I had an uploaded Empire theme which I customized and built my store. However, I purchased the empire theme after a few days. Now, when I publish my newly purchased Empire theme, I am losing all of my customization/development and requiring to start building it from the scratch.
Is there a way for me to publish a purchased theme with all my development/customization in place/intact?
First – there are configuration files in your theme – templates/* and configuration/settings_data.json – these are the files which contain all your settings done in Theme Customizer.
When Shopify does an update, it adds a new version of your theme and the copies configuration files from your current one to the new one.
If your theme code was not edited, Shopify performs this update automatically in place, without creating a new theme.
If you’ve done any edits, automatic update are not longer available.
If Shopify offers manual update and you’ve done any code changes, update will ignore them and new updated theme will no longer have those edits.
in the area between two Notes it is said that Shopify ignores edits to configuration files.
So, if you have not done any code edits and your theme version matches the one you had before, I’d simply copy over configuration files from your old theme to the one installed from the theme store.
If you did do code edits (similar to suggested in other posts) you may consider whether it is possible to move them to theme settings – Custom CSS or Custom liquid sections/blocks.
If it’s possible – you will have a theme which will either autoupdate or you will be able to safely update it via Shopify manual update.