The question "can you build us a custom design on Shoptet" gets a "yes" suspiciously easily. The more accurate answer is this: appearance on Shoptet changes at four levels, three of them from the shop admin and the fourth requiring the Premium tariff. Most briefs that look like design end at the third level - and the ones that do not can be spotted in advance.
This text does not come from our own Shoptet projects. It is assembled from Shoptet's help centre and developer documentation, retrieved 31 August 2026, and every claim carries its source. Claims that cannot be read out of the documentation are marked as such - deliberately, because that is information too.
Four levels of customisation, and three of them are already code
| Level | Tool | Availability | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Template designer | free, all tariffs | template settings only |
| 2 | Custom CSS | admin | appearance only, not structure |
| 3 | HTML codes | admin | 4 places, 8,192 characters |
| 4 | Blank template | Premium only | your own CSS and JS entirely |
That table is the whole article in miniature. The rest of the text explains what sits behind each row and why briefs usually run into the third one.
Level 1: the designer changes the template, not the content
The template designer sits in the admin under Vzhled a obsah → Návrhář šablon and, according to the help centre, is "free on all tariffs". In it you change the template's colour scheme, logo and header, background, page and element layout, favicon and banners.
The boundary is described just as plainly. The designer does not change "menu items, the welcome text on the home page, the list of categories in the footer" and - quoting - "does not serve to edit the content (text) of articles, pages, product and category descriptions" itself. For those elements the designer links through to the relevant admin screen.
What this means for a brief. A sentence like "we want a different menu" means two different jobs depending on whether it is about the look of the menu or about its items. The first is the designer, the second is the shop admin, and quotes routinely confuse the two.
Shoptet offers seven actively developed templates - Samba, Disco, Step, Classic, Waltz, Tango and Techno - and four older ones that keep working but no longer receive new features. According to the help centre a template can be changed at any time, and uploaded data does not disappear with it.
Level 2: custom CSS overrides the look and survives updates
Into the custom CSS field in the admin you paste styles that load on every page of the shop and override the template's defaults. The important property is that a template update will not overwrite your CSS.
But this is where the most common misunderstanding between client and supplier hides. CSS changes appearance, not behaviour and not the order of elements in the page source. The difference shows in a pair of requirements that sound alike:
- "The add-to-cart button should be bigger, green and with a different border." - CSS.
- "The add-to-cart button should sit above the description, not below it, and earlier in the HTML so a search engine reads it that way too." - CSS moves it visually; it does not change the order in the source.
The second requirement is exactly the type that gets ticked off as done in a quote and turns out, on inspection, not to be.
Level 3: HTML codes have four places and 8,192 characters
Here is the hardest number in the article, quoted from the help centre: "Into each of the sections Záhlaví, Zápatí, Dokončená objednávka and Robots.txt you can insert valid HTML code of up to 8192 characters." And immediately after: "Once the limit is reached, changes cannot be saved."
Read that list again, because what is on it matters as much as the limit. Four places: header, footer, thank-you page and robots.txt. The checkout steps themselves are not among them.
The help centre adds rules that are not cosmetic:
- JavaScript should not use document.write(),
- obfuscated scripts are discouraged, because "Google considers shops with such code suspicious",
- "inserting unprofessional or unsuitable modifications may break the shop's functionality".
What the 8,192-character limit means in practice. It is not a ceiling on the size of the customisation, it is a ceiling on the size of the pasted code. A larger script or stylesheet gets hosted elsewhere and referenced by a link - and that creates one more dependency that has to be written down somewhere, because when it stops working nobody will remember it.
Level 4: a custom design for the whole template is Premium only
The developer documentation describes a "blank template" mode in which the shop loads neither CSS nor JavaScript from Shoptet and you replace them with your own files. You can disable scripts only, styles only, or both. The mode is available on the Premium tariff only and is switched on in the admin on the HTML codes page.
The documentation adds one warning worth the attention of anyone who wants a design built from scratch. The blank template starts from the Classic template and keeps the class names most add-ons hook into - and if you built a template outside this mode, "compatibility with system options would not remain preserved". In other words: a custom design is built by overwriting the default template, not instead of it.
The same tariff includes the private REST API for access to shop data; the public API is aimed at add-on developers. Premium costs, per the price list, from 12,000 CZK a month excluding VAT and raises the limit to 100,000 products (shoptet.cz/cenik, retrieved 31 August 2026).
A template update is the date your customisations may stop working
This is the part clients usually do not hear, and it is a budget line, not a technical footnote.
Templates are updated continuously, and the help centre admits that "in exceptional cases some template updates may also affect your individual shop modifications". That is why deferred updates exist: the period for review and acceptance is, per the help centre, "always at least 14 days".
A second sentence from the same area: if you change the template or its colour variant after inserting your own code, that code may stop working, because the elements it was hooked to have changed.
What follows for the contract. Individual customisations are not a one-off item. Each of them comes with an answer to the question of who checks it when an update is announced, and within what period - those fourteen days are time to work, not time to decide.
We find the limit of your brief before the quote, not mid-development
There is no universal list of what can and cannot be done, because it depends on how the requirement is phrased. There is, though, a procedure that finds the limit before anyone pays for the work, and you can run it yourself.
- Rewrite requirements as sentences about behaviour, not as adjectives. Not "a modern product card", but "under the price there should be an availability table by warehouse".
- Put every sentence into one of the four levels from the table above. Whatever lands in the first or second is done quickly and cheaply.
- For the third level ask two things: how many characters of code it takes and exactly where it goes.
- Whatever does not even fit the third belongs either in an add-on through the API or on Premium. That is the point where the budget changes, not the scope of the work.
- Verify on a test instance, not on the live shop. The help centre describes testing changes on a paid clone of the shop as the recommended approach; the clone costs 1,000 CZK excluding VAT and is available for 30 days (podpora.shoptet.cz, retrieved 3 September 2026).
The procedure does not give you the answer up front, but it gives you something more useful: it turns "yes, we can do that" into a list of sentences with prices, including the awkward one marked "not possible without Premium".
When a Shoptet supplier nods at the whole brief and asks not one question about which level each item will be built at, you are not buying a design. You are buying the date on which you find out.
Five questions worth asking a supplier before signing
- At which of the four levels will each item of the brief be built?
- How many characters of code will be inserted, and into which sections?
- What happens to the customisations at the next template update, and who checks it?
- Which items require the Premium tariff, and how much is that per year on top?
- Will the shop still be compatible with the add-ons we use after the changes?
The fifth question is the trickiest, and the documentation answers it itself: add-ons hook into the class names of the default template. Rename them while customising and you break something that has nothing to do with the design.
We will tell you the limit before a contract is drafted
Send us your list of appearance requirements and a link to your shop. For each item we return the level it falls into, an estimate of scope, and a note on what happens to it at a template update. Items that come back as "not possible" will be there too - and if there are many, that is itself an answer to the question of whether Shoptet is the right platform.
What we do on Shoptet and for how much is on the e-shop development page. If you are weighing up platforms, read the comparison of Shoptet, Shopify and WooCommerce.
Write to info@lamapixel.com or call +420 775 599 009.
