Getting started

Install the theme

  1. Download abcbook-shopify-theme.zip from the theme page.
  2. In your Shopify admin go to Online Store → Themes.
  3. Under Theme library, choose Add theme → Upload zip file.
  4. Select the zip and upload it. Do not unzip it first — Shopify expects the archive.
  5. Customize to set your logo, colours and menus, then Publish.

Uploading does not touch your live theme. The new one sits in the library until you publish it, so you can set it up at your own pace and preview as you go.

The four things worth setting first

1. Put authors in the Vendor field

The theme reads Shopify's product Vendor as the author. Nothing custom is needed — open a product and fill it in.

If you already use Vendor for a publisher or distributor, you have two options: keep it as-is and turn the author off under Theme settings → Product cards, or move the publisher into a metafield and give Vendor to the author. Search matches Vendor, so whichever you put there is what customers can search by.

2. Connect a review app

Star ratings read the standard reviews.rating and reviews.rating_count product metafields. Any review app that writes those will work. A product with no rating simply renders no stars, so there is nothing to hide while you fill them in.

3. Make your genres collections

The homepage grid has one tab per collection. Create a collection per genre — Fiction, Mystery, Cookery — and point the tabs at them in the theme editor.

Panels are rendered server-side, so switching tabs costs no request and works with JavaScript disabled.

4. Install Search & Discovery

Collection filtering uses Shopify's free first-party Search & Discovery app. It is made by Shopify, it is free, and it is the only thing the theme expects that is not already in your admin. Without it the collection pages still work; they just do not filter.

Adding a format picker

Add a variant option called Format to a product, with the values you sell — Hardcover, Paperback, Ebook, Audiobook. The theme renders it as a picker with a price per format. No theme setting is involved; it is an ordinary Shopify option.

Local development

npm install -g @shopify/cli
shopify theme dev --store your-store.myshopify.com   # live preview
shopify theme check                                  # lint
shopify theme push                                   # upload

There is no build step. Edit assets/base.css or assets/theme.js directly — they are the files that ship.