New Themes in Shopify for 2015

I love it when I pop onto the Shopify theme store and discover new themes. All our Shopify clients know we use Shopify themes as the basis for your website development. Using a theme helps us to speed up development and reuse great coding by the theme developers. It is great to see that the theme developer are adopting some of the winning design trends from 2014. There is now parallax sliding, scroll vs click homepage layouts, the use of big fonts and full screen images. For more information on the web design trends for 2015, read our recent article.

Here is a showcase of the new themes launched this year.

Showtime

Key Features:

• Clear layout

• Subtle animation if you like movement on your site

• Lots of promotional spaces for communicating key messages

• Well designed drop down menu

• Product video support

Focal

Key Features

• Nice homepage layout to lots of opportunities to communicate key messages

• Good footer

• Allows for amazing photography to be showcased

• Fresh and clean product page layout

• Built in foreign currency

• Highly customisable homepage

Icon

Key Features

• Sticky top menu

• Interesting page movement as you scroll

• Great collection slider with featured image added

• Some parrallax sliding

• Instragram widget added

• Quick Filter and sort by already added

• Perfect for a fashion website

Parrallax

Key Features

• Sticky menu as you scroll

• Great full screen images in parallax scrolling added throughout the homepage

• Allows for great use of typography

• Great Product page layout - makes use of high quality product images

• Responds well in the mobile - keeping the design aesthetic

Pacific

Key Features

• Responsive

• Menu with images and multiple levels of navigation

• 4 presets

• Instagram widget built in

• FX already added

• Large main slider images

• Multiple promotional box configurations

Visit the Shopify Theme store now. If you need any help selection a theme don't hesitate to contact us. We have help you select the theme that will give you the best opportunity to stand out from your competitors and make a lasting impression on your customers.

Shopify - Image Editing Tool

Make your product photos better with Shopify's built-in image editing tool

Photoshop or similar is by far the most efficient and effective way to edit an image.
But if you have an ‘ooops’ moment when you’ve already loaded the images and discover they need to be cropped or enhanced, Shopify has a handy built in editing tool that you can use which offers the following effects:

The text tool comes in handy if you’ve realised that customers have no way of knowing which variant belongs to each photograph (e.g. which swatch is Aviator blue and which swatch is Artic blue) and need to add a label.

I’m paranoid, and like to duplicate the product (top right of the product screen) before I work on it, in case of accidents).

Open up your product in the admin/products screen and scroll down to the images for that product. Click on the pencil ‘edit’ tool at the bottom left of the photo

Crop, rotate or otherwise enhance your image and Apply the change

Remember to save your changes

Once you are happy with your changes you can delete the duplicated backup product if you created one.

Original    

Cropped with effect

As you can see, the updated image is a far better product photo for your website as it shows the product in more detail.

How fast is Shopify?

Page response time has a big impact on ecommerce conversion rates, so it's important to choose a platform that's not going be slow for your customers.

Research by Amazon has shown that a 100ms delay on your page load can cause a 7% reduction in conversions.  If you sell $1000 per day and aren't optimisde yet, that's potentially an extra $25,550 per year waiting for you if you can increase your site speed by 0.1 second!

Whatever the platform, we have a lot of tips on the post above on how to speed up your site. For those of you using Shopify, you won't have access to make a lot of those changes. Don't fear - you are already running on a modern masterpiece of infrastructure, the details of which are below.

Shopify technical infrastructure
Shopify is built on a huge, reliable and state of the art infrastructure, the specification of which in early 2014 was:

• 1700 CPU cores
• 6 TB of RAM
• 200 TB of Storage

This is used to power around 100,000 online stores. Shopify also makes extensive use of caching and a large content delivery network.

The result
The result is a superfast 80 millisecond page response time whilst handling around 500,000 (yes, half a million) hits per minute.

Hope that helps! For more Shopify advice, why not subscribe to our newsletter?

We use Shopify for our websites - want to try it out?

Why Shopify?

Are you looking for a ecommerce site for your start up, or are you wanting to redevelop your existing business? Shopify is a leading ecommerce platform that is fast to develop, secure and highly customisable. Shopify will give you the edge over your competitors.

This is why we like Shopify.

• Shopify is a leading e-commerce platform that has over 50,000 successful stores running on the platform.
• —Choose from over 100 templates or create a custom designed theme for your online store. Responsive website for different devices - so your store will look good on an email as well.
• —Fully hosted online shopping cart – Shopify provides a secure shopping cart that lets you instantly accept credit cards and PayPal payments.
• —State-of-the-art security- Shopify is Level 1 PCI compliant and uses 128 bit SSL encryption to ensure credit card data is secure.
• —Accept global currencies - Expand your business worldwide. Shopify stores can accept payment from around the world.
• —Fast time to market. The average store will only take a few days to set up.
• —100’s of additional applications that can add features to your store.

Take control of your website. Boutique Business Consulting can help you set it up and then you own and manage your store. We are hear to offer support guidance if you need it but the great thing about Shopify is that it is so easy to use!

For more information go to Shopify.

Read some independent reviews on Shopify:

• E-commerce Software Review
  
• Ecommerce About.com
  
• LeapGo
  
• Merchant Maverick

Why use a Shopify Expert?

Shopify is easy to use. So easy you could set it up yourself. However we recommend you use a Shopify Expert like Boutique Business Consulting. Here's why:

1. We will set up your site so that it is optimised for sales. There are two component to this. The first component is getting traffic. We will make sure that the website is optimised for search engines - this will help you get seen quicker. The second component is coverting the traffic that visits into sales. This means we will help you choose the themes and apps we know will deliver conversions.

2. Its not always easy to get your website to look good. Looking good is important. Your website is often your customer's first contact with your brand and you need to make an impression. Unless you have design experience its not always easy to look good or to configure to theme to exactly match your brand. We can help you look impressive.

3. Every business is unique and sometimes you need unique features on your website. Shopify is infinitely customisable if you know how to code. So if you need a feature that isn't in a theme or an app we can help it be developed.

If you decide to set it up yourself and then decide you need help - no problem. We can assist at any step in the process. Contact us for a quote. Or if you know what you need simply purchase the product from our consulting e-boutique.