Best 10 Shopify Stores: Design Inspiration

Shopify stores are at the heart of millions of retail businesses found on the web today. But what are some of the best examples of Shopify stores?

We’ve put together this fun and informative guide for our favourite Shopify stores. It’s our top-rated ecommerce platform, because of its diverse sales features and reliability.

Below you’ll find a list of beautiful online shops to browse and – shamelessly – steal design inspiration from. The websites below go beyond simply looking good – they function well and encourage visitors to make purchases with clever psychological tactics.

From soothing colour schemes to adorable pet images, these websites engage eyeballs and emotions in equal measure. Let’s dive into the wonderful world of Shopify webstores.

1. Purina

www.shop.purina.com.au

Global pet food brand Purina offers shoppers a choice on whether they want to view products for cats or dogs. Product choices are further segmented by your dog or cat’s age, dietary requirements or even if you’d like to view toys rather than food. Shopify is particularly good at helping merchants organise large or complex inventories.

Purina even has a collaboration with Disney, Pixar and Marvel that’s resulted in adorable movie-themed pet toys. Colourful product images change dynamically as you tap or mouseover each one. The shopping experience is fun, but most of all simple to navigate. Plenty of white space allows the shopper to read everything they need to convince them to purchase.

2. JB Hi-Fi

www.jbhifi.com.au

If you can offer your customers something really unique then you’re going to set yourself ahead of the competition. JB Hi-Fi has several special sales tactics to attract shoppers in the competitive technology ecommerce space. Offering pre-order on desirable Apple iPhones, discounts on big-name computers, money off with trade-in plus “Buy now, pay later” options are smart ways to convince shoppers to part with their cash.

The loud, garish colour scheme and cartoon-style fonts aren’t to everyone’s taste. However, it cannot be denied that this Shopify webstore is certainly eye-catching. You should take inspiration from JB Hi-Fi and offer as many payment options as possible to increase the likelihood of converting sales on your own webstore.

3. WhichCar

www.shop.whichcar.com.au

The WhichCar shop is the webstore from Wheels Media that lets you buy back issues, magazine subscriptions and merch for their range of motoring brands. What we particularly love about this webstore is the individual branded shops within the same website. It’s easy to navigate between the magazine brands by clicking the logos at the header of each page.

A solid, straightforward layout lets customers browse and buy car magazines, t-shirts books, hats, gift cards and more. You can emulate the success of this webstore by keeping your own design uncluttered, well-organised and clearly labelled.

4. Man of Many

www.shop.manofmany.com

Lifestyle site Man of Many runs on a Shopify site to sell men’s gifts, technology and cosmetics alongside its online magazine. We like the clever and seamless integration of a blogsite with a stylish shopping site that simply oozes cool. We feel more stylish simply by being there.

Why not take a leaf out of Man of Many’s book and include some helpful product guides in the form of blog posts on your webstore? Another feature that’s definitely worth copying is the ‘You May Also Like’ product suggestion engine at the bottom of each product page. It’s a classic yet easily-forgotten way of encouraging more shopping from interested buyers.

5. Sweat

www.sweat.com

It can be hard to get sign-ups for your new app, so why not do what Sweat did and create a website with payment capability to attract new users? With a bold, feminine logo and glamorous celebrity partner (Fleur East), Sweat achieves a credible and appealing online store for their fitness app.

Of course, whenever you’re asking for money from strangers you’ve got to convince users that you’re trustworthy. Fortunately, every Shopify store comes with a free SSL certificate, which adds a padlock into the URL bar and signals a secure website.

6. White Fox Boutique

www.whitefoxboutique.com.au

Every now and then we come across an ecommerce innovation that leaves us floored. This time it’s White Fox Boutique that’s got us frantically taking notes. On their women’s fashion Shopify store, you can actually shop by influencer. That means shoppers can take style inspiration straight from Instagram icons rather than a faceless  commercial enterprise.

We’re big fans of White Fox Boutique’s product pages too; options to filter by occasion, size, colour and price range may seem overwhelming but the truth is younger audiences are used to being given a lot of options. Including granular product filters can help you sell to 16-35 year-olds because of their familiarity with (and expectation of) personalised shopping journeys.

7. Lorelei Jayne

www.loreleijayne.com

DIY handicrafts are back with a bang for the 20-34 year-olds, with a love of sewing having skipped a generation since your grandma’s school days. Lorelei Jayne isn’t wasting any creative energy, boasting a beautifully floral and pastel Shopify site to sell its sewing patterns and fabrics.

One hot tip you can take from this site is the range of product images which show the many different creations which can come from a single PDF pattern. If you’re not selling similar products, you can still apply the same principle by styling and photographing a dress or shoes in a range of contexts to inspire the shopper.

8. Milkwood

www.milkwood.net

Sustainable living school Milkwood offers books and distance-learning courses online with Shopify, since moving on from teaching face-to-face workshops. There’s a few of things we love about this website. Firstly, Milkwood provides a range of contact options for the modern web user, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Does it seem informal? Perhaps. But it could lead to more enquiries and, ultimately, more sales conversions so it must be worth a try.

Secondly, customer testimonials with pictures of their faces alongside quotes are an authentic endorsement of the quality of Milkwood’s educational courses. You should seek to include customer testimonials in a visible place in order to build the best ecommerce website you possibly can.

9. Waverley Mills

www.waverleymills.com

Waverley Mills sells high-end homeware with a premium price tag. The company’s webstore is crafted to appeal to the luxury-seekers with its minimalistic sans-serif fonts, stripped-back product photography and lack of a “Sale” section. Their stylish shopping site is complemented by a snazzy blog section, with competitions for loyal brand followers.

When you’re designing your own Shopify store, you should always bear your target customer in mind and ask yourself, “How do they expect to shop for my products online?”. Those looking for high-quality items care more about textiles and product origins, so Waverley Mills has included such details in product descriptions accordingly.

10. Wild Island Co

www.wildislandco.com

When you’re selling childrenswear you’ve got a clear advantage over many other market sectors: adorable models. Wild Island Co features smiling, happy kids wearing their clothes on almost every page of the website. You can hardly help but smile back.

Feature boxes towards the bottom of the homepage emphasise the quality of the materials and design, reassuring parents that the clothing is “durable” and long-lasting. If you can seek to reassure your customers of any potential pain points they face when making purchase decisions, you’re well on your way to making more sales.

Shopify Pricing: How much does a webstore cost?

Tempted to create or upgrade a Shopify store of your own? We don’t blame you, given some of the snazzy results the above store owners have already achieved. We’ve rated and ranked the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses and Shopify comes out on top thanks to its excellent sales features.

We’ve already done a deep dive of Shopify pricing, but it can’t hurt to take a quick look over their available ecommerce price plans:

It’s good to know there’s a range of Shopify prices to suit your budget at various stages of growing your business. While Shopify isn’t as cheap as Woocommerce, its reliable sales features equip you to list products online with as much detail as you need.

How Does Shopify Compare to Competitors?

When we rated Shopify for Value for Money, it scored 3/5. That’s lower than Square, Squarespace, Wix and Woocommerce, which all scored at least 4/5 and above.

That said, Shopify scored 4.7/5 for its sales features in our independent testing. That’s higher than any of the other seven top ecommerce platforms we tested it against. So you’ll be sure of a reliable selling experience if you go with Shopify to build your online shop.

Shopify’s customer score was 4.8/5, another top category score in our comparative testing. That means customers found it easier to use and left more favourable reviews of it online compared to other ecommerce platforms.