Reporting & research on Shopify and ecommerce
Original studies built on real store data, benchmarks and published reports.
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.
Shopify's two first-party free themes, audited side by side on their official demos: three mobile Lighthouse runs each. Horizon has the cleaner engine, and double the LCP.
We ran 45 Lighthouse audits across the live demo stores of 15 popular Shopify themes, on the mobile profile, simulated throttling, three runs each. Only one demo met Google's threshold for a good LCP, and the gap between first and last place is more than eightfold.