The storefront editor

Customize opens your storefront with an editing panel beside it. Add and reorder sections, change their text and images, adjust colours and type, and nothing reaches shoppers until you publish.

Available on Professional and Scale · Updated 14 September 2026

Also asked as: “edit my storefront” · “change the hero text” · “add a section” · “reorder sections” · “publish my changes” · “unlock customizing”

Your theme decides what your storefront looks like. The editor is where you change it: which blocks each page has, in what order, and what they say. It is on Professional and above; see the pricing page.

Open it from Online Store → Themes, with Customize on the theme you are on.

The storefront editor: the section list, the preview and the toolbar

How it is laid out

  • The column of modes down the left: Sections, Theme, Pages, Navigation, History and AI.
  • The panel beside it, showing whichever mode you are in.
  • The preview, which is your real storefront with your real products, not a mock-up. The three icons at the top centre switch it between desktop, tablet and phone widths. Check the phone width before you publish: most of your shoppers are on one.
  • The toolbar: the page you are editing (a dropdown, starting at Home), undo and redo, the link button that shares a preview, Save, and Publish.

Sections

A page is a stack of sections. Header and Footer are fixed and appear on every page; everything between them is yours to arrange.

  • Add opens the palette of sections the theme provides, grouped as Content, Commerce, Marketing and Layout, with a picture of each and a line saying what it is for.

    The Add Section palette

  • Drag a section by the handle at its left to reorder it.

  • Click a section to open its settings: its text, its images, its links, and an Appearance group for how it looks.

    A section's settings, with its content fields on the right

  • The eye hides a section without deleting it, the two-page icon duplicates it, and the bin removes it.

  • Footer has a Footer bar group, where Show Powered by Shoponent turns the small credit line after your footer on or off. Any plan can also switch it under Settings → General. See Your brand colour and logo.

Two things in those settings are worth knowing. Text fields sometimes contain {{storeName}}, which is replaced by your store's name when the page is served, so you can leave it in place and it stays right if you ever rename your store. And a section that needs products or collections shows placeholder shapes until you have some; it is not broken, it is empty.

Theme

Theme is the look rather than the content.

The Theme panel: brand colour, colours, typography, corners and shadows
  • Brand colour is the one that matters. Put a colour here and a complete palette is worked out from it, with the contrast checked so text stays readable. Changing it here is part of your draft and reaches shoppers when you publish; the same colour on Settings → General publishes straight away and re-applies your theme over any layout work in this editor. See Your brand colour and logo.
  • Colors, Typography, Border Radius and Shadows open the individual values behind that, for when you want to adjust one thing by hand.

Changing the brand colour regenerates the palette, which replaces colour tweaks you made by hand. Fonts and spacing come from the theme and are not affected.

Pages and Navigation

Pages lists the pages of your storefront, including About, Contact, the three policy pages and any page you add yourself. The words on those pages, and how they appear in search, can also be changed under Online Store → Pages on every plan, and Customize on a page's screen there opens this editor on that page. See Pages on your storefront and Your policy pages.

Navigation is the same header and footer menus as Online Store → Navigation. See The links in your header and footer.

Saving, sharing and publishing

This is the part to get right, because the three buttons do different things.

  • Save keeps your work as a draft. Shoppers do not see it. You can close the editor and come back to it.
  • The link button shares a preview of the saved draft with someone else, without publishing it. It needs a saved draft first.
  • Publish puts the draft on your storefront. That is the only step that changes what shoppers see.
  • Revert appears once you have a draft over a published version, and throws the draft away, returning to what is live.

History lists the versions publishing has created, and lets you restore one. A store that has never published has nothing there yet.

History, before anything has been published

On Starter

Opening the editor on Starter shows this instead, and Customize on the Themes page reads Unlock customizing:

The screen a Starter store gets instead of the editor

Picking a theme, previewing themes and editing your header and footer menus are all on Starter. Editing sections is not.

If it does not work

  • The preview is blank or stuck loading. Reload the editor. It renders your real storefront, so if your storefront itself is offline the preview has nothing to show.
  • You published and the storefront looks the same. Refresh it once; a storefront page is cached for a few seconds.
  • You lost changes. Anything not saved is not kept when you leave. Save often; saving is free and shoppers never see a draft.
  • You applied a theme and your editor work vanished. Applying a theme replaces the sections on every page, by design. Your menus, brand colour, policy pages, About's text, Contact's words and details, your home page hero's words, image and buttons, and your "Powered by Shoponent" choice survive; other section work does not.
  • A section shows placeholder blocks. It has no content to show yet. Add the products, collection or images it needs, or hide the section until you have them.

Email support@shoponent.com with your store name if anything here does not match what you see. We read and answer every message.

Still stuck?

Email support@shoponent.com with your store name. We read and answer every message.

Contact page