New this week at the shop

If you run an independent bookshop on Shopify, your homepage has jobs a clothing shop never has. People want to see what your booksellers are reading. They want to pre-order next month's big release. They want to ask whether you can get a title in by ISBN. And they want to know when the next signing is. Most themes give you a hero banner, a product grid and a newsletter box, and leave the rest to you.

Here is what the Theme Store looks like today. Shopify Theme Store paid themes are listed from $100 to $500 (1,257 paid themes, checked 26 Sep 2026); a search for books there shows Bookie at $110 and Mystique at $350. Those are general-purpose themes. Shopify's free themes are built for any shop, so a bookshop still has to find a place for pre-orders, special orders by ISBN and author events.

This bookstore theme starts from the bookshop instead. It has 9 sections, and each one does a job a bookseller already does at the counter.

Staff picks shows up to 8 books (default 4) from any collection you name, with title, price and cover. You type the collection handle, for example staff-picks, and choose how many books appear. A line under the shelf says who chose them.

The pre-order shelf is the same kind of shelf pointed at a second collection, for example pre-orders, with a short line explaining how your pre-orders work. Browse by genre gives one link per genre collection. You add a block for each genre and choose how many show.

Author events is an image-with-text section: a photo or cover, the details of the reading or signing, and a button that links to your ticket or RSVP page. Book club is a text section with this month's read and a link. The special-order request form asks for an email and a message, with instructions to send the title, author or ISBN. The request arrives through Shopify's own contact form.

The bookshop FAQ holds your answers on collection, pre-orders and posting, one question per block. The new-release newsletter is a sign-up form that tags each customer as newsletter in Shopify.

Everything a customer sees comes from your shop: your collections, your covers, your prices in your currency. Every heading, note and button label is a setting, so you change the words in the theme editor, not in code. The full theme has 41 section settings across the 9 sections, plus 5 theme colours.

The free part is not a demo. The Staff picks section comes as a working Shopify theme zip. You can upload it to your own store, point it at your own collection and see your own books with their real prices before you decide anything. On our page you can also type your own titles, genres and next event and watch the whole homepage fill in as you type.

What the full version adds is everything else on a bookshop homepage: the new-release hero, the pre-order shelf, genres, events, book club, special orders, FAQ and newsletter, in one theme zip. It is $180 once, not a subscription.

Installing it takes three steps. In Shopify admin go to Online Store, then Themes. Choose Add theme, then Upload zip file, and pick the .zip. Preview it, then publish. Before you publish, duplicate your current theme so switching back takes one click. Menu names can differ slightly by Shopify version and admin language.

We checked the theme with Shopify's own theme-check library and it reported 0 offenses on both the free and the full zip. Every image tag carries width and height.

If your shop has a staff-picks table by the till, a pre-order list behind the counter and a notebook of special orders, this theme gives each of them a place on the homepage.