Build a theme, bring your own gateway, or ship a Shop Agent.

What a theme is made of

A theme is built from four kinds of pieces, plus the pages you create with them:

• Layout — the one shared shell every page sits inside: the <html>/<head>/<body>, and anything that appears on literally every page (site-wide styles, the header, the footer). There's exactly one layout per theme.
• Templates — one for each kind of page your storefront has: Homepage, Product page, Collection page (a category listing), and Content page (see Pages, below). Each template controls how that kind of page is laid out; the storefront automatically picks the right one depending on what a visitor is looking at. There are exactly these four, plus the layout — you don't create new template types.
• Sections — reusable chunks of markup you drop into the layout or a template: a header, a hero banner, a footer, a newsletter signup form, a cart. The starter theme ships with a handful already built; you can add as many of your own as you like, and name each one whatever you want.
• Pages — actual, named pages a shop owner creates (About Us, FAQ, Shipping Policy...). Every page you create is displayed through the one Content-page template, just with a different title and body each time — so a theme with a hundred pages still only needs that one template to cover all of them.

Everything in all four is ordinary HTML with a small templating syntax mixed in — a handful of extra tags that let you loop over products, show or hide content, and insert live data instead of writing everything out by hand. If you've never used a template language before, don't worry — the template syntax section below explains the whole thing from nothing, and every recipe in this guide is a complete, working example you can copy and adapt rather than build from a blank page.

You build all of this entirely inside the Theme Editor — walked through step by step next. There's no separate build step, no files to upload: saving a piece of your theme there publishes it immediately, after a quick validation pass (covered in Validation & errors, below). Pages render on request against your live shop data — products, collections, reviews, the pages you've created, your shop settings.