Best 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 free 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 aspirational styling, these websites engage eyeballs and emotions in equal measure. Let’s dive into the wonderful world of Shopify example stores and see what there is to learn in design and sales conversion.

1. The Economist

www.economistdiaries.com

The success of The Economist’s online diary shop its the continuity of its branding. Using the same fire engine red across all pages for prices, accents and The Economist’s own logo reminds the web visitor where they are, what they’re looking at and what they should do next. There’s a strong sense of professionalism, authority and reliability in the consistent branding. You’d never even know it was a Shopify store because it looks bespoke. This goes to show how wide the creative scope is with Shopify’s flexible design platform.

It’s an incredibly simple website, yet it sees a “very high” volume of traffic, according to website research platform Built With. And it serves these thousands of users with a layout that’s crisp and legible. The interface is uncluttered and navigation links are easy to spot. All of these elements combine for a tasteful and low-stress shopping experience.

2. Vogue

www.shop.vogue.co.uk

Vogue’s small online store showcases its branded apparel, mainly aimed at women. Lots of smiling faces, attractive young people and perfectly curated hairstyles – as you’d expect from this iconic British fashion brand.

What you may not expect is the simplicity of its ecommerce platform: Shopify, equally accessible to small business and sole traders as it is to corporate entities such as Vogue. The excellence of this website is not solely in its professional photography, but its excellent functionality. Mouseover any image on its “Collections” page and observe a change in both the text and image itself. The interactive experience lends itself to a suave and sophisticated shopping journey.

Shopify has dedicated fashion website templates that make it really easy to put together a sophisticated online retail outlet.

3. Mous

www.uk.mous.co

Mous is a great example of Shopify’s adaptability as an ecommerce platform. As Shopify plans all include unlimited bandwidth – which Mous takes full advantage of with high-quality autoplay gifs that show how its phone cases work. Shopify also allows Mous to offer its readers verified customer reviews, with individual ratings for the customer experience, design and function of their purchases. This adds to the credibility of the products on offer – a tried-and-tested way to improve on-site conversion rate!

There’s even an online blog updated with relevant content regarding phone hardware, which adds even more value to the site experience. As ever, high-quality photography is at the absolute centre of the website’s design appeal (are you seeing a theme here?).

4. Gymshark

www.uk.gymshark.com

Fitnesswear brand Gymshark goes heavy on the photography for their retail homepage. Featuring lots of photographs of their target consumer: trendy, young people with “real” body shapes. Bucking the trend of stick-thin white-skinned models, Gymshark’s September 2022 website featured full-width imagery of confident-looking people of colour advertising their clothing. It’s the polar opposite of brands like Hollister in the early 2000s, which their millennial customer base will remember well. Who knew Shopify could be so trendy?

Like other successful retail brands in this space, the tone of voice is friendly and casual: “Sign up to emails you’ll actually read” and “[Check out the] new additions to the Adapt family”. Such quips encourage a sense of familiarity and present email sign up and product browsing as no-pressure, intriguing activities.

5. OK! Beauty Box

www.okbeautybox.co.uk

Celebrity gossip magazine OK! has joined in with the beauty subscription box craze and set up their own Shopify site to sell it. It’s a simple yet effective shopping website with tempting sales features. For instance, a message in the top left corner notifies the web user that someone has bought another subscription box. And a pop-up window appears with a discount offer if the user submits their email address.

This website shows you how easy it is to set up a professional-looking branded website adjacent to your main website. Even if you only want to sell one or two products – such as a limited-edition subscription box, in this case – a Shopify ecommerce site is a great way to achieve this.

6. Afrocenchix

www.afrocenchix.com

Winning customer trust in a crowded marketplace like women’s haircare products is no easy task. But black haircare brand Afrocenchix achieves just this by cleverly integrating Trustpilot reviews onto their product purchase pages. When thinking over whether or not to buy Afrocenchix’s pricier-than-average shampoo bottle, customers can see the green star rating from the recognised company review site. This build confidence in the quality of the product and likely encourages conversions.

A well-structured and clean catalogue interface allows web visitors to easily search by hair product type or “Concerns” including dry hair or itchy scalp. With a simple tick-box system, the product browsing experience is intuitive and easy to use. Hovering the cursor over a product bottle image reveals the colour and viscosity of the liquid inside, so customers know what they’re purchasing.

7. Penguin

www.shop.penguin.co.uk

Believe it or not, book publishing house Penguin has a Shopify store, too. This goes to show how even famous brands of the UK choose to sell through a commercial ecommerce platform instead of building an entirely bespoke web shop. A bold header bar with the Penguin logo sits atop each page, creating excellent website continuity. Fun scrolling images give exciting glimpses of beautiful books and bags available for purchase.

Penguin also includes their writing workshops for sale on this website, as well as book-related furniture, stationary and accessories. We love the bright colours, easy-to-read text and simple, bold design.

8. Mind

www.shop.mind.org.uk

It’s not just commercial enterprise that benefits from owning their own shopping websites. Mental health charity Mind has a Shopify site as a means of distributing helpful resources and merchandise.

A few simple yet effective elements such as images with quotes convey the charity’s effective work while promoting their products. The simple white and blue interface allows the visitor to easily browse items and understand where their money goes.

9. Rock Sound

www.shop.rocksound.tv

British music magazine Rock Sound boasts a beautiful Shopify store for fans and followers to buy back issues, subscriptions, posters, t-shirts and even physical records.

Rock Sound magazine has branched out from simply selling magazines to offer the Holy Grail of music fandom: merch. Though it might seem like the traditional High Street is dead, effective online stores with a targeted audience are always going to be popular among die-hard fans. Intuitive navigation buttons, a strong colour scheme and enlarged product images upon mouseover all add to the products’ appeal.

10. Public Desire

www.publicdesire.com

Fast fashion brand Public Desire appeals squarely to its millennial audience with its brightly-lit product photography, ‘like’ option on every product and Instagram feed halfway down its homepage. The Instagram integration is particularly clever because web visitors can tap or mouseover any image (modelled by a trendy young person out on the town) and buy the product directly from that window. Removing steps between “I want it!” to “I got it!” is a sure success for selling more products online.

Money-conscious shoppers will likely take advantage of the pop-up 15% off discount which jumps out at the viewer upon scrolling down the site. With conversion rates of website visitors to paying customers at around 4.4% in 2021, you’ll want to do all you can to entice curious customers.

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. In fact, when it comes to Wix vs Shopify, the latter had a higher customer score (4.8/5 versus 4.2/5) meaning users preferred using it over Wix.

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.

Interested in more Shopify comparisons? We’ve written a guide to the best Shopify alternatives to help you shop around.