Hi everyone! I’m setting up my first Shopify store and would love some advice from people who’ve been through this.
I already have a complete brand kit ready — logo (SVG), full color palette with hex codes, typography, and design files. Everything is prepared by a professional designer.
My question is: have any of you hired someone on Fiverr or Upwork specifically just to set up and customize a Shopify theme? Not to design anything from scratch — purely to take my existing brand assets and apply them to a theme like Craft or Horizon?
I’ve already started customizing Dawn myself and got pretty far (color schemes, fonts, logo), but I keep running into small limitations that slow me down. I’m wondering if hiring someone for just the theme setup portion is worth it — or if most store owners just push through and DIY it.
A few specific questions:
Is hiring someone for theme setup only (not full design) a common thing?
What did you pay for that kind of help?
Did you feel dependent on them afterward, or were you able to manage the store yourself?
Would you recommend one of Shopify’s free themes (Craft, Horizon, Dawn) over another for a small boutique with a strong existing brand identity?
I want to be able to run and update the store myself long term — I just want it set up beautifully from the start.
Thanks so much in advance!
Sure
Please send me your store URL and let me know exactly what kind of setup or customization you need. I’ll review it properly and guide you in the best possible way.
Yeah, hiring for just theme setup is super common. You’re basically looking for a “theme customization” gig. Since you have the assets ready, expect to pay anywhere from $150 to $500 on Upwork. I’d avoid Fiverr - in my experience, you often get hardcoded junk that breaks your store later.
To avoid being dependent on them, explicitly tell the freelancer to use the theme editor settings and custom CSS blocks. Tell them NOT to edit the core liquid files unless absolutely necessary. That way you can still manage it yourself.
Fwiw, Dawn, Craft, and Horizon share the exact same underlying code. I always stick with Dawn for my stores because it gets the newest features first and has the most community tutorials. If you’re already pretty far along, you might just want to hire someone hourly to fix the specific limitations you’re hitting rather than a full setup.
A correction – Dawn and Craft use very similar, but have some differences;
Horizon is a different theme and offers more flexibility, but all themes from Horizon family do share the same code and only differ in starting settings.
If you have design files, the dev you hire will have all the info they would need.
However, I agreed with this – make sure that code edits are limited to the very minimum and are well documented.
Significant code edits will leave you with a theme which would be difficult (or totally impossible) to update.
To be able to maintain your store in future you’d rather want most customizations to be done in settings.
Modern themes (especially Horizon) do allow this to be done using “Custom CSS” and “Custom liquid” sections.
Yes, this is actually very common, especially for store owners who already have a strong brand identity prepared. It can save a lot of money since you’re not paying for full branding/design work again.
The cost really depends on your requirements. If you only need small adjustments, you can even get free help from the Shopify Community for many things.
If the expert you hire is good, they will usually build everything in a flexible way, so you can easily update text, colors, fonts, spacing, sections, etc. yourself later without depending on them.
If you already started with Dawn and like it, I think it’s a great choice because it keeps setup simple. Craft and Horizon can give you more flexibility for creating new sections or making bigger layout changes in the future.
One recommendation though: if possible, hire someone from the Shopify Partner. Usually they’re easier to verify and more reliable long-term. Fiverr isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s harder to manage quality and support there.
Good luck with your store setup. It sounds like you already have a very solid foundation to start with!
