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. Staples

www.staples.ca

Retailing laptops and stationery, Staples indeed uses Shopify to run their online Canadian store. Supplying essentials for businesses, school children, small business leaders and everyone with a penchant for colour-coding their notes.

The Staples website is cleanly structured with a carefully planned layout. Grey and white boxes contain accents of bold red, highlighting their offers for online shoppers. The graphic illustrations are cleverly paired with sans-serif font so the ‘FREE next-day delivery’, and ‘FREE in-store pickup’ offers are impossible to miss. This is great branding – which you should aim to mimic on your own online store.

2. Canada Pooch

www.ca.canadapooch.com

Dog booties and matching fanny packs – ecommerce really doesn’t get much cuter than this. In the competitive world of pet supplies, Canada Pooch stands out from the pack with image-heavy web design that tugs on the heartstrings. Dog models abound, instantly connecting with dog lovers who land on their site. Product purchase pages have auto-play videos showcasing the adorable accessories in action.

Best of all, Canada Pooch has included ‘trust signals’ right at the top of their website. These include logos of New York Magazine,  Forbes and NBC’s Today Show, highlighting how widely featured their brand is. We love to see this because it’s a highly effective psychological tactic to increase the viewer’s willingness to purchase from your brand.

3. Viola Grace

www.violagrace.shop

Viola Grace, a gift wrap company, has its website aesthetic tied up with a bow. Well-lit, professional product photos ensure all their products are easy to view and compare directly with one another. Any of the best ecommerce platforms should ensure their goods are clearly showcased, like Shopify does here.

The friendly, conversational tone of the headings on the page such as ‘Going to a themed party?’ add to the friendly, welcoming feel of the webstore. Shopping is a breezy, colourful adventure thanks to the simple, intuitive layout centered on large images.

4. WEVE

www.weve.ca

WEVE is an independent homeware store with a passion for sustainable toys and premium homeware. Originally a brick and mortar store, WEVE has expanded with Shopify to sell a wider range of goods in lifestyle, home fragrance, early years products, and outdoor living.

We like their relaxing colour scheme, and soft animation on the dropdown category selection tabs. The muted creams and greens remind us of cosy, natural comfort, reflecting the atmosphere WEVE’s creators strive to create in their physical store.

5. Altitude Sports

www.altitude-sports.com

The Altitude Sports webstore gets straight to the point with a kaleidoscopic flatlay photo of its youthful outdoor apparel. There’s no mistaking the target market of this brand: a mixture of ethnically mixed and gender-diverse models, alongside classic product photography, which makes a memorable style statement.

Unusually half-lit and blurred photography makes Altitude Sports seem half fashion blog and half online store. When creating your own online store, you’d do well to represent your target audience and reflect their tastes in your web design choices.

6. Olsen

www.olsen.ca

Olsen is the European-inspired womenswear brand with a global presence. Their ‘About us’ page is black and white to contrast with the full colour product images on its clothing category pages.

What we love most about Olsen’s website is its responsive design which adapts to on-screen window size. No matter which device you fancy browsing their collection on, Olsen’s online store looks crisp and cheerful.

7. Log Furniture and More

www.logfurnitureandmore.ca

Log Furniture and More is a neat and tidy website optimized for SEO. What does that mean? Each page is well-structured with accurate headings, relevant images and important keywords that describe the products in each section.

All of these features may seem obvious or even insignificant, however, they are extremely important to help your webstore appear high up on Google’s search engine results pages. That means new customers can find you if they search for a product you may sell.

8. Timberware

www.timberware.ca

Ottawa-based Timberware is a carpentry workshop producing handcrafted wooden furniture. As such, all their work is done by hand and machine. Timeberware’s website emphasizes the handicraft nature of their product creation with photographs and videos of these processes at the very top of the homepage. Imagery focuses on hands and people to drive this point home.

While a wide range of payment options are available on Timberware’s website, the business is in-store first and limits the number of products available for sale online. To this end, the address, opening times and travel directions to the physical store are clearly displayed in the bottom banner of each page.

9. Genuine Health

www.genuinehealth.ca

Genuine Health, a health supplement store, evokes an uplifting ambience of on their website with its clean, crisp edges. A white background, sans-serif fonts, accented with green and blue colours that remind us of fresh grass, vegetables and rivers – the viewer feels at ease in this natural and healthy environment. Large font size is extremely important for older or visually-impaired web visitors.

A handy drop-down list of product categories each creates its own atmosphere of joy (‘Stress & Mental Health’) or peace (‘Sleep’), using vivid photography. Such aspirational imagery is common for health brands. Yet it brings the products to life, and encourages the viewer to envision their new and improved lifestyle once they purchase what’s on offer.

10. IT Factory

www.itfactory.ca

Computer hardware and software technology supplier, ITFactory strives to be a reliable online retailer, delivering downloadable products in an instant. Respecting the importance of customer testimonials, ITFactory includes a section to view their reviews in the toolbar at the top of every page.

They make it easy to browse products by category by matching design with functionality. This is the only way to create the best website: ensure all design choices aid user experience (UX) so that products are easy to find and buy. ITFactory achieves this through a row of circles containing a title and image of each major product category. Simple, yet effective.

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. So if you’re after a good-looking website that’s not so harsh on your small business budget, check out our deep-dive on Wix pricing to see whether there’s a better offer out there for you.

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.