This most basic concept is baffling me. I’ve spent a full working day looking at themes that can satisfy my fairly basic design, but the best I can find satisfies 80-85% of my needs. I thought there would be plenty of individual sections and bundled sections in the app store after the huge “sections everywhere” 2.0 release, but I’m finding just a few.
Hiring a developer to build a couple custom sections isn’t in my budget, I assume. Page building apps appear to come with many custom sections, but I don’t want to use a page builder for the many usual documented reasons.
Are there 3rd party marketplaces for single sections or even bundles, like there are for themes? While I can’t build complex sections, I am capable of adding someone else’s code to my theme.
What does every Shopify customer do when a premium theme doesn’t do everything they need? Is that just not common or do they really hire a developer?
There’s nothing baffling here, specific needs warrant specific investment.
Premium themes still have to obey the law of averages in their design to be as applicable as possible to as many general situations as possible. Versus creating a massive array of infinitely flexible configurable sections that all have to be maintained.
Which means while we could naively assume premium themes should very greatly in features/aesthetics and applicability to niche needs the reality is the overall design flexibility even for premium themes is narrowed, especially when judged directly out of the box.
Are there 3rd party marketplaces for single sections or even bundles, like there are for themes?
There are samples available throughout the internet such as https://shopify.github.io/liquid-code-examples/ .
There are some “section apps” in the app store.
And they all end up with similar side-effects as page-builders, and characteristics of store themes: general product for mass adoption.
What does every Shopify customer do when a premium theme doesn’t do everything they need? Is that just not common or do they really hire a developer?
In rare cases dedicate a lot of time and money to learn to code. https://shopify.dev/themes/architecture/sections
In reality they reevaluate expectations, skip it because there’s no real business case, or invest and delegate it to a designer or developer so they can get back to business.
"There’s nothing baffling here, specific needs warrant specific investment.
Premium themes still have to obey the law of averages in their design to be as applicable as possible to as many general situations as possible."
My wording was wonky. I didn’t mean I was shocked there was no theme that met my needs 100% but rather section variety from themes, apps, and 3rd party coded sections were so limited collectively.
The tone of your response makes it clear that you’re a developer, and so I respect your point of view, but do you understand that some might expected Shopify, with its massive ecommerce footprint, to have an ecosystem comparable to WordPress?