What I Earned After 141 Days in the Shopify Theme Store
This year, at the end of February, I released a theme to the Shopify Theme Store. Today, I’m releasing all of my sales numbers to date.
When I decided to create a theme for Shopify, I knew Shopify was growing quickly. At the time they had over 11,323 stores using the platform (I think its over 15,000 now!) and only around 72 themes available in the Theme Store. Of the 72 themes, many were actually just style variations on a single template.
There were no open reports on how much anyone had made releasing a theme, or any numbers on what percentage of Shopify users actually purchase themes (Shopify also has free themes in the marketplace). I decided releasing a theme for Shopify would be an interesting experiment.
I’m not a designer, so paying a friend to work with me and build a theme was not without financial risk. Would I make my investment back? Would it be worth the effort?
Turns out…it paid off! I made back my money in about 2 months, and everything since has been icing on the cake.
Our theme, New York, sells for $120 (you pick the price) and come in 4 styles.
Twenty percent of every sale goes to Shopify. As of July 14th we had sold 85 copies of the theme, resulting in a total theme profit of $8160 (theme profits do not account for any personal expenses you might have had building the theme). Not to shabby for a side project! Imagine if your had multiple themes in the store? You would have yourself a little side business. Tim Ferriss would be proud.
Note: Profit is shown as it would be in your Shopify Partner account and does not include my expenses. (Those you’ll just need to estimate :P)
Now keep in mind that its not an exact science, every theme does not sell at the same rate. In fact, my theme is by no means one of Shopify’s top earners! Its not the most downloaded paid theme, its not the least downloaded, its about average. You can see for yourself by filtering the Shopify Theme Store to only show paid themes, and then sorting by most downloaded. Check it out.
Figuring out what niches aren’t currently being serviced in the theme store, deciding what look and feel to have, and selecting the right features to include in order to maximize sales is not easy! Not to mention, once your theme is up you need to be prepared to answer questions, reply to support emails, and submit patches if you want your theme to succeed. But if you’re willing to put in the time up front, having a passive income and the opportunity to help a bunch of small businesses get up and running is truly rewarding.
So, why am I openly publishing my sales rather than hording the numbers and building more themes myself? That’s a good question. While I do plan to release more themes, the truth is that this is the post I wish I had seen when I was deciding whether or not to take on the initial risk of building a theme. If that means I need to be the one to write it, so be it.
What you do with this information is totally your call. I’m best off if you do nothing at all ;)
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