Quickmerce Theme Developer Docs

Welcome. This is the reference for building storefront themes for the Quickmerce theme marketplace. If you have built a Liquid theme before, much of this will feel familiar - themes are Liquid templates plus CSS, JS, and a manifest, driven by a merchant-editable settings schema.

What is a Quickmerce theme?

A theme is a zipped bundle of Liquid templates, styles, scripts, and a theme.json manifest. When a merchant installs your theme, the platform renders their storefront through your templates - injecting their real catalog, navigation, cart, and branding via a locked, whitelisted Liquid context.

Every theme is:

• Data-driven. You read product, collection, cart, shop, linklists, and settings from the context. You never fetch data yourself - the platform hands it to you.
• Fully merchant-editable. Every user-facing string and image is a schema setting the merchant controls in a visual builder. No hardcoded copy.
• Sandboxed. Liquid cannot make network calls, read the filesystem, or execute arbitrary code. It only ever sees the context objects and filters the engine provides.
• Responsive. Every section renders correctly at 1440 / 768 / 375 px.

What a theme renders (and what it doesn’t)

Themes fully control the browsing surface:

Cart, checkout, and account pages are not theme-rendered. You link to them (via routes.cart_url, routes.account_url) but do not style them. Do not ship a cart.json or customers/* template expecting it to render.

How the marketplace works

1. Build your theme locally against sample data - the same render path the platform uses in production.
2. Preview each template with the standalone preview endpoint (dummy data, no store required).
3. Validate against the theme contract (structure, required files, safe links, no hardcoded content).
4. Submit for review. An automated gate runs first (parser + preview render
   • security scan); passing submissions go to human review.
5. Publish. Once approved, your version is published to the catalog and merchants can install it. Installs pin a specific version, so publishing an update never breaks a live store - merchants choose when to update.

Where to go next

• Getting started - scaffold your first theme.
• Theme structure - the bundle format in detail.
• Liquid context reference - every object your theme can read. This is the most important page.
• Sections & settings - how a section declares editable settings and blocks.
• Submitting a theme - the CLI and review process.
• API reference - public endpoints + the machine-readable context schema.