Creating an online store has been hot in recent years. More and more cross-border sellers are participating in the wave. They are affected by the epidemic and e-commerce platform policies and rules are changing, many platform sellers have also begun to choose to open another window of “independent stations”.
Everything is difficult at the beginning. Unlike retailer platforms, in order to build an online store, it requires sellers to build their own websites, which has been a headache for sellers. Basically, sellers will go for one of the following three solutions to build their websites.
First one, Software as a solution. Sellers create their online shopping websites on an e-commerce platform that integrate with social networking, post products, shopping cart and payment features.
Sellers are allowed to design the website interface with templates. In other words, these softwares/solutions serve as hosts to sellers’ stores that support sellers to create and launch their stores. You may know some of these platforms. ShopBase, Shopify, XShoppy, Shoplazza, etc.
Some solution providers give out source codes that the sellers can build up on. Woocommerce, Magento, WordPress, and OpenCart are these providers that give more flexibility over design and features.
The last solution is to start from scratch, which requires full knowledge of coding or HTML.
For most cross-border sellers, SaaS website construction is the most preferred, because it saves time and effort and can focus on operations. While interface is an important part of building your stores, you will want to put some effort into it. Here is a list of top Shopify stores that you can use as an inspiration to build yours.
New York Times Store
The New York Times store is one of the most prestigious stores in the United States, and almost every single person in the US knows about the Times. They’re using Shopify, which is a clear proof that Shopify is endorsed by the great brands and is a one-stop solution for setting up an eCommerce store.
The New York Times store contains the items that are specially designed for the Times fans such as Apparels, Books, Puzzles, Personalized items, Gifts, Photographs, and much more.
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RiPndip:
RIPNDIP is one of the most creative types of stores that are present on the internet, starting from the unified animated logo, which looks cute and gives an attractive look to the website. The store also contains a video on the front page. If we look at the navigation, it’s minimalistic and clean as well.
Looks Like Summer
Looks Like Summer (LLS) is a Portugal based store built on the platform of Shopify. The store is all about the collection of the women’s summer collection.
The feminine design of the store adds to its attractiveness. One of the great features that they are using with their Shopify store is the use of email marketing, as you can see their email Newsletter popup in the image below.
Email marketing is one of the essentials of promoting a business online, and Shopify surely facilitates in this.
Puravida
Puravida is another great store built on Shopify. Founded by two Southern California friends Griffin Thall and Paul Goodman, the business was established to appreciate the crafts created by artisans.
If we look at the store’s design and look, it appeals to the eyes. Another great thing that the store contains is the clickable icons of all their social media platforms exactly on the home page, which is an excellent way to convert visitors into fans.
Fashion Nova
Fashion Nova is one of the finest brands related to fashion. The brand received the title of the most searched fashion brand name on google in 2018. Apart from its alluring layout, the store offers a great way to capture leads with the help of entry popup offering discounts.
If you’re thinking of starting an online fashion store, you can surely give it a look.
Color Pop
Beauty products certainly need a great showcase, and Shopify offers every functionality to build a great online showcase of the products. Color Pop is a store that specializes in beauty products of various types, and the design of the store reflects it.
If you look at the footer, there is a page for privacy requests, where users can request the store owner not to use their details for advertising or any type of marketing. This is a great way to build the trust of your customers.
Tools To Help You Enhance Your Shopify Store
Previously, we have discussed why Shopify is a great platform for creating an eCommerce website. Also, we have looked into some of the inspirational Shopify stores to get an idea of the design and features. Doing all the things from designing images to developing a custom theme is a tiresome chore, that’s the so reason we are presenting you some of the tools that you can use to make the process easier.
FindNiche
FindNiche is one of the most astonishing tools in the eCommerce industry with a massive database of more than six million Aliexpress products, 27k+ Niches, and more than 700k Shopify stores. All this data can be accessed for free. Let’s discuss some of the benefits that we can get by using this tool.
The database of FindNiche contains hundreds of thousands of Shopify stores, which is a great way to find inspiration for building a Shopify store based on your selected Niche. Put in your desired search query, select the country and category, and boom! Thousands of highly relevant stores will be waiting for your visit.
If you have not started the eCommerce business yet and you’re confused about which is the perfect Niche for a profitable store, FindNiche can help you here as well. Based on a powerful database with robust search and filters, you can surely find a great niche to get started.
Apart from providing inspiration for stores and finding the Niches, the tool can also help in finding the winning products if you’re going to start a dropshipping business. All you need is to enter your keyword, and the tool will help you in finding the best products for your dropshipping store.
Filters are available to narrow down the search results such as category, top countries, number of orders, selling price, shipping country, top brands, containing videos, or the availability of PayPal payment method.
Glorify
Glorify is a tool that can help you in creating stunningly wonderful images for your products. You must have heard about that all in one design creation tool Canva, which no doubt is one of the very best tools in the industry but when it comes to eCommerce, Glorify is surely at the top and its because of the very obvious reason that the tool is build for the sole purpose of designing for the eCommerce businesses.
When it comes to designing for a product, the background matters a lot. With Glorify, you can remove the background in the matter of a few clicks because the app uses artificial intelligence to detect the background based on your defined markers. You can then add effects (shadows, etc.) to your object with a transparent background.
The tool also contains a built-in logo maker that can help in creating your desired logo within a few clicks, thanks to artificial intelligence. Although you’ll not get a creatively crafted professional logo, still, this logo can help you with getting started. The tool also recommends brand colors.
You can add annotations to a product, use the templates to craft the product images, smartly resize the product, and do a lot of other design-related stuff with the tool. Why not give it a try?
Concluding Remarks
In the above examples of the top Shopify stores, we have seen that the design plays a vital role in an eCommerce business. It’s pretty evident that people are more likely to buy from a store which has an appealing layout. Given this, we can say that the Shopify store’s theme plays a vital role in the conversion of visitors to customers.
There are thousands of Shopify themes in the market, some of them are quite great, and some are just average. To find the best theme that makes the conversions happen, we surely need to do thorough research and listen to the reviews of other people who have already used that template. Theme Forest is one such market place where you can find tons of themes.
You can search for your desired keyword, such as “Fashion” to find out the themes that are built for that purpose. Once you have got the search results, you can click on each of them one by one and look at their preview and reviews of past buyers.
You’ll surely get an idea which theme will work best for your store. The price of the templates is also very affordable, which makes Theme Forest one of the most suitable market places to find a good template in reasonable price.
We hope that this article has helped you in clearing the mind about choosing the design and building your new Shopify store. If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments section.
