Shopify runs millions of online stores, from small D2C brands to large retailers. These Shopify interview questions cover store setup, products, apps and themes for beginners, then Liquid, metafields, the Admin API, apps and Shopify Plus for Shopify developers.
30 questions · Updated
Fundamentals, definitions and simple scenarios. Good for freshers and warm-ups.
Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform that provides the storefront, checkout, payments, inventory, orders and hosting for a monthly fee.
Businesses choose it because it is fast to launch, secure and reliable, has a large app store and themes, and does not need a developer for day-to-day running.
The trade-offs are monthly and transaction fees and less control over the checkout and backend than self-hosted platforms.
A product is an item you sell; variants are its options, such as size and colour, each with its own price, SKU, inventory and image.
Shopify supports up to three options per product.
Collections group products for navigation; a manual collection has hand-picked products, while an automated collection includes products that match conditions such as a tag, type or price.
Liquid is Shopify's template language, used in themes to display store data.
Output tags in double curly braces print values, such as {{ product.title }}.
Logic tags with {% %} handle conditions and loops, such as {% for product in collection.products %}.
Filters change output, such as {{ product.price | money }}.
Liquid runs on Shopify's servers and cannot make arbitrary API calls.
Plans include Starter (selling through links and social media), Basic, Shopify (Grow), Advanced and Shopify Plus for enterprises.
Higher plans add more staff accounts, inventory locations, better reports, lower transaction fees for third-party gateways and features such as international pricing.
The right plan depends on sales volume, team size and required features.
A theme controls the store's design.
You install free or paid themes from the Shopify Theme Store, then customise them in the theme editor by adding, removing and reordering sections and blocks on each template, and changing colours, fonts and settings without code.
You can keep unpublished themes to prepare redesigns and preview them before publishing.
You can buy a domain through Shopify, which configures everything automatically, or connect an existing domain by pointing its A record to Shopify's IP and the www CNAME to shops.myshopify.com at the registrar, then set it as the primary domain.
Shopify provides free SSL certificates.
Email is hosted separately, such as with Google Workspace, using MX records.
Reviews (Judge.me), email and SMS marketing (Shopify Email, Klaviyo), subscriptions, upsells and bundles, shipping in India (Shiprocket), WhatsApp marketing, GST invoicing, and loyalty programmes. Every app adds cost and often scripts that can slow the store, so I install only what is needed and remove leftover code after uninstalling.
Discounts can be codes customers enter or automatic discounts applied at checkout.
Types include a percentage or fixed amount off products or orders, buy X get Y, and free shipping, with conditions such as minimum purchase, specific customers or segments, usage limits and dates.
Combination settings control whether discounts can stack, and Shopify Functions create custom discount logic.
Shopify tracks inventory per variant at each location, such as warehouses, retail stores or a fulfilment service.
Orders are routed to locations based on rules, stock can be transferred between locations, and you can choose whether to continue selling when out of stock.
Inventory adjustments are recorded with history for auditing.
New orders appear in the admin with payment and fulfilment status.
You fulfil them by buying shipping labels in supported countries, connecting a shipping app or courier aggregator, or a fulfilment service, adding tracking numbers so customers are notified automatically.
Partial fulfilment, returns, refunds, order editing and draft orders for phone sales are also supported.
Shopify Markets lets one store sell internationally by defining markets (countries or regions) with their own currencies, prices or price adjustments, languages, domains or subfolders, duties and import taxes, and payment methods. Shopify handles currency conversion and localised checkout, and Translate & Adapt or translation apps translate content.
Applied problems, trade-offs and questions about your own projects.
Online Store 2.0 is Shopify's theme architecture that uses JSON templates made of sections and blocks.
Merchants can add, remove and reorder sections on any page, not just the home page, in the theme editor.
Developers define settings for each section in its schema, and apps can add app blocks without editing theme code.
Dawn is Shopify's reference 2.0 theme.
Metafields store extra data on resources such as products, customers or orders, for example ingredients, size charts or care instructions, which the standard fields do not cover.
Metaobjects are custom structured content types, such as an author profile or FAQ entry, with their own fields.
Both can be defined in the admin, edited by merchants, and shown in themes through Liquid or dynamic sources.
I measure with PageSpeed Insights and Shopify's theme speed report.
The biggest wins usually come from removing unused apps and their leftover scripts, compressing images and using responsive sizes with the image_url filter, lazy-loading below-the-fold media, cutting heavy sliders and fonts, and deferring non-critical JavaScript.
Using a lightweight 2.0 theme helps too.
In Settings, I create shipping zones and rates (flat, weight or price-based, free above an amount, or carrier-calculated), configure taxes by region (for India, GST settings and whether prices include tax) and set up payment providers such as Shopify Payments where available, Razorpay, PayU or PayPal, plus cash on delivery. I place test orders to check the whole flow.
Use Shopify CLI to pull a theme, run shopify theme dev for a local preview with hot reload against real store data, and push changes to an unpublished theme.
Connect the theme to GitHub so the main branch syncs to a theme and teams can review changes in pull requests.
Theme Check lints Liquid and catches performance and accessibility problems.
Each section file contains Liquid markup and a {% schema %} JSON block that defines its name, settings (text, images, colours, ranges, product pickers and more), blocks that merchants can add and reorder, and presets so it appears in the theme editor. Settings are read in Liquid through section.settings and block.settings, which lets merchants change content without code.
The Storefront API is a public GraphQL API for building custom shopping experiences: reading products and collections, managing carts and creating checkouts.
Hydrogen is Shopify's React-based framework built on Remix (React Router) for headless storefronts, and Oxygen hosts them.
Headless gives full design control and performance but needs developers and loses some theme and app features.
Apps subscribe to events such as orders/create, products/update or app/uninstalled, and Shopify sends an HTTP POST with JSON to the app's URL, or delivers to Amazon EventBridge or Google Pub/Sub.
The app must verify the HMAC signature, respond quickly with 200, process data in the background and handle duplicates, since delivery is at least once.
Mandatory privacy webhooks handle customer data requests.
Checkout Extensibility is the supported way to customise Shopify checkout, replacing the old checkout.liquid.
Checkout UI extensions add components such as upsells, delivery instructions or custom fields at defined points, branding settings adjust its look, Shopify Functions change discounts, shipping and payment logic, and web pixels handle tracking.
It is upgrade-safe and works with Shop Pay.
Shopify Flow is an automation tool where workflows are built from triggers, conditions and actions without code.
Examples: tag high-value customers, alert staff when stock is low, hold orders flagged as high fraud risk, hide out-of-stock products, or send data to Slack or Google Sheets.
Many apps add their own triggers and actions.
It is available on most plans.
Write unique product titles and descriptions rather than manufacturer copy, set SEO titles and meta descriptions, use descriptive URL handles, add alt text to images, and use structured data for products, prices, availability and reviews, which good themes include. Handle variants and duplicate URLs with canonical tags (Shopify adds these), build collection page content and internal links, and keep pages fast.
System design, deep internals, leadership and tough follow-ups.
I scaffold the app with Shopify CLI (usually the Remix template), authenticate with OAuth and session tokens, and call the GraphQL Admin API to read or change products, orders and customers.
I subscribe to webhooks for events such as orders/create, add theme app extensions to show the app on the storefront, and respect API rate limits.
Apps can be public on the App Store or custom for a single store.
Shopify Plus is the enterprise plan with higher limits, multiple expansion stores, B2B features, automation with Shopify Flow, Launchpad for scheduled sales, and checkout customisation through Checkout Extensibility.
Shopify Functions let developers write custom backend logic in Rust or JavaScript compiled to WebAssembly, such as custom discounts, shipping or payment rules, which runs on Shopify's infrastructure.
They replaced the older Shopify Scripts.
For a few thousand products I use the CSV import, checking the format with a small sample first.
For larger catalogues, complex data or ongoing syncs I use the GraphQL Admin API with bulk operations, or a migration app such as Matrixify.
I migrate customers and order history, set up 301 redirects from old URLs, and verify counts, prices and images before launch.
The GraphQL Admin API uses a calculated query cost: each query has a cost based on the fields requested, and each app has a bucket of points that refills over time (higher on Plus).
The REST Admin API uses a leaky bucket of requests.
Apps should request only needed fields, use bulk operations for large exports and imports, read throttle information from responses and back off when limited.
Build the app with Shopify CLI, use OAuth and session tokens, request only the access scopes you need, embed it in the admin with App Bridge and Polaris for a native look, handle mandatory privacy webhooks, and charge through the Billing API with subscriptions or usage charges. The app must pass Shopify's review for performance, security and user experience before listing in the App Store.
Avoid deeply nested loops over large collections, paginate collections, use the image_url filter with appropriate widths and loading="lazy", render only what is visible, limit app scripts and third-party tags, defer non-critical JavaScript, keep CSS small, use the section rendering API for dynamic updates instead of reloading pages, and monitor the theme's Core Web Vitals in Shopify's performance report.
On Plus, native B2B lets you create company profiles with multiple locations and buyers, assign catalogues with specific products and prices, set volume pricing and quantity rules, offer payment terms such as net 30, require approval for orders and run a separate wholesale experience or a blended store. On other plans, apps provide wholesale pricing.
Use Shopify's customer privacy settings and a cookie consent banner that controls tracking through the Customer Privacy API, collect marketing consent explicitly, honour data access and deletion requests (Shopify sends the privacy webhooks to apps), give staff and apps only the permissions they need, and document data handling to meet laws such as the GDPR and India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act.
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