Bookshops have needs that a generic Shopify theme doesn't cover. One book comes in several formats, each with its own price, ISBN and way of reaching the reader. Readers browse by author, by series and by genre, and they expect to know which book in a series comes first.

I built Dog-Ear Books, a concept independent bookshop, to show how far a stock Shopify theme can be taken for a specific kind of store. It's built on Horizon, Shopify's current reference theme, with every custom feature added as new sections and blocks. That keeps the theme fully editable in Shopify's theme editor and lets future Horizon updates merge cleanly. The catalog, authors, covers and logo are all original to the project.

Key Features:

Format Picker - Paperback, hardcover and e-book appear as cards showing each format's price and how it's delivered. It reuses Horizon's own variant picker logic, so add to cart, URL updates and inventory all keep working exactly as Shopify intends.

Book Details That Follow the Format - Each format has its own ISBN, and the details table (format, ISBN, pages, publication date, genre, delivery) updates when the shopper switches formats, without duplicating any formatting logic in JavaScript.

Authors as Structured Data - Authors are Shopify metaobjects with a portrait, bio and list of books. Each one gets its own page, books link to their author, and an Our Authors page lists everyone automatically, so adding an author in the admin adds them to the site.

Series and Genre Browsing - Books show their place in a series with a link to the rest of it, the homepage spotlights a series in reading order, and genre tiles are built from each genre's own covers.

Merchant-Editable Homepage - New releases, genre tiles, a series spotlight, an author spotlight and store promises are all sections the merchant can reorder, restyle and point at different collections, books or authors in the theme editor.

Brand and Logo - A full visual identity: an open-book logo with a dog-eared page, a book-paper and bottle-green palette, Libre Baskerville headings, and a matching favicon.

Technical Highlights:

Built with Liquid, Online Store 2.0 theme blocks and Horizon's web components, linted with Theme Check, and developed against a live store with the Shopify CLI. The data model uses product and variant metafields for book details and ISBNs, metaobjects for authors, and automated collections for genres and new releases.

The whole demo store can be rebuilt from scratch with a script that uses the Admin GraphQL API through the Shopify CLI. It creates the data definitions, uploads covers and author portraits, and loads 12 books with their formats, stock and ISBNs, plus collections, pages and menus. It's safe to rerun and updates everything in place.

This project gave me hands-on experience with Shopify's theme architecture, its data model and the details that make a store feel built for its products. It's the kind of tailored, maintainable Shopify work I want to do for clients.