What are the advantages of a modified Shopify theme?

This is an amazing starting point for start-ups or small businesses looking to scale, but when it comes to bigger brands that have a strong brand identity, using an 'out of the box' pre-built theme can make their unique identity look like everyone else’s store.

By clearly defining your brand, target audiences, and considering how you might meet your customers' expectations and business goals, this is where you should start in deciding if the modification of a pre-built theme is right for you and your store.

You can make significant changes to fonts, colours, layouts and content sections with pre-built themes. However, for more advanced modifications and customisation, a Shopify agency can support custom components, UI kits, functionality, brand elevation, and more.

One of the biggest draws and advantages of a customised theme allows for a far better user experience. Whilst Shopify is built with consumers in mind, every brand and business is unique, and it’s often the case that pre-built themes don’t accommodate all audiences. This leads to:

• Clunky and hard to use navigations causing user indecision
• Poor user journeys and flows forcing users to U-turn or exit
• Buried content, collections, and products leading to missed sales

One of the biggest challenges with user experiences through Shopify is filtering. 

The more complex product catalogues become — think filtering by category, product types, style, price, colours, size — the more it leads to user confusion or overwhelm due to the number of options. If users become frustrated, then they’re more inclined to leave a site altogether.

However, a Shopify agency with a UX team can support stores in understanding and designing a filtering system that is intuitive and highlights the most common user flows through your store.

There are some truly beautiful and well-designed pre-built themes on Shopify. However, whilst there is a degree of customisation: adding logos, fonts, brand colour palettes, etc., many bigger brands with larger revenue streams tend to take such themes and very heavily customise the code to feel unique to their brand. 

Modifying a Shopify theme with custom components and design gives commerce sites a feel of their own. It stops consumers from going between different brands — on Shopify — feeling like they’re experiencing the same website. 

Whilst muscle memory is good alongside best practice UX, customisation of components gives a Shopify Commerce a point of difference. What’s more, it sticks to offering a more bespoke user experience that’s been considered and designed specifically for a store’s audiences.

It stops users scrolling through the same feeling product carousels, the same formatted content blocks, the same looking ‘add to basket’ buttons, and gives stores a more dynamic and enjoyable experience, which inevitably converts.

Motion is often one of the most overlooked aspects of a store. When we talk about motion, we’re thinking about buttons or how a product card interacts when someone hovers over it. Colourfils on bold text or components, lazy-loading or appearing on the screen during scroll. It’s these surprise and delight interactions that often set Shopify stores apart from one merchant to the next.

Motion keeps users engaged and stops a store from feeling static, and becomes more ‘app-like’ as consumers move through a website and checkout to convert. 

Dynamic Yield by Mastercard reported that, ‘mobile drives the largest portion of visitors to ecommerce sites, at 77%’ and so an ‘app-like’ feel and interaction is more important than ever to support user experience when engaging with an ecommerce site to keep buyer attention.

We worked with the Get More Vits team on their Shopify store to elevate their brand identity online and create a seamless experience for their customers. 

Planning out a new mega navigation based on how their consumers search, changing the filtering mechanics, and redesigning their theme to better appeal to their audiences have brought the brand to life online.