Should you build your own Shopify Design?

Every new Shopify users is welcome to choose a theme when setting up a store. Any theme can be adjusted to their brand by changing the visuals, updating the fonts, colors or adding copy. Some themes are free of charge, while others cost between 160 and 180 dollars. The designs differ in terms of features and possibilities for customization, but they are generally valued for the ease of use and user experience that they offer. Nevertheless, many Shopify store owners decide to create their very own Shopify Design. What is it about?

Shopify Design – when is it worth to get it?

As a Shopify-only agency with years of experience, we had a chance of designing and developing dozens of Shopify stores. We did a lot of bespoke shop designs, but does it mean that a custom design is necessary for everyone?

According to InVision (web design tool) 94% of first impressions are design-based. It means that design greatly influences the way we form an opinion about a particular store, and what is more important, whether they want to buy our products or return to the store. If we take care of a clear and well-functioning design, we can win the hearts of online shoppers.

Customizing a ready-made theme is enough for fledgling businesses to start selling, but when an advanced merchant can be certain that investing in a custom solution is a good decision? It comes down to four things. Let’s see them:

• you have a unique customer journey

• you have a customized product

• you need a customized checkout

• you run a shop for a popular brand

Shopify Design- what does it consist of?

There are many reasons why you would choose a Shopify Design service, but how does an agency work on your design? Designing a Shopify store from the ground up means that we need to go through all the stages of a regular web (or mobile) design, and that is, learn about your business and users, build and test a couple of prototypes that are a prerequisite for user interface. As a result, you get an e-commerce site that is optimized for user experience.

What can an agency do for you?

• UX i UI Design
• Shopify Development
• UX Audit
• Shopify Optimization

What does designing a unique storefront look like, step by step? It consists of six stages, and at the end, you get a good-looking, well-functioning and fast-loading site.

Kick-off

We start every project with a meeting. What for? We want to get to know you and your business to the best of our ability. We want to get to know your target customers and their needs. It’s important to learn as much as we can about your customer, because ultimately, he or she will use your site the most and it’s crucial to design for their comfort. With your help, we will build a customer journey map that shows what your customer needs to go through to buy and stay loyal to you. We will also work on Personas, or representations of your target groups. Those two artifacts will guide us through the stages to come.

Prototype

Since at this point, we learned why you are creating a Shopify store and who you want to target, it’s time to propose some solutions. Before we do a detailed Shopify design, we devote some time to explore ideas for an intuitive, well-functioning site that makes your customer feel welcome and at ease. The result of our work at this step is the final prototype. What is that? It’s not a detailed site that is visually astounding. It’s a working model of your site that allows us to show you how the store is going to function, what the information architecture is going to be like, which customer journey is the most optimal. If we’re designing a unique solution, let’s say a calculator for your client to use or a complicated form to fill in, we test every prototype that we make with real users.

Tests

UX design is an iterative process. Every new information that we come brings us closer to the best solution. How do we collect information? By testing the prototype. We invite a couple of users from each user group that you have to test the prototype and based on our findings we alter the design. We test our UX design until we can be sure that every group can perform the task free of any problems. Tests make us certain that we do a great job for you, and we can start preparing a detailed UI design.

UI design

Until now, all we had was a functional project. Let’s start designing user interface. We prepare a graphic projects of all the important screens, namely main website, product collection, product page, checkout (for Shopify Plus – from scratch), search result, user account and text page.

Shopify development

Once you accept the Shopify Design of your store, we kick off the development phase. Our Shopify programmers do the front-end works, making sure that site performance is up to par with modern website design. They also take care of smooth transitions between the elements, animations and image quality. We can help you configure payment methods and prepare instructions on how to upload products into your Shopify store. If the development is done, we will test it on various devices and web browsers to see if everything works smoothly. At the end, you will get a Shopify store that is ready to launch.

Continuous support

From our experience, you may need Shopify development help in the future. That’s why we stay in touch with our clients and help them anytime they need a new subpage, integrations, etc. We can help you with that, too. For example, we can help you optimize your store before a new marketing campaign, what do you say?

Ask us about Shopify Design

Shopify Design is a whole service and our Shopify experts can design and develop a custom design for you. But if you have a unique design ready and you need only a developer’s helping hand, we can do that too.