Quick Start

What is theme?

A theme determines the way that a Shoplazza online store looks, feels, and functions, it shapes the online store experience for merchants and their customers.

What is theme made of?

Shoplazza themes are built using Liquid, along with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JSON. Using these languages, developers can create any look and feel that their clients want.
Shoplazza provides several tools and best practices to accelerate the development process.

How developers can take part in theme building?

As a theme developer, you can customize themes for a specific merchant, customize a theme to meet a merchant's needs, these customizations might range from small tweaks to complete redesigns.

Or you can build a theme to sell in the Shoplazza Theme Store

You can checkout the following quick steps to: learn how to customize a theme to meet a merchant's needs.

1. Learn Shoplazza's theme architecture

A theme controls the organization, features, and style of a merchant's online store. Theme code is organized with a standard directory structure of files, as well as supporting assets such as images, stylesheets, and scripts.

As a theme developer, you can optimize the organization, features, and style of themes for your merchants.

The organization of each page is determined by the following components.

The layout Layouts file
The template assigned to the resource being displayed
The sections.
The blocks that each section contains

Features can be introduced to themes in Liquid template files, sections, blocks, and snippets. You can implement theme features using Liquid, CSS, and JavaScript. The features included in the theme inform how customers can interact with the content on an online store.

NEXT: For more detailed theme architecture please checkout the pages in architecture section.

2. Building your business with Shoplazza themes

As a Shoplazza Partner, there are several ways that you can earn money when working with Shoplazza themes.

Theme customization

The most common theme-related task for developers is theme customization, where an existing theme is altered to meet a merchant’s needs. Customization jobs range from minor tweaks to major overhauls.

You can apply to for the staff access for store, so that you can offer theme customization services.

Building themes and stores

Developers can build themes from scratch. This can be a major undertaking, and the work is usually commissioned by a single merchant with very specific requirements.

You can offer theme building as a service to merchants. You can charge your clients a fee that you both agree upon to build their theme.

Building for the Shoplazza Theme Store

The Shoplazza Theme Store is one of the first stops in a merchant’s journey to launching their online store. As a Partner, you can create themes for the Shoplazza Theme Store and reach an international audience of millions of entrepreneurs.

To be accepted into to the Shoplazza Theme Store, themes must meet strict technical, maintenance, and support requirements. You should review these requirements before you start developing a theme for the store.

Learn more about submitting a theme to the Shoplazza Theme Store.

3. Start developing the theme

To optimize your theme development experience, Shoplazza has established a set of best practices that you can refer to when developing your theme and any surrounding toolchains and processes. Our best practices include the following:

Designing and coding a theme - To create an optimal customer experience, and to keep your merchant's stores fast, accessible, and discoverable, you need to consider many factors. Shoplazza provide several principles and best practices that you can follow to design and build an optimized theme.
Working on merchant stores - When you're developing or customizing a theme for a merchant, you should keep certain best practices in mind around security, and collaboration.