At Shopify alone, there are more than 4 million live stores which create high competition in the industry, so it is crucial to know what makes one Shopify store better than the rest.
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or simply looking for inspiration, we've curated a list of 18 best Shopify store designs to look at in 2023.
From sustainable footwear to modular 3D educational tools, these stores have successful businesses and visually appealing website designs that inspire you to create your own stunning eCommerce store.
Best Shopify stores for clothing and fashion
1. Allbirds
Allbirds is a sustainable footwear business that creates sneakers and shoes from eco-friendly materials such as merino wool and eucalyptus tree fiber. They have gained a loyal following of customers who appreciate its sustainable and comfortable shoes. Allbirds has expanded beyond footwear and now offers a broader range of apparel products, including t-shirts, sweaters, and underwear.
To reinforce the product offerings, Allbirds' minimalist store design emphasizes their sustainability commitment. The entire website is clean and sleek, with a neutral color palette and super high-quality product images to highlight the natural materials used in their products.
On the home page, the most special thing is the mix of simple background and colorful sneakers, which effectively drives customer attention to the products. Moreover, the website layout is also designed to fully deliver essential information, including highlighted products, products on sale, product collections, and brand story. As a result, shoppers just need to scroll down and click on what they want to explore more, which minimizes their efforts in the shopping process.
Allbird website is a perfect Shopify store example if you want to design your own store. There are many things you can learn from its design, including color, layout, photography, etc. But the most worth learning is the contrast between colorful products and the simple layout, which minimizes needless information and attracts more customer attention to products to aim for a higher conversion rate.
However, although Allbirds defines themselves as a sustainable footwear and clothing brand, the home page focuses more on showing off sneakers than clothing items. This missing point could sometimes make customers confused about Allbirds’ product offerings and forget about the brand’s great clothes. Instead, they could spend more space on the home page to introduce some popular clothing and still remain focused on sneakers. By doing so, customers will have Allbirds’ clothing products in mind, and their chances of purchasing those products will be higher.
2. Hiut Denim
Hiut Denim specializes in premium quality jeans made in the UK. Its business is built around creating sustainable and durable denim products that are meant to last for years rather than following the fast fashion trends of disposable clothing.
There are multiple Shopify stores about denim products out there, in which Hiut Denim is featured with a simple design and a focus on showcasing product categories and craftsmanship. The brand also demonstrates its value of sustainability to visitors through the use of static natural images and deep colors on many pages.
The website impresses shoppers with high-quality images. The use of text is kept minimized with purely product categories such as Shorts, Men, Women, etc. The combination of airy images and single words has removed unnecessary details, shifting shoppers’ attention to product collections, which encourages them to explore products in detail.
Being simple and effective at the same time is what anyone needs in creating a Shopify store. We should learn it from Hiut Denim. Their website design does not contain any complicated section, they just use simple ones to be straightforward in showing brand values and driving customer curiosity on products.
3. Gymshark
Gymshark is one of the most successful Shopify store examples that provide fitness apparel and accessories. Gymshark's products are both functional and fashionable, catering to the needs of fitness enthusiasts around the world.
The Gymshark website is engaging and energetic, with bold images and bright colors that create an atmosphere of motivation and inspiration. The brand also expresses its diversity by showing different models with different skin colors in the same image.
The first impressive thing about Gymshark online store is the minimal header with a mega menu inside, making it easy for shoppers to take an overall look at Gymshark’s product offerings. Furthermore, the brand optimizes a lot of Shopify elements including images, video, text, CTA buttons, etc. to show the diverse functionality of gymwear products and help shoppers quickly find and click to the products or product collections they want to purchase.
For creating a Shopify store, everyone should learn to design an aesthetic mega menu like Gymshark - by showing organized web pages with featured images to capture shoppers’ attention instantly the moment they see it. However, it is noticeable that mega menus work best for mega stores, which offer high volume products.
It is worth mentioning that mixing multiple elements in one single page like Gymshark is quite risky. If the design is too ambitious in adding details without optimizing the overall look, it can lead to overloaded information. Therefore, shoppers may face difficult shopping experiences and reduce the likelihood of purchasing.
Best Shopify stores for jewelry and accessories
4. Lúdere
Lúdere is a Shopify store that sells jewelry by artist & designer Arielle Zella on a mission to inspire individuals to embrace their authenticity and to live life as a play. Therefore, Lúdere jewelry is always differentiated from others with creative and unique shape, color, and size designs.
Powered by Zest theme on Shopify, Lúdere is highly aesthetic, given its elegant style and bright tone. Its photography and typography are whimsically creative, which deliver a sense of freshness and liberty.
The significance of Lúdere online store is that they optimize multiple Shopify sections to the highest level of appeal: the product slider section now showcases multiple images, the video section has been upgraded to have a simplified CTA link, etc.
Among multiple shopify stores in jewelry, the Lúdere website is a harmonious combination of elegant content, gorgeous visuals, and lean transitions. It is not easy to see any possible improvement in this website. However, if there is any, it would be the text content. Instead of using text to only express brand values and stories, Lúdere could consider mentioning product benefits in paragraphs. Doing such a thing will make customers feel more pleased and engaged with the brand in general and with the product in particular.
There is no doubt that Lúdere is an inspiring Shopify store example to explore for those who are looking for beautifully-crafted jewelry with a conscience. Among all the nice things about Lúdere Shopify store, the great thing that every store should learn is flexibility. Although Lúdere uses many general sections, they utilize Zest theme to customize sections and achieve a stunning look, which impresses customers better and possibly acquires a higher conversion rate.
5. Pura Vida Bracelets
Among many Shopify store examples, Pura Vida Bracelets is a must-mention name in the jewelry industry because of its product diversity. Pura Vida sells a wide range of handcrafted bracelets made by artisans from around the world. This business not only satisfies customers who love beautiful little sparkles but also delivers extreme support and encouragement to local artisans and their communities.
Pura Vida has a fun and colorful website design that reflects the brand's positive and energetic vibe. The Pura Vida website displays visuals of the ocean, sand, fruits, tanned happy people, and more, which links to the trait of freedom on vacation.
The Shopify store of Pura Vida features multiple visuals showcasing products, people, community, and nature, making shoppers deeply dive into their spirit. Indirectly, it helps the brand increase shoppers' retention and conversion rate.
More than that, Pura Vida knows the importance of upsells and has added a small section named “Bundle + Save” on the home page to show some product packs, which definitely leads to a positive impact on Average Order Value. However, if Pura Vida makes this section bigger, and better highlighted with catchy CTAs, the result would definitely be more impressive.
6. MVMT Watches
Many adults want to own well-made watches, but dropping thousands of dollars for one might be overwhelming. This is the market gap that MVMT has successfully filled by providing high-quality watches with minimalist designs at reasonable prices.
Unlike many other watches brands, the MVMT website doesn’t establish a luxury and mysterious online presence. Instead, MVMT uses Shopify to develop a modern style that reflects the brand's focus on simplicity and elegance.
MVMT is another Shopify store example of using top-notch photography with modern and classy style. Every image is edited in a deep color tone with the bright products at the center position, which instantly drives customer attention to products and inspires them to explore. Moreover, they optimize text content by crafting concise sentences with a straightforward tone, adding promotional CTAs where needed.
On the other hand, we believe there is something that MVMT online store can do better. We will say it: it has too many pop-ups, which could seriously kill the buzz of customers’ shopping experience. To be more specific, when you first access the website, there are 2 pop-ups; in which the first one asks you to choose the shipping country, and the second one lets you know about the current promotional program. These pop-ups disrupt the shopping process. Instead, MVMT can consider removing the promotional pop-up and adding it directly to the website’s hero section or announcement bar. This will reduce the disruption while still inform customers about the brand promotion effectively.
MVMT is one of the best Shopify store examples that teaches us how to optimize text content for an elegant look with high conversion rates. The website is strongly minimalist, with reduced text content with the exception of promoting sales or deals.
Best Shopify stores for beauty and health
7. Kylie Cosmetics
This Shopify store is a business of Kylie Jenner, where she sells various beauty products, including makeup and skincare. The brand aims to provide unique and trendy beauty products that are affordable, inclusive, and accessible to everyone.
Kylie Cosmetics website is eye-catching, with the main color palette of white and pink, visuals of stunning models, and marvelous product images. The website not only shows the product but also clarifies them in real usage to provide customers with the most objective viewpoints.
However, what makes Kylie Cosmetics stand out in the market is social proof. Given Kylie is one of the top celebrities and influencers, she often features as the model and consumer of the products. To optimize her social proof, the brand's website includes a large section "Shop Our Feed", in which Kylie has provided some real videos about her using products. Since Kylie is a top influencer and video is often trusted more than just photos, this technique is an effective way to spread testimonials to shoppers.
Another point about Kylie Cosmetics is the use of pink color throughout the website. On one hand, this will boost brand presence. Whenever mentioning Kylie Cosmetics, they will think about the pink color, which is tied to a sense of beauty and aesthetics. On the other hand, since every section is pink, there is no highlighted section to actually drive customer attention to, which reduces the impact of big sections such as images with text and testimonials. To overcome this limitation, Kylie Cosmetics should paint a significant section with a contrast color (such as black) to create a better eye break and design effect, which eventually captures shoppers’ eyes.
One of the most excellent ways to build trust for business is using video testimonials like Kylie cosmetics. Video format is usually regarded as more authentic, more trustworthy, and more dynamic, which converts customers better. This is also a thing you should try when creating a Shopify store.
8. Beardbrand
Maintaining facial hair can be a daunting task. Thankfully, Beardbrand has come to help by providing bundles of multi-use oil, spray, wash, and wax mixing with needed tools and gear. Shoppers can quickly build their bundles by following their basic steps, which are easy and fun to do.
The Beardbrand website has a simple and stylish design that guides customers through its story: from past to present, and from problem to solution. The entire website is a harmonious blend of multiple colors, including black, gray, brown, green, and purple, to create a modern vibe for the brand.
The most impressive thing about Beardbrand website must be its text content, which is lengthy but not tedious at all. In detail, the paragraphs do not mention themselves but customers’ pain points and their solutions, aka Beardbrand products. This writing style engages the shoppers' needs and emotions directly, which make them read and understand the products with more enthusiasm.
Besides, Beardbrand online store is designed with many other Shopify sections including images with text, video, testimonials to catch customer attention and build trust more efficiently.
However, some sections are oversimplified without being utilized to their full potential. For example, testimonials are merely expressed with text, which can be easily overlooked. Beardbrand can integrate testimonials with some real images and videos to be more interesting and trustworthy.
The valuable lesson in creating a Shopify store from Beardbrand is how to craft text on websites to actually involve customers into the content. By having a customer-centric mindset and merging customer needs with brand offerings, the entire website content would be more attractive, then encourage customers to explore more about the products, and result in more sales.
9. Prodrome Sciences
Have you ever heard of plasmalogens? They are essential molecules for the cells in our bodies. However, as we increase in age, these cells decrease in quantity.
Understanding the negative impacts of lacking plasmalogens, Prodrome Sciences is a cutting-edge health sciences company specializing in developing plasmalogen-based products, including oil, pill, soft gels, test kit, etc.
A special thing about Prodrome Sciences’ website visual is the use of two primary colors: white and red, in which white represents a clean and sterile environment, while red expresses a sense of urgency. This color combination is not only eye-catching but also partly shows the business traits in the field of health-conscious industry.
However, for healthcare products, presenting benefits to customers is way more important than just a nice look. Prodrome Sciences understands this well and uses Zest theme as the core builder to craft engaging storytelling visuals. The brand uses multiple images with text sections, then customize them to showcase the importance of plasmalogens products, given the flexibility of Zest.
Although the overall design and content of Prodrome Sciences’ online store are good, it is noticeable that it lacks testimonials. No matter how hard the brand educates visitors about plasmalogen, those efforts would be wasted if they can not convert people to purchase products. And one of the easiest and quickest ways to convert them is through real testimonials. If the brand can add customer reviews with some real images or videos, sales would grow remarkably.
Wrapping up
In conclusion, this first part of our list of the best Shopify store examples to look at in 2023 showcases the diverse and innovative range of businesses thriving on this eCommerce platform. From sustainable fashion to health supplements, each store offers a unique value proposition and outstanding website design. The use of customized design, intuitive navigation, beautiful imagery, and engaging storytelling are just a few examples of the common elements that make these stores stand out. If you are struggling in creating a Shopify store that is as good as these examples, you may want to give the Zest theme a try!
Still need more references from awesome Shopify store designs? Let's check out the part 2 of our list, which will continue to highlight the best of the best in Shopify stores in other industries including food and drink, homeware and cookware, etc.
