There's a lot that goes into building a Shopify website, and the design is just one piece of it. Of course, you want your store to look great. But you also need to think about how customers will find your products, what information they'll need before making a purchase, and how everything will work behind the scenes.
Some decisions are fairly straightforward. Others, like choosing the right theme, structuring your products, or connecting Shopify with your existing systems, can have a much bigger impact on the project than you might expect.
Whether you're launching a new Shopify store or redesigning an existing one, here are 12 things we recommend thinking through before getting started.
1. Establish Your Brand and Visual Direction
Your Shopify website should feel like an extension of your brand, not just a theme with your logo and colors added to it. If you already have established brand guidelines, that's a great starting point. But there's still plenty to consider when translating those guidelines into an ecommerce experience.
How should your products be photographed and displayed? What should your buttons, promotional banners, and other elements look like? Do you have enough imagery and content to support the design you're envisioning?
It's also important to strike a balance between aesthetics and usability. A unique ecommerce website design can help your store stand out, but customers should still be able to find what they're looking for and understand how to make a purchase.
If you're planning a Shopify website redesign, take some time to evaluate what's working on your current site before changing everything. You may have existing design elements or layouts that customers are already familiar with and that are performing well.
2. Choose the Right Shopify Theme or Custom Design
One of the first decisions you'll need to make is whether to use an existing Shopify theme or invest in custom theme development.
There are plenty of Shopify website themes available, including free and paid options. Many come with built-in features for displaying products, organizing collections, and creating promotional content.
For some businesses, starting with an existing theme and customizing it to match their brand is a great option.
For others, a more customized approach makes sense, particularly if they have unique design requirements or functionality that isn't easily supported by an existing theme.
It's also worth understanding that customizing a Shopify theme and building a fully custom theme aren't the same thing. An existing theme can often be modified quite extensively without needing to build everything from scratch. Custom Shopify theme development, on the other hand, gives you more control over the structure and functionality of the storefront, but generally requires a larger investment.
Before choosing a theme, make sure it can support the features you need, not just the visual style you like. A theme might look perfect in its demo but require significant modifications to accommodate your products or purchasing process.
3. Prioritize the Mobile Shopping Experience
It's easy to get caught up in how a website looks on desktop, especially when you're reviewing designs on a large monitor, but your mobile experience deserves just as much attention.
Navigation menus, product images, filters, and buttons all behave differently on smaller screens. Something that works perfectly on desktop might require several extra taps or a lot of scrolling on a phone.
When planning your Shopify website design, think about how customers will actually use the site on mobile. Can they easily browse collections? Are product options easy to select? Is the Add to Cart button easy to find? Can they view product images without struggling with the gallery?
Don't wait until the website is nearly finished to start thinking about these things. Mobile usability should be considered throughout the design process.
4. Plan Your Navigation and Collections
One of the first things to figure out is how you're going to organize your products. This might seem simple if you only sell a handful of items, but it can get complicated quickly as your catalog grows.
Shopify collections allow you to group products in ways that make sense for your customers. Depending on what you sell, that might mean organizing products by category, brand, use, material, or another characteristic.
You'll also want to consider filters, search functionality, and how customers will move between related collections. For example, a clothing store might need customers to filter by size, color, and style, while a store selling technical equipment might need filters for compatibility, dimensions, or other specifications.
Try to approach this from your customer's perspective rather than your internal product organization. Someone visiting your website for the first time shouldn't need to understand your business to find what they're looking for.
And if you're redesigning an existing store, take a look at your current navigation before assuming it needs to be completely replaced. There may be parts of it that are already working well.
5. Think Through Product Page Design and Customization
Your product pages are some of the most important pages on your website, so it's worth spending time figuring out exactly what they need to include. For some stores, a few images, a description, a price, and an Add to Cart button might be enough. For others, customers may need sizing charts, technical specifications, videos, downloadable documents, FAQs, shipping details, or other information before they're ready to buy.
The good news is that Shopify product page customization gives you quite a bit of flexibility.
For example, Shopify metafields and metaobjects allow you to store and display additional product information without having to manually build a different page for every product.
You might have one product that needs a sizing guide, another that needs detailed specifications, and another that needs an instructional video. With the right setup, those products can share a consistent design while displaying different information.
When planning your Shopify product page design, think about how much information customers need, where it should appear, and how it should be organized. This is something we recommend figuring out early, ideally before products are added to the store. It's much easier to build your product templates around the information you need than to restructure everything later.
6. Consider Product Variants and Options
How customers select and customize products is another area that deserves some planning. Shopify has built-in support for product variants, which work well for things like size and color, but depending on what you're selling, you may need something more complicated.
Maybe customers can personalize a product, select optional accessories, build a bundle, or choose from configurations that affect pricing. Not all of those options should necessarily be handled as variants. Sometimes it makes more sense to use separate products, add-ons, bundles, or a third-party app.
The way you set this up can also affect inventory tracking, fulfillment, and reporting. For example, if an optional accessory needs to be tracked separately in your warehouse, treating it as a simple product option may not be the best approach.
It's worth thinking beyond what the customer sees on the product page and considering how those selections will be handled once an order comes in.
7. Make the Cart and Checkout Experience Easy
Getting someone to add a product to their cart is great, but you still need to make it easy for them to complete their purchase. Start by thinking about what should happen when someone clicks Add to Cart.
Should a cart drawer slide out, allowing them to continue shopping? Would a full cart page make more sense? Do customers need to enter special instructions or review important product information before checking out? You might also want to display related products, free-shipping thresholds, or promotional messaging in the cart.
When it comes to Shopify checkout design, it's important to understand that customization options depend on your Shopify plan and the functionality you're trying to add. Some changes can be made through Shopify's built-in checkout settings, while more advanced checkout page customizations may require additional apps or Shopify Plus.
It's also worth distinguishing between the cart and checkout. Shopify themes generally give you much more flexibility over the cart experience, while the actual checkout has additional restrictions.
The main thing is to keep the experience straightforward. Customers shouldn't have to work hard to figure out how to finish placing an order.
8. Plan for Subscriptions, Upsells, and Cross-Sells
Are you planning to offer subscriptions? What about product bundles, add-ons, or recommended products? These are all worth discussing before development begins.
Subscriptions in particular can introduce quite a few decisions. You'll need to think about how often customers are charged, whether they can skip deliveries, how prepaid subscriptions work, and what options they'll have for managing their subscriptions. You'll also need to consider how subscriptions interact with your products, cart, checkout, and fulfillment process.
For example, if you're offering a subscription box that ships every other month, you'll want to think through when customers are charged, which box new subscribers receive, and how renewals are handled.
Upsells and cross-sells are generally more straightforward, but they still need some thought. You might want to recommend complementary products directly on a product page, offer an add-on when something is added to the cart, or display related products based on what's already in the customer's cart.
These features can be useful for increasing average order value, but they should make sense for your products and your customers.
9. Be Strategic About Shopify Apps
One of Shopify's biggest advantages is its app ecosystem. There are apps for just about everything, from subscriptions and product reviews to shipping, marketing, and customer service, but that doesn't mean you should install an app every time you need a new feature.
Before choosing an app, it's worth checking whether Shopify already offers the functionality you need or whether it can be handled through your theme.
Apps can be incredibly helpful, but they can also add monthly costs, affect performance, or create compatibility issues with other parts of your store. We recommend being intentional about which apps you use, especially when several apps offer similar functionality.
It's also worth looking at the quality of an app's support and how actively it's maintained. If something goes wrong with a feature that's important to your business, you'll want to know there's someone available to help.
10. Identify Your Integrations and International Requirements
Your Shopify store may need to communicate with a number of other systems, including your email marketing platform, accounting software, warehouse, shipping provider, CRM, or inventory management system.
Before development starts, make a list of the tools you're currently using and determine which ones need to connect with Shopify and, more importantly, think about what information needs to move between them. For example, if you use a third-party warehouse, how will orders get from Shopify to that warehouse? Where will inventory levels be updated? How will tracking information make its way back to customers?
It's also important to confirm that the integrations you need can support your specific workflows. Just because two platforms have an integration doesn't necessarily mean they can exchange all the information you need.
If you're planning to sell internationally, there are a few additional things to consider. Shopify offers tools for selling in multiple markets, but there's more to international ecommerce than displaying prices in different currencies.
You'll need to think about shipping, taxes, duties, product availability, languages, and potentially different pricing for different countries. There may also be limitations depending on the apps and services you're using. For example, a subscription or fulfillment app that works perfectly for domestic orders may not support every international market you want to sell in.
Working through these requirements early can save a lot of time and frustration later.
11. Build SEO Into Your Website
Search engine optimization is another thing that's best considered before the website is built, rather than something you address right before launch. The way you structure your collections, organize your navigation, write product descriptions, and link between pages can all affect how search engines understand your website.
If you're redesigning an existing Shopify store, there's an additional consideration: preserving the search visibility you've already built. You may be changing page layouts, consolidating collections, rewriting content, or removing pages altogether. Before making those changes, it's important to understand which pages are bringing in organic traffic and what will happen to their existing URLs.
You'll also want to plan for redirects, page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, and other SEO fundamentals.
A redesign can be a great opportunity to improve your SEO, but you don't want to accidentally undo work that's already paying off.
12. Keep Website Performance in Mind
Finally, don't forget about performance. It's tempting to add lots of interactive features, animations, videos, and apps to make your Shopify store feel more engaging, but every addition should serve a purpose.
Large images, unnecessary scripts, and too many third-party apps can slow down your website, particularly on mobile devices. Performance should be considered throughout the design and development process, not just tested at the end. That might mean optimizing images, limiting unnecessary apps, or finding a simpler way to achieve a particular design effect.
You don't have to sacrifice good design for a fast website. The goal is to make thoughtful choices about what actually improves the experience for your customers.
Planning Your Shopify Website
There isn't one perfect way to build a Shopify store. What works for a business selling a handful of products may be completely different from what works for a company managing hundreds of products, subscriptions, or complex fulfillment requirements.
That's why we recommend spending time on planning before jumping into design and development.
Think about what your customers need, how your business operates, and what you want your store to be able to do in the future.
At Bizango, we help businesses work through these decisions as part of the Shopify website design and development process. Whether you're starting from scratch or redesigning an existing store, we can help you create a website that looks great, works well, and supports your business as it grows.
