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Most Shopify store examples posts are a gallery of screenshots and the same three compliments: clean design, nice white space, great storytelling. You scroll, you nod, you close the tab, and nothing about your own store changes. The screenshots are the least copyable part of any of these brands, and the least important.
So this list is built the other way round. Twenty-five Shopify store examples, sorted by vertical, and for each one the single decision worth stealing: a specific thing you could go and do to your own store this afternoon. Some of these are household names on Shopify Plus, some are tiny makers you have never heard of, and the best ideas are as likely to come from the second group. First, the part nobody screenshots.
What actually makes a Shopify store worth stealing from
Strip the branding off the best Shopify stores and you find the same handful of structural decisions underneath. They are boring, they are measurable, and they are what separate a store that sells from one that just looks expensive. Four of them matter more than the rest.
The product page has to win the argument. It is where the buy-or-leave decision happens, and the biggest lever on it is reviews. The Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern found that a product showing five reviews is 270% more likely to be bought than the same product with none, and the effect is strongest on higher-priced items. The goal is not a thousand reviews, it is getting every product past zero. Alongside that: the all-in price with shipping visible without a hunt, and one clear call to action rather than five competing buttons.
The store has to be built for a thumb. Mobile is now roughly 60% of global ecommerce sales, up from around 56% in 2018, according to Statista. Yet mobile still converts lower than desktop, which Littledata benchmarks at about 1.2% against 1.9%. Read those two facts together and the instruction is obvious: the mobile page is the store, not a shrunk-down version of the desktop one.
The checkout has to get out of the way. The Baymard Institute puts documented cart abandonment at 70.22%, and a chunk of that is self-inflicted friction. Their checkout research finds the average checkout shows 23.48 form fields when 12 to 14 would do, and that a large site can gain up to a 35.26% lift in conversion from better checkout design alone. On Shopify, that mostly means switching on guest checkout and accelerated payment and not adding fields you do not need.
And the site has to be fast. Deloitte’s Milliseconds Make Millions study, run with Google across 37 brands and more than 30 million sessions, found that improving mobile site speed by a tenth of a second lifted retail conversions by 8.4%. A tenth of a second. Every unused app and heavy hero image taxes your conversion rate in the same proportion.
Hold those four in mind as you read the examples below. When a store impresses you, ask which of these it is quietly getting right, because that is the thing worth copying, not the font.
Fashion and apparel
Gymshark: run the whole world from one storefront
Gymshark grew from a teenager’s bedroom into a business turning over more than 500 million pounds a year, and it did it after replatforming from Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus to scale internationally. Today it serves well over 100 countries from a single storefront with regional pricing, and it launches around its athletes and community rather than leaning on paid traffic alone.
Steal this: if you sell abroad at all, turn on Shopify Markets so international shoppers see prices in their own currency instead of doing mental maths and bouncing. Then plan your next launch around the people who already follow you, not around ad spend you have to rent.
Allbirds: put a number where the adjective was
Allbirds runs its retail and website on the same Shopify back end, and does its omnichannel fulfilment through Shopify POS. The detail worth copying is smaller and sharper than the tech: every product page states the carbon footprint of the shoe as a specific figure, printed like a nutrition label. It turns a woolly claim into a checkable fact.
Steal this: take your vaguest product claim, the “sustainable” or “premium” or “long-lasting”, and replace it with one measured number a sceptic could verify. A figure earns trust that an adjective never will.
Hiut Denim: do one thing well
Hiut is a small maker in Cardigan that exists to bring jeans manufacturing back to a Welsh town that lost its factory. It sells, more or less, one product, under two slogans: “Made in Wales” and “Do one thing well”. The Shopify store leads with the story, and the brand’s HistoryTag idea gives every pair a number so owners can chronicle the life of their jeans after buying them.
Steal this: narrow your range to the few things you are actually known for, and write the product page as a story rather than a spec sheet. Focus is a positioning strategy, not a limitation.
Taylor Stitch: let the customers fund the run
Taylor Stitch built its “Workshop” around pre-orders: new designs are offered at a discount before they are made, and the brand only manufactures what has been ordered. Roughly 90% of its products are funded by customers before production, which validates demand and pays for the inventory at the same time.
Steal this: before you commit cash to a new line, pre-sell it. A real pre-order at a real discount tells you whether the demand exists far more honestly than a survey, and it funds the stock you were going to gamble on.
Alo Yoga: design for the phone first
Alo Yoga sells premium activewear and treats mobile as the primary experience, with its app and its stream of studio and community content doing much of the retention work. The store feels built for a phone held in one hand, not squeezed down from a desktop layout.
Steal this: open your own store on your own phone and try to buy something. If the add-to-cart takes a treasure hunt or the images crawl in, fix that before you touch anything on desktop, because that is where most of your customers already are.
Beauty and personal care
Kylie Cosmetics: make the scarcity real
Kylie Cosmetics grew on scheduled drops that genuinely sold out, once handling more than 200,000 shoppers hitting the store at once during a launch on Shopify Plus. The scarcity was the marketing, and it worked because it was true.
Steal this: a launch calendar customers learn to anticipate beats a permanent “sale ends tonight” that everyone has learned to ignore. If you use scarcity, make it honest limited stock, not a countdown that resets on refresh. Shoppers can smell the fake ones, and they remember.
Crabtree & Evelyn: sell the story, not the ingredient
Crabtree & Evelyn was founded by someone who, in the brand’s own telling, “didn’t sell soaps, he sold stories”, bringing back capsule collections inspired by places he had travelled. The personal-care category is crowded with ingredient lists; the brand competes on the world each product belongs to.
Steal this: lead the page with the ritual and the feeling, then back it with the ingredient detail underneath for the shoppers who want it. Facts confirm a decision; stories start one.
Pura Vida: turn buyers into the marketing
Pura Vida sells handmade bracelets and grew by making its customers the engine: heavy personalisation plus a large ambassador and user-generated-content programme. Shopify’s own numbers put the payoff at 50% year-on-year revenue growth.
Steal this: give customers something to personalise and an easy, obvious way to show it off. A product people want to post does your top-of-funnel work for free, which matters more the smaller your ad budget.
Food and drink
Death Wish Coffee: own one sharp claim
Death Wish sells coffee under a single, unmissable line: “the world’s strongest coffee”. It is specific, memorable and defensible, and it does the positioning work that a paragraph of “artisan, small-batch, ethically sourced” never manages, because every other coffee brand says exactly that.
Steal this: trade your generic quality adjectives for one concrete claim you can actually prove and then repeat everywhere. Specific beats superlative. “Strongest” sticks; “premium” evaporates.
Heinz: a legacy brand can go direct in weeks
When its usual retail routes were disrupted, Heinz stood up its first ever ecommerce store, Heinz to Home, on Shopify in a matter of weeks. A century-old brand tested selling direct without a six-month replatforming saga.
Steal this: you do not need a perfect, bespoke build to start selling direct. A lean Shopify store live in weeks will teach you more about DTC demand than a year of planning one.
Oatly: let the voice do the selling
Oatly’s direct store carries the same unmistakable tone as everything else it makes: dry, self-aware, a bit contrarian. The voice is the differentiator in a category where the product spec barely varies between brands.
Steal this: write your store like a person with a point of view, not a committee describing a product, and keep that voice consistent from the homepage to the returns policy. In a crowded aisle, tone is often the only thing shoppers can tell apart.
Lindt: keep a direct channel you can switch on
When its shops were forced to close, Lindt Canada launched a direct store on Shopify Plus in five days, by Shopify’s own account. The lesson is not the speed record, it is the resilience: a direct channel meant the business was not wholly dependent on one route to market.
Steal this: even if wholesale or retail is your main channel, keep a lightweight direct store ready. It is insurance, a source of first-party data, and a place to test new products without a buyer’s permission.
Ugly Drinks: reframe the category
Ugly positioned its sparkling water against sugary soft drinks rather than against other waters, with a deliberately blunt, “ugly” brand that made honesty the whole point. It defined itself by the thing it was replacing.
Steal this: decide what habit or product you are the alternative to, and position against that, not against your nearest lookalike rival. The comparison that matters is the one already in your customer’s head.
Health, wellness and supplements
Huel: default to subscription, and teach before you sell
Huel runs one-off orders, subscriptions, upsells and free-gift logic through Shopify, with a heavy layer of education that de-risks a genuinely new habit for the shopper. The repeat purchase is the easy, obvious default.
Steal this: for anything consumable, make subscribing the path of least resistance, and answer the “is this actually for me” question on the page rather than hoping the customer works it out. A confident, well-explained default lifts lifetime value more than a discount does.
AG1: focus the catalogue to one hero
AG1, formerly Athletic Greens, implemented Shopify Plus back in 2017 and built a very large business around essentially a single product sold on subscription. No range creep, no forty SKUs diluting the message: one thing, done properly.
Steal this: resist the urge to add products for the sake of a fuller catalogue. One hero product that is easy to understand, easy to reorder and relentlessly focused will usually outsell a sprawling range you cannot explain in a sentence.
Bootea: make the subscription the product
Bootea built its business around a recurring programme, a “teatox” with a start, a duration and an outcome, rather than selling one-off tins and hoping people came back. The plan was the product.
Steal this: if you sell something people consume over time, package it as a programme with a beginning and an end state, not just a jar on a shelf. People commit to outcomes more readily than to inventory.
Home, kitchen and sleep
Made In: borrow professional credibility
Made In sells cookware used and endorsed by working chefs, and merchandises it with editorial content to match. The most credible possible user of the product is placed front and centre, which does the persuading for a category full of interchangeable claims.
Steal this: find the most credible real user of your product, a professional, an expert, a recognised name in your niche, and put them where the buying decision happens, not buried three clicks deep in a press page.
Brooklinen: bundle the decision
Brooklinen sells bedding as coordinated sets so a shopper buys a solved problem, a whole made bed, rather than assembling it from a pile of individual SKUs, and it backs the pages with a large volume of reviews.
Steal this: bundle the items that obviously go together and sell the outcome, not the components. It lifts average order value and, more importantly, it removes a decision the shopper would otherwise have to make alone and might abandon.
Simba: put the guarantee in the headline
You cannot lie on a mattress before you buy it online, so Simba sells one with a long home trial and a multi-year guarantee, and makes that reassurance prominent rather than hiding it in the small print.
Steal this: for anything expensive or hard to judge on a screen, make the trial, the returns policy or the guarantee a headline feature, not a footnote. Removing the risk of getting it wrong closes more considered purchases than shaving the price does.
Mahabis: make a boring product feel considered
Mahabis took the humble slipper, an everyday item nobody thinks about, and made it feel designed and considered through presentation and merchandising. The product is ordinary; the treatment is not.
Steal this: a dull, everyday product is an opportunity, not a handicap. Photograph it well, describe it with care, and present it as a considered object, and you can charge and convert like a premium brand in a category where nobody else bothers.
Footwear, bags and accessories
Rothy’s: answer the doubt where it lives
Rothy’s makes shoes from recycled plastic and sells them online with clear material proof and sizing guidance placed exactly where a first-time buyer’s hesitation sits. For a fit-sensitive, unusual product, it puts the reassurance next to the doubt.
Steal this: work out the single biggest reason a shopper hesitates on your product, usually fit or “will this actually be as described”, and put the answer right at that point on the page, not in an FAQ they have to go looking for.
MVMT: show the value gap, don’t hide it
MVMT built a watch brand on offering quality at a fraction of luxury pricing, and it made that value comparison explicit rather than pretending to be something it was not.
Steal this: if you are the value option, show the comparison openly instead of hoping nobody notices the price. Making the gap visible turns your lower price from a suspicion into a selling point.
Herschel: sell the lifestyle, not the litre count
Herschel merchandises its backpacks through lifestyle photography and a recognisable signature detail, selling the life the customer wants rather than a list of compartments and capacities.
Steal this: shoot your product in the life your customer aspires to, in use and at human scale, not just isolated on a white background. Specs answer questions; context creates want.
Bombas: wire a real mission into the buy box
Bombas built its brand on a one-purchased, one-donated model, and crucially it is core to the business rather than a marketing add-on. The mission is present at the point of purchase, not confined to an About page.
Steal this: if you have a genuine mission, and only if it is genuine, wire it into the product page and the checkout so it informs the buying moment. A real reason to buy from you specifically beats another five-percent-off banner.
Bailey Nelson: win by removing the category’s biggest pain
Bailey Nelson set out to sell beautiful, affordable eyewear in a category notorious for opaque markups, bridging its shops and its Shopify store with the same clear, honest prices. It competes on being the antidote to how annoying buying glasses usually is.
Steal this: find the single thing customers hate most about buying in your category, the confusing pricing, the pushy upsell, the fiddly returns, and build your store to remove exactly that. Being the easy, honest option is a position competitors rarely bother to take.
Steal the decision, not the design
Read back over those twenty-five and the pattern is hard to miss. Not one of them wins because of a font, a colour palette or a hero animation. They win on decisions: Gymshark on one global storefront, Allbirds on a number instead of an adjective, Taylor Stitch on validating demand before spending, Huel on a well-explained default, Simba on removing risk. The aesthetics are downstream, and they are the easiest part to copy and the least useful.
One honest caveat before you copy a thing. Every brand on this list is a survivor, and survivors are a biased sample. For every Gymshark that launched off a community, hundreds of brands ran the same playbook and vanished, and you never see them. That does not make the decisions worthless, it means you copy them because they are sound in their own right, not because a famous name also made them. The tactic was rarely the cause of the win on its own. It was necessary, not sufficient, and the offer underneath did the heavy lifting, which is exactly where the next section goes.
So when you study the best Shopify stores, resist the screenshot. Ask what structural decision each one made, check it against the four fundamentals from the top of this piece, and copy the decision. That is portable across your category. The exact shade of green is not.
The thing all the store lists leave out
Here is the uncomfortable part, and it is why I wrote this rather than another gallery. Every store above is built on a product people actually want. That is not a detail, it is the foundation, and no amount of store optimisation can substitute for it.
Conversion work acts on demand that already exists. It cannot manufacture demand that does not. I have watched founders spend months and a small fortune perfecting the packaging around a product the market had already, quietly, declined to buy, then blame the theme. If warm traffic is landing on a fundamentally sound store and still leaving, flat across the whole funnel, the problem is usually not the store at all. It is the offer: the product, the price, the positioning or the claim.
Notice how many of these brands sorted that out first. Taylor Stitch pre-sells a design before making it, so demand is proven before a penny goes into stock. Gymshark launched off the back of a community that already wanted the thing. The store came after the yes, not instead of it. If you want the method for getting that yes before you build, start with how to test your audience before you spend and the guide to concept testing platforms.
This is the one place my own company fits the problem on the page, so I will say it plainly rather than slip it in. TestFeed lets you put a product, pack, price, claim, name or ad in front of your target shoppers and get back a purchase-intent read, the shoppers’ reasons in their own words, and a clear next move, in days rather than weeks. We built it working with challenger brands like Bae Juice and Sol Bevi. It is a pre-spend, directional signal, not a sales forecast or a guarantee, and it does not judge taste, texture or smell, so it will not tell you whether the product is nice to use. What it does well is triage: killing weak offers cheaply so that the beautiful store you are about to build has an offer worth building around. Get the yes first. Then steal every trick above.
Frequently asked questions
What are the best Shopify store examples to learn from?
Gymshark, Allbirds, Kylie Cosmetics, Pura Vida, Death Wish Coffee, Hiut Denim, Huel, Made In and Bombas are among the most instructive. Study them for one decision each rather than the overall look: Gymshark for running the world from a single storefront, Allbirds for putting a measured number where a vague claim used to be, Taylor Stitch for pre-selling a collection before manufacturing it.
Are big brands actually built on Shopify?
Yes. Large brands including Gymshark, Allbirds, Kylie Cosmetics, Heinz, Lindt, Huel and Bombas run on Shopify or Shopify Plus. Gymshark replatformed from Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus to scale internationally, and Allbirds runs its stores and website on the same Shopify back end. Plus is the enterprise tier built for high traffic, international markets and custom checkout logic.
What makes a good Shopify store?
The structural fundamentals, not the theme. A product page that answers what it is, what it costs all-in and why to trust it, with reviews present; a mobile-first layout, because mobile is roughly 60% of global ecommerce sales; a short checkout with guest and accelerated payment; and a fast-loading site. Get those right and a plain store outsells a beautiful one.
How can I tell if a store is built on Shopify?
View the page source and look for references to cdn.shopify.com or a /cdn/shop/ path in the image URLs, which Shopify serves assets from. Browser extensions that detect ecommerce platforms also work. Check before you assume, because brands do replatform, and a store that was on Shopify two years ago may not be today.
Can a great-looking store make up for a weak product?
No. Conversion work acts on demand that already exists; it cannot manufacture it. If warm traffic browses and leaves across the whole funnel while your fundamentals are sound, the problem is usually the offer, not the store. Validate the product, price or claim with your target buyer first, then build the store around the version that already earns a yes.
