Reporting & research on Shopify and ecommerce
247 official Shopify themes with real-user Core Web Vitals data, each figure printed next to the sample it came from. Price correlates with speed at r = 0.15. Star ratings correlate at r = -0.004.
Every theme in the official Theme Store passed a review with hard numbers in it: a Lighthouse performance floor of 60, an accessibility floor of 90, 16 required templates, roughly 15 mandatory storefront features and an explicit ban on fake countdown timers. We read the whole rulebook so you know what your money buys.
We installed both free Shopify themes and read their source. Dawn ships 45 editable sections and 475 settings. Horizon ships 39 sections backed by 95 reusable blocks and about 1,476 settings. Here is what each one actually builds, and roughly $2,000 a year of apps the built-in features quietly replace.
Paid Shopify themes cost $100 to $500 once. We put the question to our own July audit of 15 live theme demos: three paid demos beat every free Shopify theme on speed, and nine paid demos lost to free Dawn. The honest answer is that specific themes are worth it, the category is not.
Dawn ships quick buy built in and switched off. The setting appears in only 2 of its 46 sections, and its two working modes are not equal: standard adds 21128 bytes to a collection page, bulk adds 41935. Read from the theme's source at v16.0.0.
Horizon's hero has 36 section settings and 8 block types carrying 104 more, and its Height dropdown switches from rem to svh as the screen grows. Read from the theme's source at commit 8b42ace.
Dawn v16.0.0 asks the browser for 9 image widths from 375 to 3840px, and a different ladder up to 7680px when you use two images. This is every setting in the Image banner section, every default, and the exact heights in pixels, read from the theme's own code.