Shopify Website Design - Complete Guidance by EcomHeroes

If you have questions about Shopify website design, you are at the right place.

Shopify website design for an e-commerce business is the best platform to start.

Shopify is a Canadian-based multinational e-commerce platform, or we can say a retail point-of-sale system that retailers can use to build their personalized online retail store. According to Shopify 1,700,000 businesses are using the Shopify platform from more than 175 countries. According to W3Tech, 4.4% of the top 10 million websites are using Shopify. We cover almost everything in this article to answer your questions about Shopify. We try to give you precise information on the benefits of using Shopify for e-commerce website design and make you aware of the limitations of Shopify.

Why is Shopify Website Design For an Ecommerce Business?

Why did Shopify become the first choice to start an e-commerce business? Here are the advantages of Shopify website design for e-commerce businesses.

Fast and easy to set up

You don't need any technical skills and coding knowledge to set up a basic Shopify website or store. You can set up the store with the help of the Shopify website setup guide available online. Hence you don't need to write a single line code this makes your store set up faster and more adaptable. Setting up a store on your own saves money, which you can spend on marketing or growing your business.

Fast and secure payments

Secure payment transactions are the priority for any e-commerce store in terms of buyers. It helps you to build your brand and customer base. Shopify is highly secure your buyer money is protected and safe from online fraud and cyber attacks. Shopify's fast page loading speed allows every transaction to be done without any glitches. Shopify has an inbuilt speed checker that enables the buyer to complete payments at a nominal speed.

Thousands of apps

Shopify app store has thousands of apps to add to your Shopify store. These apps allow you to add advanced functionality, boost sales, track marketing campaigns, increase conversion rate, help in upselling, cross-selling, manage to ship, manage drop shipping, and more. You have the option to choose a suitable app from hundreds of apps to add a single functionality.

24/7 customer support

Another reason to choose the Shopify platform is 24/7 customer support. You will get an instant reply from the support team. It means your business never gets interrupted. It's easy to contact the support engineer with a chat option. You can also contact them through mail and phone. In addition, you can join ask online communities and forums managed by Shopify to get the answer to your questions.

Abandoned cart recovery

According to data online, there is two third of potential customers leave after they add products to the cart. To resolve this Shopify comes with an inbuilt software that recognizes the abandoned cart and automatically shoots mail to remind the complete purchase. This feature makes Shopify the most suitable platform for e-commerce stores for retailers.

Own payment gateway solution

Shopify comes with dozens of own payment gateway solutions that allow you to receive payments from buyers from any country without any transaction fee. You never need to create a merchant account to start your online business. All these payment gateways are secure to use and PCI DSS compliant. So the data of users are not at risk and also builds customers' trust.

What is Shopify?

What Shopify is all about?Shopify is a software-as-a-service or SaaS model providing online software as services on a subscription basis to retailers. So they can build an online store or POS to sell products digitally.

Is Shopify e-commerce website design software?

Yes, It is an online platform to rediscover the design and development of e-commerce websites. Retailers can create an e-store, list products, market them, and make money with it. As Shopify is a SaaS, so the headache of hosting your eCommerce website is not a problem.

You can use the Shopify platform after buying its different plans such as Basic, Shopify, and Advanced on a monthly or yearly basis. After the purchase of a plan, you will get access to an admin panel from which you can set up a store using a theme or custom code, create pages(collection page or product page), add products, install payment apps, and start selling.

What is an eCommerce platform?

Shopify is also an eCommerce platform. An ecommerce platform is a web-based software application for retailers who want to sell their products online. Retailers can make online retail stores with no tech and codding skills, by just selecting, clicking, and following the simple steps. E-commerce platforms are where buyers come, browse products, buy, and pay online.

Can I use my own domain with Shopify?

Yes, you can use your own domain with Shopify. Sometimes people get confused that they can use the domain that they have already purchased with a platform like Shopify because Shopify hosts websites on its own cloud servers. So you must host your domain on their servers but not necessary to use the domain by them.

Shopify stats

Yes, you can use your own domain with Shopify.
  1. Shopify is the most widespread e-commerce platform globally, with a 23% market share in the U.S.
  2. Millions of businesses have made $496 billion in sales using Shopify
  3. Shopify covers nearly 11 percent of all e-commerce market shares
  4. Shopify is available in more than 175 countries
  5. Over 50 percent of Shopify stores get a repeat purchase

Shopify is free?

No, Shopify is not free. But still, you can get it free for 14 days by choosing 14 days free trial. In the trial pack, you allow to set up a store and publish online to make the sales.
However, to run your business without any interruption after the end of 14 days trial you need to purchase its paid plans as follows:
  1. Basic (29USD / mo)
  2. Shopify (79USD / mo)
  3. Advanced (299USD / mo)

What programing language is Shopify built on?

Shopify is built with Ruby on Rails as its core development language. Because of Tobu Lutke, a Ruby on Rails developer and co-founder of Shopify. Shopify also has components based on JavaScript, MySQL as the database, and PHP used in liquid code files.

What does Shopify do?

Shopify is a self-hosted software, so you don't need a hosting solution to use this software. Basically Shopify a subscription-based SaaS where users can build their own custom e-commerce website.
You can build e-commerce websites from scratch. It doesn't matter that you are a coder or a non-tech person you can create a ready-to-sell products website faster than any other platform.
Shopify is not only about Showing products but also a platform for engaging with customers, accepting payments, monitoring shipments, growing customer base, running marketing campaigns, and more.
With the power of third-party tools, you can manage everything in a single place.

Biggest Companies that Use Shopify?

Some of the biggest companies or brands that are using Shopify are:
  1. KKW Beauty - Market value: $1 billion
  2. Kylie Cosmetics - Market value: $1.2 billion
  3. Fitbit - Market value: $2.1 billion
  4. Hyatt Hotels Corp - Market cap: $8.35 billion
  5. Red Bull GmbH - Market value: $12 billion
  6. Whole Foods Market - Market value: $13.7 billion
  7. Lindt & Spruengli - Market cap: $21.9 billion
  8. Kraft Heinz Co. - Market cap: $49.7 billion

Pros and Cons of Shopify

Every software has some pros and cons, and Shopify has too. We list the pros and cons that you should know before choosing Shopify as your e-commerce website builder.
Pros of Shopify
  1. Easy to use and set up.
  2. Hundreds of fully responsive templates free and paid.
  3. Abandoned cart recovery feature to maximize the sale.
  4. One of the best options for a dropshipping business.
  5. Automatically tax calculation tools for every country.
  6. Highly competitive plans to use.
  7. Available in 175 countries.
  8. Numbers of free tools to make your business journey easy.
  9. Support trade in multi currency and cryptocurrency.
  10. Addons for search engine optimization.
  11. Exceptional third-party apps to build AMP product pages.
  12. Zero transaction fee when you use the Shopify payment solution, Shopify Payments.
  13. Tools to boost social media marketing and branding.
  14. Free and paid tools to send notifications, messages, and mails.
  15. Advanced options for monitoring sales, tracking buyers, and analyzing reports.
Cons of Shopify
  1. To add advanced features, purchase third-party apps or an Advanced Shopify plan.
  2. There is a transaction fee when you use third-party payment gateways.
  3. You will need a Shopify developer to add custom fields to the store that cost you as per the developer charge.
  4. Advanced reporting functionality comes only with the advanced plan.

Shopify Website Design Services -

When you need a Shopify store for your business, you need to hire Shopify store design services or a freelance Shopify web designer to build your Shopify website. The hiring of a freelance Shopify web designer or Shopify store design agency depends on your requirement. Hire a freelancer to build a website with a template costs you between 500-600 USD, but for a custom website, you should hire a Shopify web design agency which cost you around $1500. Some key factors will affect your project scope in terms of pricing, delivery date, quality, features, and more. You can choose Shopify custom website design development or Shopify theme customization option to get ready your Shopify.

Custom Shopify website design -

Custom Shopify website design includes creating a Shopify website with custom code according to the customers' requirements. When the customer does not find any of the prebuild themes appropriate for the project and the requirements are advanced then custom store development is the best option. Hire Shopify website designers for custom Shopify store development from our platform EcomHeroes, we have a team of skilled Shopify designers that built advanced, robust, customer-centric, and search engine-friendly Shopify websites.

Shopify theme development and customization -

Shopify theme development and customization service to create a store with prebuild theme or custom theme. Shopify has hundreds of free and paid themes to choose from. You can use any theme for your website design. Hire a Shopify web designer to customize your theme or for the development of a custom theme.

Other Shopify website design services

Our services are not limited to Shopify website design, theme development, and customization. We also offer other popular Shopify services as below:

Shopify eCommerce Development

Our years of experience in Shopify eCommerce development enable us to create a perfect Shopify store compliant with specific industry needs, business requirements, and customer base. We focus on creating an intuitive and customer-centric store. Along with pre-build Shopify features and functionalities, we write code to add additional personalized functionalities to your store.

Custom Shopify Development

Our Shopify developers tailored custom Shopify stores for those who need a unique Shopify business website. Because there are only hundreds of themes and millions of businesses using them.Our custom Shopify solutions include custom theme development and custom Shopify development for brands who want to stand out from the league of competition from others. Custom Shopify development helps your branding.

Shopify Integration

We offer a Shopify integration service to add third-party apps to your Shopify store. Our developers have expertise in integrating third-party payment APIs, forms, add-on functionality, features, shipping software, and other software to better your store for buyers and you. Our team of Shopify developers helps you excel at an integration initiative of any kind with a dedicated integration solution tailored to your explicit context and objectives.

Shopify Migration

We offer Shopify migration from other e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, Wix, BigCommerce, Drupal, etc. No loss of your precious data is guaranteed. Our experts handle all this easily, and your brand does not get any hassle.

Shopify Support and Maintenance Services

You can hire us for even small tasks and tweaks. We have listed more than 170 small Shopify predefined tasks on our website. You can browse and buy with just one click. We also provide service support and maintenance services for existing Shopify stores.

Shopify Expert Services

EcomHeroes offer Shopify expert services for all type of Shopify design, development, and customization tasks. You can hire Shopify experts on flexible time modules such as hourly, weekly, or project basis. Our Shopify experts have hands-on Shopify design and development experience.

What is the difference between custom Shopify store design and Shopify theme customization?

Custom Shopify store design and development is building a Shopify store from scratch using custom code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, etc.) according to the clients' requirements. Whereas Shopify theme customization is adjusting prebuild theme settings, changing the theme color, and images, adding, editing, and removing content. Custom Shopify store development is costlier compared to the Shopify theme customization. Often you have to pay 4x the cost for the custom Shopify store design, and it needs lots of time, resources, and expertise. It totally depends on your requirements, business, and goals.

Shopify theme customization and development process

We keep the process very simple yet effective with agile methodology. We continuously improve the development with real-time feedback from you with high productivity.

Steps for Shopify theme customization and development:

  1. Project Requirement
  2. Business Analysis
  3. UI/UX Design & Development
  4. Testing & Quality Assurance
  5. Support & Maintenance

Why We Are The Best Shopify Website Design Agency?

The best Shopify website design agency not only builds the Shopify website but builds the store that generates high revenue, and maximizes sales. EcomHeroes is the best Shopify website design agency that builds highly optimized and based on data-driven Shopify stores which maximize your revenue. We design the Shopify store to be unique and easy to use for your customers.
We are specialized and only focus on the Shopify website design and development. So, when you choose us as your Shopify website design company, we ensure 100% satisfaction is guaranteed.
You don't know how to hire a Shopify expert. Here are some questions that help you to hire the best.
How to hire a Shopify expert or web design agency?

#1 Find the Shopify experts or agencies -

The process of hiring a Shopify expert or agency starts with finding experts through search engines, asking for a reference, or visiting freelance platforms.
You can also find Shopify experts on Shopify's official website. Search on search engine with appropriate query browse and visit the best results. If you have friends and contacts that have already worked with any Shopify expert or agency you can ask them too.

#2 Check do they have the required skill sets

The second step in this process is checking the skill sets of experts or agencies to be hired. To check skillsets visit their profiles or website in the case of an agency. You can check their experience, using tools, coding skills, expertise, knowledge about the Shopify platform, current technology, etc.

#3 Look at the previous projects and portfolios

At this stage, you have a pile of Shopify experts or agencies. The next important step is to look at the previous projects done by the expert or company. Examine their previous work with more attention, and observe the unique approach of every expert. Check website aesthetic, UX/UI, usability, functionality, and overall potential.
You can also filter out the experts or agencies who have never done a project in your niche or industry. Because when you choose the expert who has already developed the websites for the industry in which you are, that makes your communication very easy, productive, and effective.

#4 Talk to the past clients

It sounds quite awkward, but if you manage to contact and talk to the past clients. You can ask some question as follow:
  1. What was it like working with the expert?
  2. Was the expert or agency able to meet deadlines?
  3. How much did the expert or agency charge you for the project?
  4. How is your Shopify website functioning? Would you credit the designer for an uptick in leads or sales?
Keep in mind that the respective expert or agency is not at fault for any negative experience every time.

#5 Meet the shortlisted candidates and communicate properly

The most important thing is to communicate properly with the selected candidate. Discuss all your vision and project scope clearly. So the candidate can quote you the right price and deadline.
Aks twice or thrice or more times if you do not get the things clear. Also, ask the other important questions about revision, feedback, support, maintenance, hidden charges, etc.
This is the final step for hiring a Shopify expert or web design agency.

Shopify Experts Near Me

Another way to hire a Shopify expert is to go and search 'Shopify experts near me' you will find the best Shopify designers, developers, and experts near your location. This search query helps you find a developer in your neck of the woods.

Is hiring a Shopify expert nearby beneficial?

Hiring a Shopify expert from a nearby location is beneficial. You can meet them in real to discuss the project scope, verify them, and do a background check.

Why Hire Us As Your Shopify Website Design Agency?

Are you looking for a Shopify website design agency? Then here are the best reasons you should hire us as your Shopify website design company.

All we do is Shopify

We have been working since 2015 for Shopify based business owners. We provide solutions for only Shopify based businesses. It makes us the best in business compared to companies that work on multiple technologies. We have deep knowledge, understanding, and experience in every aspect of the design, development, payment, branding, and marketing of stores based on Shopify. We help you to grow your business 360 degrees.

Create highly profitable Shopify stores

The reason hires us is that we have a team of Shopify experts who are skilled enough to outline the customer base for every business. We create data-driven stores that maximize the sales so the revenue. We optimize stores with call-to-action (CTA) buttons and forms to focus your websites more on sales.

Customer centric approach

Our approach is to build customer-centric stores. We positioned the utmost importance on your unique business goals. This approach focused on crafting stores optimized for objectives such as increasing leads, high conversion rate, abandoned cart recovery, cross sell, up sell, and branding. Our team of designers and developers make your store fully functional and authentic front-end. Users can easily navigate, search for products, and buy products.

Delivered projects timely

With our experience in the industry, we never false promise you about the timeline. We know how much time it will take to deliver a project based on your project scope and requirements. We value your time as much as our time. So, achieve every milestone before the deadline. We deliver the project with 100 percent satisfaction guaranteed. Our customer satisfaction rate is almost one hundred percent.

We've worked with all sizes of companies

We have worked with all sizes of companies from startups and medium to enterprise levels or brands. We successfully help them to grow their business with edge-cutting e-commerce store development rather than depending on the niche.

We got your back

We provide free support even after the delivery of projects. We have a team of support engineers who specifically support running the website without any breakdown and glitches. So your business never goes down. Our support engineers are available 24/7 to help you.

Shopify Website Design Pricing - How Much Does a Shopify Website Cost?

Shopify website design pricing can be different based on the project requirements. The pricing can be between $0 to 50K dollars. Pricing is different for a website using a pre-made theme or custom theme.When you browse the search engine, you will find Shopify website design services usually cost from $500K to $5000K. At EcomHeroes, we offer complete Shopify website creation at just $1499.

Shopify pricing -

If we talk about Shopify pricing to setup and open an online store, Shopify offers three different plans as follows:
  1. Basic Plan - $29USD per month
  2. Shopify Plan - $79USD per month
  3. Advanced Plan - $299USD per month
Note: These plans may be different at the time you read.

FAQs

Shopify hosting - How does hosting work with shopify ?

The security of e-commerce business websites and their buyers is a significant concern for retailers and business owners because cyber attacks can result in the loss of customer data, business revenue, and the overall feasibility of the business.

Shopify is the third top e-commerce platform used to build online retail stores, and 20 percent of e-commerce businesses are on Shopify.Online stores powered by Shopify have generated over 496 billion dollars by selling products, goods, and services.These stats attract the hackers the most.

Yes, Shopify is secure. Shopify has developed an automatic system that protects and monitors every money transaction and data. Shopify websites come with a 256-bit SSL certificate to protect customers' business data and information.
Shopify has spent over 850,000 on more than 300 ethical hackers to resolve security issues.

Shopify is compliant with level 1 Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI CSS). So the data of buyers using credit cards and debit cards is secured. E-commerce websites with PCI compliant are more secure, so buyers prefer to buy from the website. With these built-in security features, the Shopify apps store has several third-party apps that enhance your store security.

Is Shopify Secure?

The security of e-commerce business websites and their buyers is a significant concern for retailers and business owners because cyber attacks can result in the loss of customer data, business revenue, and the overall feasibility of the business.

Shopify SEO

Yes, Shopify is SEO friendly. Websites powered by Shopify are search engine friendly and have strong built-in on-page and technical SEO features. You don't need to worry about the on-page and technical SEO when your e-commerce website is built with Shopify.

You will get the options to customize and add meta title, description, tag, URL structure, alt tag, heading tags, redirections, body content, hyperlinks, images, etc.

Shopify automatically generates and manages Robots.txt and Sitemap XML files of your website. With the help of third-party apps, you can customize advanced SEO settings. You can easily integrate Search engine verification tags, analytic tags, Google tag manager tags, and other social media app codes.

Shopify Speed Optimization

To know how important website loading speed checks out these stats:
According to data published at HubSpot, 70% of customers state that website speed influences the decision to buy products from online retail stores.

According to HubSpot, conversion rates decrease by an average of 4.42% for websites that take an extra second to load.

So website loading speed is one of the essential factors for generating sales for every store.

Shopify servers have a fast response time and assure you of 99.99 percent uptime. So, your customers never suffer while purchasing or browsing the website.
The main key factors that affect website loading speed are images, scripts, redirections, and website content. Now, the question is:

Compress images -

Images take more time to load than other content on the website page, so you need to compress images without losing quality. However, images are the most valuable thing on the e-commerce website especially. In e-commerce stores, images make buyers know what products they are purchasing.
On the Shopify store, you can upload images of up to 4472 x 4472 pixels with a maximum of 20MB in size. But Shopify recommends 2048 x 2048 pixels square product images.

Optimize install Shopify apps -

Check that all installed third-party apps are in use because third-party apps run scripts on your store page that cause high loading speed. So, uninstall all the apps that are not in use. It will allow web pages to load faster.

Optimize redirection and content -

Redirections increase page loading time because every time page redirects somewhere else, it extends the HTTP request and response process. No need to worry if your website has 3-5 redirection links. But redirection more than this will impact loading speed. Don't use redirections unnecessarily, and remove all unuseful redirections.
The other thing to optimize is website content. For this, you can use the Content Delivery Network (CDN),where you can host your website content. These are auxiliary servers that reduce server load and make your content easy to render.

Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML -

Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML codes. Optimizing JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files will help to improve website loading speed. For this, you can remove unnecessary spaces, code lines, characters, comments, and unuseful elements from the code files to optimize.

Use third-party apps -

The final method to optimize your website page speed is you can use third-party apps. These apps optimize images, redirection, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. You can find hundreds of apps to automate the optimization process at the Shopify app store, both paid and free.

The genuine answer is that it depends on the needs of the business. We have been creating Shopify stores since 2015. We have delivered more than 500 Shopify websites, and every website took a different time to be completed.
In general, a simple Shopify website takes 3-5 days minimum, and a custom website can take almost a month to launch. The main bottlenecks to time are custom theme development and content. These two work takes more time.
The other aspect that matter is the number of resources and expertise of developers. When you hire a company for your Shopify store development, they often deliver the project in a shorter time compared to freelance individuals because the company has dedicated teams to manage the projects. So your project never suffers whatever the conditions. Whereas individual freelancers take more time to complete a website.
In short, Shopify website development with pre build theme can take one week, a semi-custom website can take 2-3 weeks, and a complete custom website can take 2-3 months.

Shopify hosting - How does hosting work with shopify ?

The security of e-commerce business websites and their buyers is a significant concern for retailers and business owners because cyber attacks can result in the loss of customer data, business revenue, and the overall feasibility of the business.

Platforms that require third-party hosting are sometimes quite complicated and demand a degree of technical and coding skills to set up. Many business owners don't want to face this. Shopify the savior, it is as simple as you only choose the plan, sign up and follow the simple instructions.

Some other 'self-hosted' platforms charge you separately for hosting. In starting, they may charge a minimal amount, but soon they rack up thousands of dollars per month. Whereas Shopify never charges any brand a single penny for hosting.

Many brands offer limitless bandwidth and space under the * mark. So when your store gets a good amount of traffic your site goes down due to the limited bandwidth. Sometimes the same happens when you start uploading products after a specific limit. To up your limit they exceedingly charge you.
Shopify gives you unlimited bandwidth and welcomes you to high traffic, rather than punishing you for high this. Every Shopify plan included unlimited bandwidth.

Shopify hosting is PCI DSS level-1 compliant and guarantees the data security of your business and customers. All Shopify stores come with an SSL certificate, so your website is safe from online cyber attacks and phishing.

Seguno - Email Marketing

Seguno is one of the best email marketing apps specially made for Shopify stores. You can easily manage your email marketing campaigns with the automation feature. It helps to turn customers into regular buyers.
Therefore, if you are looking for an app that manages email marketing effectively for your newly launched Shopify store, generate sales and increase revenue. Seguno should be your go-to first app.

Plug-in SEO

Plug-in SEO manages all SEO. This app automatically scans and fixes all critical SEO issues of your store, boosts website ranking, and optimizes metadata, image alt tag, schema, broken links check, and more.
It is the highest-rated SEO app on the Shopify app store, used by thousands of Shopify and Shopify PLUS merchants globally. So, it's the best Shopify app to install for your Shopify store before launch.

Smile: Loyalty and Rewards

Best Shopify app to retain your customers. Smile app easy to run program to offer loyalty points, rewards, and referral perks. This app helps you to retain your existing customer base and increase sales, repeat purchase rates, and brand loyalty.
To run an e-commerce business effectively for a long time. It's better to build brand loyalty for the existing customer base by giving them exciting offers, rewards, and discounts. If you think today, you will win tomorrow.

PushOwl: Web Push Notifications

The abandoned cart can be an obstacle to the success of your e-commerce business. Shopify focus and resolves this issue by providing you with a third-party app named PushOwl. This app sends web push notifications that recover abandoned carts by encouraging buyers with attractive offers and rewards.
PushOwl is the highest-rated web push notification app, trusted by 25K+ merchants on Shopify and Shopify PLUS. You can personalize your marketing with several features or automate it easily

Form Builder:

Plug-in SEO
Form Builder has advanced features such as accepting online payment, automatically creating a customer account, advanced CSS & JS, and form response notification.
These apps make your path to becoming a successful e-commerce entrepreneur easy and effective and help to grow your business simultaneously.