If you’re new to Shopify, or if you’re looking to refresh your digital aesthetic, your first stop should be the Shopify Theme Store.
The ecommerce platform has close to 100 Shopify templates and ecommerce themes in its store, and the company lets you search for themes by industry, price, and design type. For example:
Also, you can also pick the best Shopify themes to match your catalog. Shopify has different offerings depending on whether your store will have dozens of product pages, or just a few, for instance.
From there, you can tweak each theme's customization options to your liking. Pick the font, layout, and color swatch that closely matches your vision for your brand. Afterwards, you have a fully functioning storefront.
Here are some tips on how to navigate the Shopify Theme Store:
The easiest way to get website inspiration is to look at existing brands. If you’ve ever visited a Shopify site that you particularly love, and you want to know what theme the brand used, here’s a quick tutorial:
This method tells you that the coffee brand MUD\WTR, for instance, is using the Shopify theme Debut.
Your website is one of the most important venues where customers interact with you, and a sophisticated web design is worth putting money into.
Premium Shopify themes are especially worth exploring because you don’t have to pay until you’ve already demo’d them. The fees only kick in only after your theme is published, meaning you have free rein to test whichever theme you want as long as you keep it in beta.
In the grand scheme of things, most Shopify themes also aren’t that expensive. The range is about $100 to $300.
Many Shopify themes are tailored to specific kinds of products, and that’s for a reason.
The needs of a fashion store, whose products cycle in and out of season very quickly, are going to be very different from the needs of a DTC coffee company that only has a single product or three at its core that it wants to showcase.
The third-party theme Vendy ($39) is a great option for fashion companies, since it features a massive “New Arrivals” header that can help you promote your newest products, plus several rows of product images that make for easy browsing.
If you sell greeting cards, by contrast, you might opt for a free theme like Minimal, which—true to its name—offers a slightly funky, minimalist design that lets you put your own motifs front and center.
An analysis of the top Shopify themes from 2021 found that after Debut—the default theme for free stores—the most used Shopify themes were Brooklyn and Minimal, with 38,210 and 33,487 users, respectively.
Just because a bunch of people are using that theme doesn’t mean you should shy away from it necessarily. There are plenty of ways to customize each online shop so it looks uniquely your own.
Some themes let you add these optimizations, which can give your store a more functional and responsive design:
Others even let you display customer testimonials about your best-sellers. But you should be aware that the design of your website might, for better or worse, look familiar to ecommerce buyers.
If you don’t find what you’re looking for in the Shopify Theme Store, there’s an entire ecosystem of third-party themes that integrate with Shopify.
You can sift through themes on sites like ThemeForest, TemplateMonster, and 99 Shopify. If you find one you click, download it and import it into Shopify directly.
A common mistake for new brands is to assume that the design process stops at your Shopify site.
In fact, brands should be designing their website with the goal of mimicking those same aesthetics across their social media pages—like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok for instance.
No matter what you choose as your brand identity, it’s important that those visual cues stay the same across all places where customers find you.
Brands should pick a small number of fonts—maybe even just two—that they want to claim as their own, and make sure those fonts stay the same on their website, their logo, and even on their Stories on Instagram.
The same goes for colors. Pick three colors, save the exact code string for each one, and make sure those colors match on all platforms. Your TikTok captions should be in that same color.
Shake Shack, for instance, uses its signature light-green color to decorate its TikTok videos.
Brands should also decide whether or not they want to add patterns to their website. Only add polka dots to your Instagram Stories if that aesthetic matches the design you’ve already laid out on your Shopify site.
Shopify has an app called Hatchful, which helps brands create a visual identity they can disseminate across all platforms. Based on information you provide about your products, Hatchful suggests customizable logo ideas, which you can then tweak by color and more.
And once you do launch your Shopify store, don’t forget to attach a customer service team to it. Chatdesk Teams will work with you across all platforms, responding to customer FAQs in a live chat on your Shopify site, or in the comments of TikTok and Instagram.
