I would recommend staying away from themes that are not approved by Shopify. You don't want to tie yourself down to a codebase that is completely broken from the start and doesn't make any sense in terms of development. Let alone a theme that is paid but provides a bad user experience (which costs you even more in sales). If you pick an official theme, you're pretty much guaranteed to have a good development experience. If you pick a premium one, you'll find some of these features built in, so you won't need to get extra apps. And you don't need to strip any unwanted features. They have settings for almost everything. More on reddit.com

Hi, We are planning to use Shopify but we are not sure if a custom build theme will be a good idea to start with or a readymade theme will be a good idea. We designed that using Figma and done something exclusively. I am attaching theme here in attchments. Please let me know if we can develop ... More on community.shopify.com

Short answer is yes. You can upload and download theme code from your store's Shopify admin. HOWEVER. There is a big catch. You need to be very careful about what it is you are selling. If you plan to resell theme code, you better make 100% sure that you're allowed to sell that code. For example, you can't go and purchase a theme for your store, customize it to fit your market, and then go and sell it without paying any extra dues to the original theme maker. That's piracy, regardless of whether you modified the code or not, and could get you in a lot of trouble if caught. The exception to this would be using a base theme that has explicit licensing that allows you to do just that, under the MIT license or similar, or getting some kind of contract with the original theme developer in writing. The same goes for any plugins, etc, that you use. If you're familiar with code licensing already this shouldn't be big news. Some more info around what Shopify theme piracy is here That being said, if you want to use another theme as the base for your theme -- which i would recommend, because creating a fully-featured theme from scratch would involve at least 100 hours of work (upward of 1,000 if you want to do everything right and depending on your experience as a developer) -- you have a couple options: For the non-developers: If you want to start from a theme in the Shopify theme store, I believe what you could do is purchase the base theme, customize it to your heart's content, and then make sure that when you want to sell your custom work to a new store that you purchase the base theme for every store that you resell the code to. Definitely ask around for the proper way to do this if you want to go this route. Or, if you don't want to go that route and are a frontend dev, or learning to become one, you can create your theme using an MIT licensed (or similar) framework as the starting point. I'd suggest checking out Slate , Shopify's theme framework that's open to modification and resale. While it's planned to be replaced by something new (hopefully in the next few months, Shopify!), it should be plenty to begin with for a savvy frontend dev. More on reddit.com

There's a tool for that, but it costs money: Udesly More on reddit.com