Why So Many Designers Decide Shopify "Isn't for Them"
- Most Shopify designers work at surface level, using premium themes plus some CSS to make them a bit less basic.
- You can't break a client's live store when you build inside a duplicated unpublished theme or a free development store.
- Shopify has about 7.5 designers per 1,000 stores, the lowest designer density of the five platforms I compared.
- Three or four areas of the Shopify backend belong to a designer. Orders, inventory, finance, and most of settings stay with the client.
- Shopify limits drag-and-drop freedom on purpose, because theme sections display product data in patterns that are proven to convert.
- Shopify projects generate retainer work by nature: product launches, seasonal banners, app tweaks, and conversion tests.
I find that designers say "ummm no thanks" to Shopify over these five specific beliefs: that you need to code, that you'll break something, that eCom projects have too many moving parts, that the platform belongs to dropshipping YouTubers, and that the theme editor is too rigid.
I've held all five of them myself, so none of this is me judging from the sidelines.
If you're still deciding between platforms, my Shopify vs Squarespace breakdown for designers covers the practical differences. This one is about the talking-yourself-out-of-it part.
My First Shopify Backend Was a Full Panic Moment
Okay so, back around 2019 I was a brand designer who had started adding Squarespace sites, because sure, I can build your website too.
I made nice sites for hairdressers and stylists. It was fun work and it paid fine, and after a while it started to feel repetitive, because service sites tend to run the same flow every time: services, contact, about, and around again.
Then one of my clients asked if I could build her gift boxing company's store in Shopify. I was at the stage of business where you don't say no to anything yet, so obviously I said yes.
Then I opened the backend and panicked. I had spent a couple of years dragging blocks around a canvas, and this was a wall of products and collections and settings I had no map for.
But somewhere inside that same panic came the thought that changed my business: if this is intimidating me, and I build websites for a living, imagine how lost a store owner feels in here.
That gift boxing site ended up going semi-viral, and five more clients booked me off the footer credit.
💡 The panic is a signal that you're looking at something your clients can't figure out either, which is usually where the money is.
Belief 1: "I'm Not a Coder, So Shopify Isn't for Me"
Short version: you can build Shopify sites professionally without writing Liquid, and I did it for years.
Shopify design work falls into three levels of technical depth:
| Level | What you're doing | What you need to know |
|---|---|---|
| 1: Theme customization | Themes styled with custom CSS for brand colors, fonts, and a more unique look + feel | Design skill plus a bit of CSS. Most designers from a branding background stay here. |
| 2: Custom sections | Layouts beyond what the theme offers, added as new sections | Normally HTML, CSS, JS, and basic Liquid/JSON. The right resource like a prebuilt section library removes the need for that coding knowledge. |
| 3: Custom Liquid | Bespoke functionality, working around platform limits with code instead of a prebuilt app | Real Liquid fluency and comfort with Shopify's data model. |
I hung out at Level 1 for a long time. It was decently profitable, it was fun, and I made really cool sites for my clients (so if that's where you are right now, you're in good company).
What happens eventually is that you run out of layouts to choose from in your theme, which can feel annoyingly limiting when you see all these gorgeous Pins of cool Showit designs.
Another thing that trips designers up when they think about getting into Shopify: you probably think you need to master every setting and functionality in the Shopify backend before you're allowed to call yourself a Shopify designer. I thought that too, for way too long.
The thing is, what we touch as designers is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Shopify.
It's a totally valid route to say "I only touch the frontend design that can be built with Shopify's native platform, the "eCom manager" backend stuff is up to you/I can refer you to someone who can help", particularly when you're just getting started in the platform.
I don't touch payments, taxes, shipping settings, or inventory, and I make this clear during my discovery calls. One client asked me to set her payments up and I had to point out that I'd need her actual bank password to do it.
Belief 2: "What If I Break Something?"
This is probably the scariest one of the lot, because of course you don't want to be the one breaking your clients' checkout on Black Friday...right?
A Shopify store is the core infrastructure behind an online brand's revenue, so if something breaks to the point where customers can't check out, that's a whole lotta stress.
So here's the thing: Shopify already solved this for you, and the answer is themes.
Everything visual on the storefront lives inside a theme, and a theme is the core infrastructure you design on top of.
When you're diving in to make updates, you duplicate the published theme, work away in the unpublished copy, and publish it when you've double checked everything's looking good and working. So, the live store doesn't flinch if you make a little "whoopsie" for a sec while you're building.
Free Shopify development stores have no time limit, come with Advanced plan features, and allow up to 10 custom apps each (I've never come close to that limit). You build in a sandbox, then transfer it over. Pair that with unpublished theme copies and there's basically zero chance of breaking someone's business unexpectedly.
💰 The client's fear of breaking things is why your rate is higher on Shopify. Store owners don't trust themselves to pull this off, so they go looking for professional help far sooner than someone building a photography site on Squarespace.
Belief 3: "eCommerce Projects Have Too Many Moving Parts"
A Squarespace project hands you a couple of page layouts, perhaps an embed or two, and then you're done. Shopify involves products, collections, variants, tags, metafields, apps, and templates beneath all of that, and the sheer volume is what makes designers smash the X button on the Shopify tab.
Think of it like a physical store. The storefront you design is the showroom floor, and the admin behind it is the warehouse and the back office.
| Yours | Sometimes yours | Never yours |
|---|---|---|
| Page/product/collection templates, theme settings, content and files, menus, metafields, | Bulk product data management, app installs, discounts, gift cards, analytics, shipping | Taxes, payments, inventory, policy writing, cookie banner settings |
Templates are a core concept that you'll want to learn ASAP in your Shopify design career. Three product templates can be populated by 300 products, meaning you want to think hard about how they're going to flexibly handle varying product data.
Belief 4: "Every Shopify Resource I Find Is a Dropshipping Bro"
Search "how to build a Shopify store" on Youtube and you'll get red arrows, shocked faces, $0 to $500k in 30 days, and a whole lot of AliExpress product research.
This is so far off from high-end, boutique Shopify design studio life. So a designer considering getting into Shopify takes one look and assumes the platform is for someone else.
The platform hosts everything from someone's first crochet shop up to Skims, Gymshark, and Fenty, which are deeply design-led operations with serious creative teams. That side of Shopify is enormous, but it doesn't make for loud YouTube thumbnails.
The clients you want as someone just getting into Shopify are the ones outgrowing a marketplace like Etsy. They come to you with a validated product, real photography, and listing copy already written, which makes them some of my favorite projects to take on.
Belief 5: "The Theme Editor Is So Restrictive I Can't Design Anything"
This one is valid, and I struggled with this one for YEARS until I found the right workaround.
You open the theme editor and you're picking from whatever predefined list of sections your theme felt like including (which is much shorter on a free theme).
You're wondering how to make this look ~designed~ enough for someone paying you thousands (and to satisfy your impeccable design taste). You kinda balk at the fact that Shopify doesn't even let you upload a custom font without touching CSS?!
I call this conundrum theme jail, and the CSS lipstick you just slapped on it stops working at a pretty predictable point.
The admin doesn't do itself any favors for designers jumping into Shopify for the very first time either. There's no "edit site" button anywhere. The way to open Shopify's theme editor involves going to Sales Channels > Online Store > Themes > Edit theme. What's even crazier is that on a brand new store Online Store isn't even displayed in your main sidebar until you search for it?!
Annoying as it is at first, the rigidity is deliberate. Once I understood why Shopify is so damn different from Squarespace, I made total peace with it and actually ENJOY the rigidity.
Shopify is an entire eCom system first. The storefront's job is to display a potentially huge layer of product data sitting underneath it.
The predefined section layouts exist because they present products in layouts that are proven to convert.
Full drag-and-drop freedom brings mobile problems, slower load times, and clients who nudge things out of place by accident. If the entirety of Shopify store owners had access to a Showit-like design interface, Shopify stores across the globe would convert way less.
I find that working with more constraints surprisingly frees up my creativity rather than limit it. I like designing within Shopify's structure and clear goals, compared to a client saying "make me a nice site that makes me look good". You know that feeling of "designer's block" when you're staring at a blank canvas? Shopify doesn't have that.
The way out of theme jail without learning to code is having a serious section library under your belt. You copy and paste sections into whatever theme you're working in, which is why theme selection stops mattering and why I recommend Shopify's free Dawn theme pretty much always.
Clients love it too, because "this is a totally custom site" sells a whole lot better than "I styled a theme for you". My rundown of the 5 best Shopify themes covers where a premium theme still fits.
⚠️ On Shopify's AI section builder: it'll spit out something maybe 50 to 70% of the way there on the first go, and then it falls apart completely as soon as you want to edit anything. Treat it as a rough draft generator.
Why Designers Who Push Through Get Paid
Shopify runs about 5.8 million live stores and holds 29% of the US eCom software market, with $292 billion in sales in 2024. Checkout converts 36% better on trust and recognition alone, and there are 12,000+ apps offering functionality you'd otherwise have to build from scratch ($$$).
Ever since getting into Shopify as a boutique, brand-focused studio, I was always kinda like "wow...sure is quiet in here!".
I ran the math to see if my gut feeling was correct. I used BuiltWith alongside official partner counts, filtering the public "100,000 Shopify partners" figure down to the people doing design work (not app or theme developers).
When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense why the designer market for Squarespace, Showit, and Wix sites feels really crowded.
The key thing driving this: these platforms are all marketed at DIYers, since those platforms are built on the idea that the owner puts the site together herself. Showit especially is a tiny pond with a lot of fish, further crowded by the fact that half of those designers run template shops with some really gorgeous work.
The sweet spot for a solo designer or a small studio runs $2,500 to $15,000 per Shopify project. Two projects a month at $6,000 gets you to $144,000 a year, and that's before any retainer income or template sales.
First-time eCom founders typically are open to investing about $1,500 to $6,000 on their stores and make up around 70% of store owners, while redesigns for established brands pay considerably more (seriously, in the low to mid six figures for one large agency project).
My favorite type of project to work on is a pretty successful store with a bad storefront who has found their success because of their marketing and audience-building skills. I love working on these projects because they've already gotten the hard part right, and now there's so much potential for growth through a strategic site rebuild (you can see a few of those across my Shopify design portfolio).
Retainers are part and parcel of Shopify work too. A wedding photographer's site gets touched maybe twice a year, whereas a Shopify store has product launches, seasonal banners, and conversion tests running all year long.
Where to Start (Or Start Again) If You've Written Shopify Off
Create a free Shopify Partners account, open a free development store, and head on over to the theme editor. Your main goal here is to build a mental model of the frontend layer vs. the backend layer of the Shopify platform, and get comfy building out some pages using a theme.
After that, go through the motions of an entire project (great for learning and great for building a portfolio that will land you your first eCom client). My 7 things to know before starting a Shopify store guide covers what to gather up front.
🌭 If you had to sell a million hot dogs this year, the thing you'd most need to get right is where you park the cart. You want hungry people who'll happily pay $10 a hot dog. Choosing Shopify is a parking decision.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ready to Design Shopify Stores Without the Code Crisis?
If theme jail is the thing standing between you and taking Shopify clients, a section library solves it in an afternoon. The Section Studio gives you drag-and-drop sections for any theme, so you can sell truly custom Shopify sites without writing a line of Liquid.
