The biggest gap in the template market right now is Shopify: here's why

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.

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). 

What the template gap looks like in 2026

Here's the template market broken down across platforms. 

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.

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:

Frequently Asked Questions

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.