A custom Shopify redesign runs $10,000 to $35,000 with most agencies. Liquid Lemon does one for a fixed $9,500, or $12,500 on Shopify Plus, in a 30-day sprint. The full range stretches from about $500 for a theme reskin to $250,000 or more for an enterprise build, but "redesign" can mean anything from a reskin to a from-scratch rebuild, and the price depends entirely on which one you buy. Here's each real build tier, what you actually get, and how to tell which one fits.
Is a theme refresh a redesign?
No. A theme refresh restyles a template you already own for $500 to $3,000, new colors, fonts, and imagery on the same underlying store. It's a reskin, and it's the right call if your store works and just looks dated. But it's a different project than the one this article prices. If a template is what's holding the business back, a refresh doesn't fix it, and the tell is usually whether you've outgrown your theme. Everything below is a real rebuild, designed and coded from scratch.
Freelancer: $1,500 to $15,000
What you get: one person doing the design, the build, or both, at $50 to $120 an hour. Quality ranges from excellent to unusable.
Timeline: varies widely with availability.
Best for: a defined, contained project when you already know exactly what you need.
The catch: one person means variable availability and no backup when something breaks mid-build. The huge price range is a direct read on how much skill and reliability vary.
Studio-grade custom redesign: $10,000 to $35,000
What you get: a store designed from scratch and hand-coded around how your brand sells. Product pages built for your objections, cart and navigation built for your catalog, sections no theme ships with.
Timeline: 6 to 12 weeks at most agencies.
Best for: growing DTC brands where the current theme is capping conversion, not just looking dated.
The catch: senior North American talent runs $120 to $250 an hour, which is what puts these in five figures, and open-ended revisions push the number higher.
Liquid Lemon, a Shopify / Shopify Plus design + development studio, sits in this tier, priced the opposite way. A fixed $9,500, or $12,500 on Shopify Plus, agreed before any work starts and delivered in a 30-day sprint. Scope is locked up front so the price doesn't move, the build is founder-led, and complex scopes like wholesale, B2B, or gated portals are quoted. That's at or below the usual range, and it ships in weeks, not months.
Enterprise Plus build: $50,000 to $250,000 and up
What you get: a large team, formal process, and scale. Deep integrations, multi-region, and headless or composable architecture, which runs $40,000 to $150,000 on its own.
Timeline: 4 to 9 months.
Best for: high-volume brands with operations complex enough to genuinely need enterprise architecture.
The catch: a lot of the number is overhead. Account managers, project managers, and multi-week discovery phases are real costs baked into the quote.
A fully custom build does not have to cost this. Liquid Lemon builds custom stores for a fixed $9,500, or $12,500 on Shopify Plus, and prices complex scopes like wholesale, B2B, or gated portals by quote. Same custom, hand-coded foundation, a fraction of the enterprise number, priced by scope instead of team size. Liquid Lemon rebuilt Gymshark's Shopify Plus storefront, so the fixed price still buys work at that scale. The gap between $12,500 and $50,000-plus is mostly the overhead, not the store.
What changes the price inside a tier
Two redesigns at the same shop can quote very differently. The levers that move the number:
- Scope: a light rebuild versus a from-scratch build of every template is the single biggest factor, by a wide margin.
- Catalog size: reorganizing hundreds of products across dozens of collections takes real time, separate from the design.
- Custom functionality: subscriptions, bundles, B2B, gated logins, and quiz or personalization logic all add build time.
- Integrations and migrations: connecting a 3PL, ERP, or reviews and loyalty apps, or moving platforms at the same time.
- Revision rounds: open-ended revisions are where hourly projects quietly balloon.
The hidden costs to watch for
The headline quote is rarely the final number. The ones that surprise brands:
- Scope creep and hourly overruns: an hourly engagement means every question and change is billable, so the invoice climbs past the estimate.
- Revision billing: confirm how many rounds are included and what a round costs after that.
- App subscriptions: the features a redesign leans on (subscriptions, reviews, page builders) carry their own monthly fees.
- Maintenance retainers: ongoing support runs $1,500 to $10,000 a month if you sign one.
- Paying twice: the most expensive redesign is the cheap one that didn't convert and has to be rebuilt a year later.
Is a Shopify redesign worth it?
A redesign is worth it when the current store is capping conversion or revenue, not when you're simply tired of looking at it. Measure it against the money, not the mood. If the store is slow, hard to navigate, or a stock theme you've pushed as far as it goes, a rebuild has something real to fix and a clear way to pay for itself. If it converts fine and just feels stale, a refresh is the smarter spend.
Two things brands worry about, answered: a redesign done right will not tank your rankings. The damage only happens when URLs, redirects, or content are handled carelessly, which we covered in does a Shopify redesign hurt SEO. And a custom redesign does not have to take months. See how long a Shopify redesign takes. Building a brand-new store instead of redesigning an existing one is a different number, broken down in how much a Shopify store costs.
If your store is capping the business, that's the redesign worth paying for. Start your sprint and you'll have a fixed number before you commit to anything.
