the interior designer. Shopify also maintains a broader catalog of free open-source themes built on Dawn's foundations—Crave, Craft, Sense, Studio, Taste, Publisher, Ride, Spotlight, and a handful of others—all under the same permissive MIT license. If Dawn's baseline aesthetic isn't your starting point, one of the others in the catalog probably is. Pick the one closest to the look and feel you want to build on, and use that as your foundation. ⚠️Important: Horizon is NOT the same. Shopify's newer Horizon theme uses a proprietary license that explicitly prohibits selling or distributing themes derived from it as commercial products. You can use Horizon for client service work where you're building a Shopify store for one specific merchant for their own use, but you cannot sell a Horizon-based template as a product publicly. For any productized template business, stick with Dawn or one of the other MIT-licensed base themes above. The second piece of the stack is commercial-license section libraries. With a library like The Section Studio—the 60+ section catalog I built, which includes commercial licensing for designers who want to package sections into templates they sell—you can include professionally-coded sections inside your templates without coding each one yourself from scratch. Hero variations, testimonial rows, gallery layouts, product feature grids, CTAs, and dozens more, all OS 2.0 native, all legally able to include in a product you're selling. Put those two pieces together (Dawn as an MIT-licensed base + a commercial-license section library on top) and you have what the Shopify template market's been missing for a decade: an easy way for indie designers to ship templates for sale without a full blown software company's infrastructure behind them. What building and selling a Shopify template looks like Here's the workflow designers are starting to move into: Start with Dawn (or an MIT-licensed base) Dawn handles Liquid, performance, accessibility, metafields, and the schema layer for you. You're building on top of Shopify's maintained foundation, not replacing it. Every platform update Shopify ships flows through for free. Layer in commercial-license sections Pull in a section catalog with a commercial license instead of coding every section from scratch. You get hero variations, gallery layouts, testimonial rows, product feature grids, CTAs—custom-coded, OS 2.0 native, legally clearable to include in the templates you sell. Design on top with your design style This is where your design work makes its appearance. Typography, color, layout, photography direction, spacing, the whole brand build. You're customizing a proven theme infrastructure and curating a set of polished sections into something that looks and feels unmistakably yours. Package and sell it Ship through your own site, your Instagram, your newsletter, the way Tonic Site Shop and other designers selling digital products on Shopify have been doing it on other platforms for years. You're probably too lightweight for the theme store and too "high-end" for Etsy. You're selling direct to buyers who want a custom-feeling Shopify store without a custom-build budget. ✦ For designers The designers who start selling Shopify templates in the next twelve months are going to be the ones who own the category in three years. The base infrastructure is ready, and the commercial-license components exist—the buyer market has been waiting. Frequently Asked Questions Do I need to know Liquid or be a developer to build and sell a Shopify template? No. If you use Dawn (or another MIT-licensed Shopify base theme) as your foundation, the theme already handles Liquid, schemas, accessibility, and performance for you. Your work is design customization and section curation, which is the same kind of work Showit and Squarespace designers do on their platforms. Instead of developing a theme from scratch, you're arranging a curated starter package for buyers to launch from. Can I legally sell a Shopify template that's built on Dawn? Yes. Dawn is released under the MIT license, which permits using, modifying, and commercially distributing derivative themes. The same applies to Shopify's other open-source themes built on Dawn's foundations (Crave, Craft, Sense, Studio, Taste, Publisher, Ride, Spotlight, and others). As long as you include the MIT license notice with your template, you're free to ship it as a paid product you sell directly to buyers. What about Horizon? Can I use it as a base for templates I sell? Only for client service work. Horizon uses a proprietary license that explicitly prohibits selling or distributing themes derived from it as commercial products. You can use Horizon when you're building a Shopify store for one specific client for their own use, but you cannot ship a Horizon-based template as a product you sell publicly. For anything productized, use Dawn or another MIT-licensed base theme. What does "commercial license" mean for a section library? A standard license typically only covers using sections on your own stores or on stores you build for clients. A commercial license gives you the explicit right to include those sections inside templates that you sell to other people (though not as their own standalone sections or bundle of sections). The Section Studio includes commercial licensing built for this use case. How is a Shopify template for sale different from a section library for merchants? A section library is a catalog of reusable blocks that merchants install into their existing store. A Shopify template is a complete pre-styled starter package—base theme plus curated sections plus brand design—that a buyer installs and launches from. Section libraries are the component layer. Templates are the finished product built using them. When you're building a Shopify template to sell, you can use a section library as one of your ingredients. Why is now the right time to start a Shopify template shop? Two things aligned. A while back, Online Store 2.0 made sections first-class on every Shopify page type, which means Shopify themes are now modular and extensible in the way other platforms' templates have always been. Second, commercial-license section libraries exist alongside MIT-licensed base themes like Dawn, which collapses the technical overhead that used to require a software company's infrastructure. The base is ready, the components are ready, and the buyer market has been waiting on the designer side to catch up. Where to go from here If you're a designer reading this, particularly the Instagram-based indie designers who've watched peers build six-figure Showit template businesses and wondered when Shopify was going to get its turn, this is your chance. The base infrastructure is here (Dawn plus Shopify's MIT-licensed theme catalog). The commercial-license components are here (The Section Studio, built for exactly this). The buyer market has been waiting for years. All you've got to do is show up with your design sensibility, your audience, and a clear point of view on what a Shopify store should look and feel like. The first wave of designers to move into this gets to shape what the Shopify template market looks like for everyone who comes after. Explore The Section Studio
Julia DennisThe biggest gap in the template market right now is Shopify: here's why
✍ Written by Julia Dennis, Shopify Expert ⏱ 11 min read Key Takeaways Webflow, Framer, Squarespace, and Showit all have massive indie template ecosystems. Shopify has roughly 230 Theme Store themes and an Etsy category flooded with low-quality knockoffs. Most Shopify merchants end up in one of three places: Dawn plus apps, a $180-$400 Theme Store theme, or a $5,000-$50,000 custom build. The middle tier has been hollow for years. The gap is about legacy distribution: for a decade, selling Shopify templates meant either the Theme Store or building a full Liquid theme from scratch. Dawn is Shopify's MIT-licensed reference theme—you can legally build derivative templates on it and sell them as commercial products. Shopify maintains a whole catalog of other MIT-licensed themes too. Important: Horizon is NOT MIT-licensed. Its license prohibits selling templates derived from it. For products you sell, stick with Dawn or the MIT-licensed catalog. A commercial-license section library (like The Section Studio) plus an MIT-licensed base theme collapses the technical theme-building capability that used to require a software company's infrastructure. If you've been anywhere near design Twitter, Substack, or the creator Instagram ecosystem in the last two years, you've watched template marketplaces explode on every major platform except one. Webflow has Relume and Flowbase and hundreds of indie designers clearing $20K-$100K a year in template sales. Framer blew up in 2023-2024 and now has a cottage industry of designers making that their full income. Showit has a whole Instagram economy of indie designers running six-figure template businesses for photographers and creative brands. Squarespace has a smaller but polished universe of kit shops. Shopify—which powers more eCommerce stores than every other platform combined—has a Theme Store with around 230 themes (most of them owned by a handful of big vendors) and an Etsy category that, if you've ever tried to buy from it, you know is mostly Canva templates dressed up as "themes." I've been building Shopify stores for over a decade, and for most of that time, merchants have cycled through the same three options: install Dawn and patch it with apps, buy a $180-$400 Theme Store theme that 50,000 other stores are also running, or invest $5,000-$50,000 in a custom build. The Webflow-templates-for-Shopify equivalent—the $200-$600 tier where you get something that actually feels custom without hiring a team—hasn't really existed. I wrote about the broader gap and the opportunity it represents for designers already. This piece is about the other side: why the gap has been so stubborn in the first place, and why I think it's finally starting to close. What the template market actually looks like in 2026 Before I get into why Shopify is the outlier, it's worth being specific about what "a thriving template market" actually means on the platforms that have one. Because when I say Shopify is behind, I'm not being vague about it. On Webflow, the template ecosystem is massive. Flowbase, BRIX, Wizard, and dozens of independent designer shops sell templates in the $49-$299 range and often do six figures in revenue off a single template. Webflow's official template marketplace has roughly 1,900 templates at last count, and the indie market off-platform is several times that. On Framer, the template explosion started in late 2023. I watched designers build full businesses off Framer templates within the span of 18 months. Framer's official marketplace now lists thousands of templates. The indie designers selling direct often outearn the official marketplace sellers because their brands travel. The category has heat. On Squarespace, the market is smaller but functional. GoLive, Avelã Creative, Big Cat Creative, and a handful of other indie kit shops have built meaningful businesses selling Squarespace designer kits in the $300-$1,200 range. The Squarespace official template library is tiny, but the off-platform indie ecosystem fills the gap. And then there's Showit, which might be the single best comparison for what Shopify is missing. Showit is a drag-and-drop site builder popular with photographers, service-based brands, and creative entrepreneurs, and its indie template market is one of the most mature I've watched on any platform. Tonic Site Shop alone has sold templates to 18,000+ customers at the $1,000-plus tier. With Grace and Gold claims 11,000+ small business customers. Northfolk, Davey & Krista, Foil & Ink, Create with Danielle—the list of indie shops just keeps going, and most of these designers market almost entirely on Instagram. Pricing spans $275 on the accessible end to $1,500-plus for premium shops. It's a full blown ecosystem built by solo designers and small studios, and it exists because Showit is super accessible: no code, no review process, and no Liquid. A buyer drops the template into their Showit account, swaps content, and launches. Thi template-to-launch experience is definitely more frictionless than that of Shpoify's. ~230 Shopify Theme Store themes Most owned by 6-8 large vendors. Compare this to Webflow's 1,900+ official templates and the thousands more in the indie market. Now for the Shopify picture: the Theme Store has about 230 themes. Roughly 70% of them are owned by a small number of established vendors: Archetype, Out of the Sandbox, Pixel Union, Maestrooo, Switch, and a few others. They're serious vendors, and I've installed plenty of their themes on client work with great results. A handful of large catalogs, a thin layer of indie work, and then a huge drop-off into the Etsy bargain bin where the average "Shopify template" listing is a few non-responsive Canva hero templates and a dream. Why Shopify's template market has historically lagged behind Shopify is more technical to build templates for than Webflow or Showit. Liquid, commerce data models, performance constraints, variant and inventory logic—all of that adds real weight, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. But designers who can handle Liquid haven't been selling templates either, which tells me the bigger blocker has mostly been something else: distribution. For most of the last decade, if you wanted to sell a Shopify template, you had two paths forward, and both kept indie designers out of the market. Here's what that looked like. 1. The Theme Store was the only built-in distribution channel If you wanted to reach Shopify merchants through an official marketplace, your route was the Theme Store. And the Theme Store is a seriously full-business commitment: months of review, Lighthouse performance audits, accessibility testing, ongoing update maintenance every time Shopify publishes a platform change, and support SLAs for every store that installs your theme. That's full-blown software company territory. The economics also reward vendors with a catalog, which is why the Theme Store concentrates around six or seven established names. 2. Off-platform, the only alternative was building a full theme from scratch Before Online Store 2.0 changed the economics in 2021, if you wanted to sell a Shopify template off the Theme Store, the model meant building your own full theme in Liquid from the ground up. Your own section architecture, your own schema, your own settings, and your own component library all needed to be custom-coded. The technical floor to sell a functional, competitive product was high enough that most designers that could do it well looked at the workload and picked something like Wordpress or Webflow instead. 3. The Etsy bargain bin poisoned the category Go search "Shopify template" on Etsy right now. You'll find thousands of listings priced between $9 and $39, and based on the ones I've reviewed, maybe 5-10% are functional templates. The rest are basically Dawn with a few Canva templates thrown in there (terrible for accessibility + SEO). 💡Design talent was never the missing piece. A talented Shopify designer can absolutely build a beautiful storefront template. What's kept the indie template market lacking is that the only paths forward used to be "apply to Shopify's gated store" or "build a full Liquid theme from scratch"—a distribution problem sitting on top of a real technical one. Squarespace or Showit template designers don't deal with this on their platforms. What the template gap looks like in 2026 Here's the template market broken down across platforms. Platform Indie template market Typical price range Merchant experience Webflow Thousands of indie templates plus Flowbase, BRIX, etc. $49-$299 Buy, clone to workspace, customize visually. Live in hours. Framer Thousands of templates, booming indie designer scene $49-$249 Remix in Framer, publish same day. Squarespace A decent amount of indie template shops $300-$1,200 Install kit, import content, tweak and launch. Showit Massive Instagram-driven indie market because of the low barrier to entry $275-$1,500+ Drop template into Showit account, swap content, launch. Shopify ~230 Theme Store themes. Handful of indie shops. Etsy chaos. $180-$400 (Theme Store), $9-$39 (Etsy—mostly unusable) Install theme, realize it looks like every other store, either live with it or pay for custom. Shopify is where the unsaturated opportunity is. The $275-$1,500 middle tier—the price zone Showit designers have been serving for years—has had almost nobody in it on the Shopify side. The market is there and the buyers are there. What's been missing is the base infrastructure to sell a template product without becoming a software company. The accessible path: Dawn plus a commercial-license section library Dawn is Shopify's free, official, OS 2.0-native reference theme. It's maintained by Shopify, performance-optimized, WCAG-compliant out of the box, and released under an MIT license. The MIT license is the piece that matters for anyone wanting to build Shopify templates for sale: it explicitly allows you to use Dawn, modify it, and ship derivative themes as commercial products you sell to other people. You don't have to build your theme from scratch in Liquid, and you don't have to go through the Theme Store. Dawn handles the hard parts so you can focus on the design: think of it as the electrician and you're the interior designer. Shopify also maintains a broader catalog of free open-source themes built on Dawn's foundations—Crave, Craft, Sense, Studio, Taste, Publisher, Ride, Spotlight, and a handful of others—all under the same permissive MIT license. If Dawn's baseline aesthetic isn't your starting point, one of the others in the catalog probably is. Pick the one closest to the look and feel you want to build on, and use that as your foundation. ⚠️Important: Horizon is NOT the same. Shopify's newer Horizon theme uses a proprietary license that explicitly prohibits selling or distributing themes derived from it as commercial products. You can use Horizon for client service work where you're building a Shopify store for one specific merchant for their own use, but you cannot sell a Horizon-based template as a product publicly. For any productized template business, stick with Dawn or one of the other MIT-licensed base themes above. The second piece of the stack is commercial-license section libraries. With a library like The Section Studio—the 60+ section catalog I built, which includes commercial licensing for designers who want to package sections into templates they sell—you can include professionally-coded sections inside your templates without coding each one yourself from scratch. Hero variations, testimonial rows, gallery layouts, product feature grids, CTAs, and dozens more, all OS 2.0 native, all legally able to include in a product you're selling. Put those two pieces together (Dawn as an MIT-licensed base + a commercial-license section library on top) and you have what the Shopify template market's been missing for a decade: an easy way for indie designers to ship templates for sale without a full blown software company's infrastructure behind them. What building and selling a Shopify template looks like Here's the workflow designers are starting to move into: Start with Dawn (or an MIT-licensed base) Dawn handles Liquid, performance, accessibility, metafields, and the schema layer for you. You're building on top of Shopify's maintained foundation, not replacing it. Every platform update Shopify ships flows through for free. Layer in commercial-license sections Pull in a section catalog with a commercial license instead of coding every section from scratch. You get hero variations, gallery layouts, testimonial rows, product feature grids, CTAs—custom-coded, OS 2.0 native, legally clearable to include in the templates you sell. Design on top with your design style This is where your design work makes its appearance. Typography, color, layout, photography direction, spacing, the whole brand build. You're customizing a proven theme infrastructure and curating a set of polished sections into something that looks and feels unmistakably yours. Package and sell it Ship through your own site, your Instagram, your newsletter, the way Tonic Site Shop and other designers selling digital products on Shopify have been doing it on other platforms for years. You're probably too lightweight for the theme store and too "high-end" for Etsy. You're selling direct to buyers who want a custom-feeling Shopify store without a custom-build budget. ✦ For designers The designers who start selling Shopify templates in the next twelve months are going to be the ones who own the category in three years. The base infrastructure is ready, and the commercial-license components exist—the buyer market has been waiting. Frequently Asked Questions Do I need to know Liquid or be a developer to build and sell a Shopify template? No. If you use Dawn (or another MIT-licensed Shopify base theme) as your foundation, the theme already handles Liquid, schemas, accessibility, and performance for you. Your work is design customization and section curation, which is the same kind of work Showit and Squarespace designers do on their platforms. Instead of developing a theme from scratch, you're arranging a curated starter package for buyers to launch from. Can I legally sell a Shopify template that's built on Dawn? Yes. Dawn is released under the MIT license, which permits using, modifying, and commercially distributing derivative themes. The same applies to Shopify's other open-source themes built on Dawn's foundations (Crave, Craft, Sense, Studio, Taste, Publisher, Ride, Spotlight, and others). As long as you include the MIT license notice with your template, you're free to ship it as a paid product you sell directly to buyers. What about Horizon? Can I use it as a base for templates I sell? Only for client service work. Horizon uses a proprietary license that explicitly prohibits selling or distributing themes derived from it as commercial products. You can use Horizon when you're building a Shopify store for one specific client for their own use, but you cannot ship a Horizon-based template as a product you sell publicly. For anything productized, use Dawn or another MIT-licensed base theme. What does "commercial license" mean for a section library? A standard license typically only covers using sections on your own stores or on stores you build for clients. A commercial license gives you the explicit right to include those sections inside templates that you sell to other people (though not as their own standalone sections or bundle of sections). The Section Studio includes commercial licensing built for this use case. How is a Shopify template for sale different from a section library for merchants? A section library is a catalog of reusable blocks that merchants install into their existing store. A Shopify template is a complete pre-styled starter package—base theme plus curated sections plus brand design—that a buyer installs and launches from. Section libraries are the component layer. Templates are the finished product built using them. When you're building a Shopify template to sell, you can use a section library as one of your ingredients. Why is now the right time to start a Shopify template shop? Two things aligned. A while back, Online Store 2.0 made sections first-class on every Shopify page type, which means Shopify themes are now modular and extensible in the way other platforms' templates have always been. Second, commercial-license section libraries exist alongside MIT-licensed base themes like Dawn, which collapses the technical overhead that used to require a software company's infrastructure. The base is ready, the components are ready, and the buyer market has been waiting on the designer side to catch up. Where to go from here If you're a designer reading this, particularly the Instagram-based indie designers who've watched peers build six-figure Showit template businesses and wondered when Shopify was going to get its turn, this is your chance. The base infrastructure is here (Dawn plus Shopify's MIT-licensed theme catalog). The commercial-license components are here (The Section Studio, built for exactly this). The buyer market has been waiting for years. All you've got to do is show up with your design sensibility, your audience, and a clear point of view on what a Shopify store should look and feel like. The first wave of designers to move into this gets to shape what the Shopify template market looks like for everyone who comes after. Explore The Section Studio
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