A brief overview of Shopify Themes

One of the most important things that a merchant has to decide when creating their store is it will look and feel. Customers can quickly decide whether or not they want to spend their hard earned money on your products based solely on how your website user experience.

With Shopify, your stores design is all controlled by what they call ‘Shopify Themes’.

A ‘Shopify Theme’ is a code base that can be edited and customized freely by a developer to create an online storefront design. Of course this requires the knowledge of how to code.

Below I will go over the options a merchant has when deciding on what to do with their Shopify theme.

Debut Theme

When starting your store, Shopify gives you a ‘Debut’ theme. Here is the landing page:

And Here are the Product Listing and Product Display Pages:

As you can see it’s a fairly simple and functional online storefront, however it lacks any sort of brand identity.

Theme Store

If you don’t like the look of the debut theme as a starting point, another option would be to browse Shopify’s theme store and pick a theme that you like. Prices usually range from free to $180 USD and will get your store up and running fairly quickly and some themes offer a good amount of customer service and help when setting up(although this depends on the theme, you should always check reviews).

These two options give a good base for stores, but if the goal is to have a unique and strong brand identity shown throughout your online store and differentiate yourself from other stores, then the Shopify Themes’ code will need to be customized. Most larger companies choose this option. This is also especially helpful when having an online presence in more than one country.

One example of this would be allbirds. Starting with a regular .com English based shopify store, they recently broke into the Japanese online market with allbirds Japan.

Their theme design is significantly different from the Debut theme. This results in an online store that reflects their brand identity well.

Looking at other, international stores, our in-house UI/UX designer wrote an article earlier in the year picking 30 stores with great Shopify store designs. I have a couple examples from that list down below.

Ullac Oy has a wonderfully designed shopify theme that reflects a strong brand identity. Their store certainly wouldn’t have the same effect if they were using one of the base themes.

The final example I have is a little different but emphasises the importance of a well designed Shopify theme the most.

Myro Deodorant is different from the above stores listed in quite a few ways. First their primary product is deodorant, and secondly they sell based on plans. They don’t have the usual Product Listing and Product Display Pages. Their whole storefront wouldn’t be able to exist as it does without a customized Shopify theme.

So if you are thinking of switching to Shopify, updating an existing Shopify store or even starting from scratch don’t hesitate to contact us. As Shopify experts we can help stores of all sizes whether that’s through recommending the best option, to designing and creating a custom theme or app specifically for your brand, contact us through our contact for and we’ll get right back to you.

EXTRA: Theme localisation

As with allbirds it’s possible to have the same theme but different languages for your stores based in specific countries. allbirds.com has english and allbirds.jp has Japanese.

Another option is to do what Gourmet Mondiale , which targets English and French customers does. A simple ‘English’ and ‘Francias’ button that when clicked, instantly translates the store to the corresponding language.