A recent study found that 75 percent of Americans are shopping online more than ever.
E-commerce is roaring, and there has never been a better time to start an online store. One of the stylish platforms to launch your e-commerce store is Shopify.
Why do so many people love Shopify? In part due to its
- affordability
- ease of use
- scalability
- security
One stage-out reason numerous e-commerce store owners love Shopify is the flexibility it offers through Shopify themes. With thousands of paid and free themes available, you can create a unique e-commerce store that offers your customers a positive user experience (UX).
What Are Shopify Themes?
Shopify themes are templates that determine the way your website looks and feels to guests who visit your store. Different themes offer different styles and layouts. Also, each theme offers a different UX, depending on how it’s designed.
Design plays a pivotal part in how your store attracts, engages, and converts guests. That is why the Shopify theme you choose is critical to your business‘s success.
In e-commerce, your theme of choice must reflect your industry and niche. For example, if you’re in the health and wellness niche, you’ll want a theme that looks professional and conveys a sense of reassurance.
If, on the other hand, you’re into electronics, you’ll want a theme that’s sleek and energetic.
Will Changing Themes Break Your Store?
One fear that most store owners have when changing themes is that it’ll break their Shopify store.
That is not true.
Changing your Shopify theme( or editing your current theme) does not affect your content or other aspects of your account.
Feel free to experiment with your theme settings or indeed elect a new Shopify theme that you like. Your e-commerce store will not break, and you will infrequently have any time-outs if you do it right.
Why Your Shopify Theme Matters
Now that you understand what a Shopify theme is, let’s briefly examine why your theme choice is so important.
Helps Project Your Brand Personality
One of your most important assets as a business is your brand.
And no—branding doesn’t just mean logo.
An essential aspect of branding is your brand personality. Brand personality refers to the set of human characteristics that can be attributed to a brand. For example,
- sophistication
- excitement
- fun-loving
- sincerity
- ruggedness
Your theme plays a critical role in helping you project these characteristics. As a result, your Shopify store will attract customers who share your personality and love it.
Determines Your Website’s UX
Your theme is a pivotal aspect of your store‘s design because it determines your website’s UX. That is because your theme determines the essential angles of your e-commerce store, including navigation, layout, color schemes, aesthetics, and more.
Your theme determines the experience your guests will have as they navigate your store, consume your content, and search for products. However, they are likely to keep coming back if the experience is positive. A negative experience, on the other hand, leads to high brio rates.
7 Tips to Pick the Perfect Shopify Theme for Your Store
Ready to shop around for the perfect Shopify theme for your store?
Here are a few tips to help you find the perfect one.
1. Decide on Your Budget
Shopify stores come at varying price points. That’s why your first step to choosing your Shopify theme is to determine how much you’re willing to spend on a theme.
Examples of factors that impact the theme’s price include:
- The developer: More experienced and well-known developers tend to charge more for their themes.
- Flexibility: The level of customization of your theme impacts its price. For example, if it has drag-and-drop functionality, you can expect to pay a bit more.
- Level of functionality. Some themes are limited in functionality, while others allow you to turn your e-commerce store into anything you want. Those with extra bells and whistles, like forms or SEO features, tend to cost more.
Like everything else in life, you get what you pay for when it comes to Shopify themes. Make sure to read the fine print and understand what features and functionality a theme has before buying.
2. Prioritize Themes on the Shopify Theme Store
Shopify theme developers are a dime a dozen. You can get a theme for your Shopify store from many theme marketplaces.
However, I highly recommend selecting from the themes available in Shopify’s theme store.
One of the main reasons is that Shopify carefully screens all themes submitted, ensuring you get a quality, secure theme.
Another reason to prioritize themes on Shopify’s theme store is that you’ll be assured of regular updates and world-class support.
3. List the Main Features and Functions You Want
The key to choosing the perfect Shopify theme for your store is to consider the main features and functionality you want for your store.
Do you want a slide- eschewal wain hole?
Is a videotape player a precedent?
Do you need forms, landing pages, or a blog?
Chancing a theme that includes most of the features you are looking for will help you reduce development costs. When you find a theme that has one of the most critical features you are looking for, but not the others, move on. The key is choosing one that has the most of the themes you want. You can always have an inventor add the missing point( s).
To find features included in a theme, check out the theme exercise runner. Still, because not every point may be listed there, you may want to play around with the theme rally.
You can also use the live store exemplifications to help you get a sense of all the features of a theme you are considering.
4. Consider Your Niche
Ultimate themes are developed for specific industry types. When picking a Shopify theme, you must make sure it’s designed for your niche. For illustration, an e-commerce store that sells colorful electronics and accessories can not fluently use a theme designed for fine art pieces.
That is because the electronic store needs a theme that can handle numerous orders and advanced search capabilities. The art store, on the other hand, does not need as important advanced functionality.
As you quest for a Shopify theme, make sure to filter your top picks by niche. Fortunately, the Shopify theme store makes it easy to search for themes by niche and number of products.
5. Design and Aesthetics
Global e-retail sales are a whopping $4.3 trillion industry.
To get a piece of the global e-commerce action, you must attract and retain customers to your e-commerce store. That’s the key to growing a successful Shopify e-commerce store.
Attracting customers can be achieved through search engine optimization (SEO) best practices, like keyword research.
But retaining customers on your site is all about your design and aesthetics. The right Shopify theme makes design simple by providing:
- an attractive storefront
- color palettes that match your brand
- clean and easy-to-understand user interface (UI)
A well-designed Shopify store will not only look amazing, but it will also encourage more conversions.
6. Favor Lightweight Mobile-Friendly Shopify Themes
Website speed is pivotal to online success, as it can impact search rankings, conversions, and bounce rate. To offer callers the fast runner speed they want, you need a quick, featherlight theme.
Featherlight themes prioritize performance and tend to avoid busy elements, such as robustness, fancy scrollbars, and other unnecessary features that increase file size.
Another advantage of featherlight themes is that they are designed to be simple. Their main thing is to help guests navigate around your store and perform the action they came to do.
To deliver a presto, easy-to-use point, you will want to choose a mobile–friendly theme.
7. Optimized Checkout
Studies show that the average e-commerce store loses about 76 percent of its sales to cart abandonment. The same studies show that one of the leading reasons for cart abandonment is a complicated checkout process.
That’s why you must make sure the Shopify theme you choose offers an optimized checkout experience.
The best Shopify themes offer a fast and intuitive checkout process, well-designed add-to-cart buttons, and an easy way to check the total cost.
Making the checkout process easy should be a priority, so ensure the theme you choose makes this as easy as possible.
3 Examples of Great Shopify Themes
Now you know how to pick a suitable Shopify theme for your store. Before you run off to find yours, let’s look at a few great Shopify themes and discuss what makes them stand out from the rest. You might find your perfect match right here!
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is one of the top free Shopify themes out there.
The theme is designed for the apparel and accessories niche. Because of that, it focuses on a brand image by enabling you to show off your inventory with stunning visuals. Some notable features include:
- A slide-out cart helps customers easily add items to their cart without leaving the current page.
- Home Page Slideshow: Use the top of your homepage to showcase multiple products or brand images.
- Video integration: Grab attention, tell your story, and showcase your best products in action by featuring a YouTube or Vimeo video on your page.
If you’re bootstrapping your way to e-commerce success in the apparel niche, Brooklyn is the Shopify theme to help you get there. (Did I mention it was free?)
Icon
Looking for a lightweight and easy-to-use Shopify theme that will help you set up a stunning store quickly?
The $182 Icon Shopify theme could be what you’re looking for.
One of Icon’s greatest strengths is that it’s built to power omnichannel marketing campaigns. That’s thanks to seamless social media integration and a blog to power your content marketing. Other features include:
- Sticky Navigation: Keeps your menus fixed to the top of your page as customers scroll down.
- Product Quick View: Customers can view product details in a pop-up, so they don’t have to leave the current page
- Multi-column menu: Helps you feature product images in an extensive, multi-column drop-down menu.
As the name suggests, Icon is one Shopify theme that will help you build an iconic e-commerce store and generate a lot of revenue.
Expression
Have a large inventory of products?
Then you need a Shopify theme that can help you display them all beautifully. Your theme should also make it easy for your customers to find what they’re looking for.
Expression is one of the best Shopify themes that can help you do that and more.
That’s because some of the theme’s prominent features include drop-down menu bars, advanced search functionality, and a dynamic slideshow.
Other notable features you can expect are:
- Versatile Sidebar Area: You can use your sidebar to display blog posts, images, advertisements, and more.
- Product Image Rollover: Hovering over products reveals different product images, giving customers a clearer picture before they buy.
- Grid-Style Layout: This allows you to feature multiple products or promotions in a grid-style layout throughout your store.
Expression will set you back $180, but it’s worth the investment as it helps you create an e-commerce store with attention-grabbing visuals. It’s also designed to make your promotions stand out, thereby encouraging more conversions.
Conclusion
The e-commerce space is fast-growing as more entrepreneurs are launching e-commerce stores. One of the most trusted platforms to launch a store is Shopify. As you design your store, pay careful attention to the Shopify theme you use.
Remember, your theme affects your store’s:
- user experience
- aesthetics
- performance
All three are factors that have a considerable impact on your conversion rates.
