"i only speak liquid" #48: Theme development shutdown 🪦

Hey everyone!

Welcome back to i_only_speak_liquid - I’m Jocelyn, a Storetasker expert and front-end Shopify developer. This is my 4th and final edition of “i only speak liquid” before another Storetasker expert takes the pen. So for one more time: Let’s gooo!

What I’ve been thinking about:

There’s been a little wave in the Shopify dev community after Florescent themes announced at the end of last month that they will be retiring two of their themes, Ira and Context, in May 2024. It’s quite a rare thing for prominent theme developers to retire a theme. Fluorescent themes has four other themes on the Shopify theme store. 

Being a theme developer on Shopify is a hard game. You’re expected to adapt to all Shopify updates (the biggest one recently was the Online Store 2.0 upgrade) and provide lifetime support to all customers. And in return receive a one-time payment from customers when they buy the theme. Essentially you have to keep selling your themes in order to fund and support your old customers’ support tickets. 

Additionally if you decide to become a Shopify theme partner you’re not allowed to market your themes on any other marketplace, such as ThemeForest. The Shopify theme store obviously has the market domination on warm leads that will actually buy your Shopify theme. But still, it reduces your ability to diversify your marketing.

it might have come to a point for Fluorescent themes where the theme wasn’t performing as they expected and the support load was costing them more money than they were making. It might have been a sensible financial move just to shut it down altogether and start over. On their Twitter/X they announced at the beginning of March that they are designing a new theme, so maybe that’s the conclusion they came to as well. 

What is clear at least is that the theme development environment on Shopify needs to change in order to sustain theme development companies and keep thousands of merchants supported. Some ideas I’ve seen across the internet is to offer one year of “free” support then offer additional annual support subscriptions. 

If the conditions don’t improve for Shopify theme developers they might find that the best and most profitable route is to go rogue and sell directly to merchants or diversify to other marketplaces. Hopefully it doesn’t come down to that. Themes are an integral component of the Shopify ecosystem. Many brands wouldn’t be as successful without the hard work and dedication of theme developers to provide beautiful and easy to use themes. 

3 links you can’t miss:

1. Built with - if you’ve ever wondered what kinds of tools a Shopify site or other site uses, you can quickly search here to find a breakdown.

2. Mobile simulator - responsive testing tool This tool is great to test for every possible screen size and device known to man and find any bugs associated with a specific device size. A couple builds ago the ecom manager I was working with was testing the site on a iPhone 15 Pro Max, which is a screen size that a lot of development sizes don't account for. We were having lots of confusion back and forth because I couldn’t see the issues she was having. After I found this extension I was able to find the issues and now I use it all the time in my builds. Because it’s embarrassing to have worked on a build for so long but somehow didn’t account for that ONE screen size condition where everything goes haywire. 

3. Automated QA testing software for your Shopify store - this has become more of a hot topic recently. Some players in this space are Store Watchers, Virtuoso and UptimeRobot 

1 app I like:

Helium Customer Fields

This app is great to extend the customer area with additional forms if you need certain types of information from certain customers. I’ve used this in multiple situations. 

For example, one of my clients had to verify that each of their customers from Vermont had registered businesses. If the customer’s default address was set to Vermont and they didn’t upload the form they could not checkout. So we used Helium Customer Fields to set up a form upload area in the customer app that we would use to check and block the checkout button if necessary.

The Helium team is also developer-first. They have a great help section as well as a developer-focused area for more advanced customizations if you need to use their frontend JS API or REST API.

One learning as a freelancer:

One of your lead generation strategies should be to partner with larger agencies or other service providers that offer complimentary services.

Think about the services that are needed before you and after you. For example, as a developer, a client needs a site designed before they need you to develop it. So you could partner with designers that don’t like to or can’t code to be their go-to developer. Then after the site is developed, a client could need marketing services or SEO services. Then you could partner with a marketing agency or SEO consultant to implement recommendations.

Something simple to think about, but it’s helpful for you and on the client side to be a part of the full cycle of services a client could need. 

I hope you enjoyed these newsletters. It was a great experience writing them.

As for things to plug: If you’re a merchant or marketing/ecommerce manager who works with Shopify often, join my newsletter for useful technical information broken down into layman’s terms to improve your Shopify store and get more sales.

Let’s connect on LinkedIn or follow my Plentiful Commerce account.  

Have a great week,

Jocelyn