How to Choose a Shopify Theme

Initially, we set up our Shopify store purely as a demonstration tool for clients. We were blown away by the ease and efficiency, and it soon evolved into a quick way for customers to order hardware. We haven’t looked back since...

One of the great aspects of Shopify is that it allows you to build a beautiful, modern website without knowing any code. The only hard part is choosing a theme out of over a hundred. If you’re a new small business, one of the free themes will get you up and running quickly, without compromising on aesthetics. If you’re more established, or simply want more customisation, one of the paid themes is well worth the investment.

Important considerations include:

Is this theme capable of handling the number of products you sell, or is it designed for businesses with a single ‘hero’ product?

Is it responsive? As in, will it automatically adapt to different size screens, such as smartphones.

Does it align with your current branding?

Does it have the right feature set? Such as the ability to zoom in on product photos, drop-down menus, subcategories and newsletter integration. Pen a list of must-haves before making your decision and make use of Shopify's theme search filters.

Always:

Preview the theme in your shop before making your purchase, as the one-off fee cannot be refunded.

Try to ignore the colour palette and photos used in examples, and instead focus on the layout.

Check the reviews, the designer’s reputation, and an example of the theme in action on another website.

It helps to have a good place to start, so we’ve compiled a few of our favourite themes below.

Retina

An award-winning theme, with glowing customer reviews, Retina is a flexible fit for all kinds of businesses. The designers, Out of The Sandbox, are known for their exemplary customer support. This SEO friendly theme boasts a responsive layout, product videos, retina display, built-in Instagram slide support, and a highly customisable sidebar menu.

Blockshop

As functional as it is beautiful, Blockshop, is a highly customisable, unique theme, perfect for businesses of all sizes. Turn-key perfection, stunning, well thought out, fantastic and elegant are just some of the praises flowing from their customer base.

Kagami

The first to develop an entirely automatic Masonry feature for collections, Kagami also has marketing pop-ups, contact page with map, FAQ template, video on the product page, integration to the official Shopify reviews app, compatibility with non-latin languages like Chinese, and infinite levels of navigation for stores with large inventories.

If you’re interested in signing up to Shopify, or need help integrating it to your point of sale, please get in touch via our contact page. We can provide admin configuration, training and an unlimited developers trial account.