Reporting & research on Shopify and ecommerce
A merchant searching for a shopify sticky add to cart theme usually just wants to know if the bar is on or off out of the box, and across all six themes UTD publishes it is off by default and controlled by exactly one checkbox, which settles the question but not the one about how much else ships turned off alongside it.
247 official Shopify themes with real-user Core Web Vitals data, each figure printed next to the sample it came from. Price correlates with speed at r = 0.15. Star ratings correlate at r = -0.004.
Every theme in the official Theme Store passed a review with hard numbers in it: a Lighthouse performance floor of 60, an accessibility floor of 90, 16 required templates, roughly 15 mandatory storefront features and an explicit ban on fake countdown timers. We read the whole rulebook so you know what your money buys.
We installed both free Shopify themes and read their source. Dawn ships 45 editable sections and 475 settings. Horizon ships 39 sections backed by 95 reusable blocks and about 1,476 settings. Here is what each one actually builds, and roughly $2,000 a year of apps the built-in features quietly replace.
A merchant who wants a store email list usually installs a popup app first and only checks the theme second, and that order is backward because Dawn already ships an email-signup-banner section with 11 settings while Horizon builds the same job out of a 27-setting block, neither of which needs a subscription.
Merchants search for a sticky add to cart toggle in Dawn because Horizon has one, but the actual Dawn section files carry no such setting, and knowing which files exist changes what a fix can realistically do.
Merchants searching for a Shopify FAQ page without an app usually get pointed to a theme comparison chart, but the actual answer sits inside a single Dawn section file with 13 settings that already does the job.