Best Shopify Stores: In-depth Reviews and Case Studies In Different Niches

You've seen the wording before: Best Shopify Stores - a list of Shopify eCommerce businesses that are too good to be true, and too beautiful not to convert.

With a dose of inspiration, you pulled all-nighter after all-nighter, with laser-focus to create a Shopify Stores for your online store that converts. 

Weeks later, your business seems to be slouching through life, despite how many anatomies of the best Shopify stores you've consumed.

Conversion rate is stuck at 2%. What went wrong?

What are the secrets? Are the Shopify Best Practices that no one tells you?

We all know getting traffic to your site, and then optimizing it to convert is the key to success. All the bells and whistles of fancy site design mean nothing unless visitors take action and buy.

An idea means nothing on its own. It’s about execution.

That’s why we do these Best Shopify Stores reviews. To ease your mind and give you clarity around how and why they convert so well. Then, you can simply implement the techniques in your own store.

We know, there is no one-size-fits-all blueprints for Shopify Success - each niche is different. Hence, we'll cover the best Shopify stores from the most popular niches, with in-depth reviews and case studies.

But first, let's take a detour to the Checklist Department - to refresh yourself with Shopify Store Checklist before we drill down into how people create magic from a seemingly basic checklist

Shopify Store Best Practices: An Essential Checklist

Review all of your

• ❏ Start with your Unique Value Proposition
• ❏ Maximize the speed and performance of the page
• ❏ Check your Shopify landing page functionality on mobile, tablet, and laptop/desktop
• ❏ Effective buttons on featured product(s)
• ❏ Include as much positive information as possible to reinforce the benefits and trust
• ❏ Host images on Shopify Content Delivery Network
• ❏ Have a strong title and brief, effective paragraphs
• ❏ Invest in product image quality
• ❏ Be fastidious with grammar and spelling
• ❏ Use videos to showcase products
• ❏ Use sliders to maximize the space on your landing page
• ❏ Have a strong, visually present call-to-action
• ❏ Use a countdown timer to create urgency
• ❏ Include an FAQ section so many customer inquiries can be solved from the same page
• ❏ Make your advertisement and landing page identical
• ❏ Use the optimum length

There are some more obvious elements to include on most of the pages in your Shopify Stores:

• Copy
• Image
• Call-to-Action (CTA)
• Layout
• Form
• User Experience
• Goal Clarity
• Trustworthiness

Aside from having a very clear message, making sure every page - either homepage or product page, is well-designed and persuasive and making it easy for your visitors to purchase, there is a lot that you can do to optimize the page that might not occur to every Shopify merchant.

The following is our Shopify Stores checklist to make sure you minimize any lost clients through a well-designed Shopify Store.

Related article: Top 10 Trending Ecommerce Designs For Your Online Store

01. Value Proposition Is Your Secret Weapon

It's your job to convince your customers that they can solve their problems with YOUR products.

This is, too often, the pitfall for many Shopify eCommerce businesses. Some, despite having stellar products, fail to articulate the Why:

You also need to explain how your offer is most beneficial and why it is unique. This doesn’t necessarily need to be a long-winded explanation of what you’re offering but needs to succinctly express the reason the visitor should purchase from you instead of a competitor.

How to structure your UVP

02. Optimize Your Page Speed. 

Speed is one of the biggest factors in whether or not a visitor will abandon a page (and a purchase!). The best tool for making sure your page will perform at its very best is Google Page Speed Insights.

All you need to do is copy your URL and select “analyze.

Google Page Speed lends a valuable hand when it comes to mobile optimization

This tool will provide a rating for how fast your page is and a description below. It will assess both mobile and desktop response times and offer insights into how to improve the page speed as in the example below. If the rating is low, Shopify merchants should certainly do whatever they can to optimize their landing page to avoid abandonment.

Programs like ImageOptim make it easy to optimize image files for upload to your store. There is also an Image Optimizer App available from the Shopify App Store.

Google also shows you how to optimize page speed!

03. Optimize Your Shopify Store For Different Devices

As you may have noticed in the page speed analysis above, the same page can have vastly different performance on different devices.

It’s important to check for yourself how your stores behave across all platforms. This will ensure that no matter where visitors are accessing the store, they are having a positive experience.

How being mobile-responsive looks like

You can also right-click in Google Chrome and select the “inspect” option to view the page from different interfaces.

Effective buttons on featured product(s)

For featured items, a big, bold “BUY NOW” or “ADD TO CART” button will remove the need for visitors to sift through several product or collection pages, instead of compelling them to add the item to their cart from the same page.

Every Shopify store is equipped with a ‘buy now’ button feature. How you customize it makes a difference

Also make sure that the button is functional, typically adding the item to the cart without leaving the current page. This allows the visitor to continue browsing uninterrupted and hopefully purchase additional items.

04. Social Proofs and Customer Reviews Are The Essential

Each product should have descriptions that detail why the product is unique, how it will benefit the buyer and the outstanding features that are possessed.

You should also include testimonials from customers who have purchased the specific product to enhance the belief in the product and provide social proof that others have found satisfaction in it.

Example testimonials from the PageFly BFCM template

05. Optimize Images With Shopify Content Delivery Network

Shopify CDN will ensure that the images present in your store are cached at servers around the globe. This will make your page load faster when accessed from anywhere in the world, a powerful feature in preventing abandonment due to sluggish load times.

All Shopify merchants are afforded CDN privileges for owning a Shopify store. Click here for all the information you’ll need.

You can upload image files from the “files” settings section of your Shopify admin:

How to optimize images on Shopify

06. Write Amazing Content 

Amazing content = Product Description + Headlines + Title + Everything that is text-based in your online store :)

Once you have a lightning-fast Shopify store, visitors need to be able to scan and digest the present information very rapidly.

A creative but clear title is fundamental, and any supporting paragraphs need to be brief and communicative by enhancing the UVP.

Clear, concise, and suggestive content

Combining this with great layout and images will prevent any confusion and stop visitors having to question any information on the page.

07. Step Up Your Product Photography

Make sure your products are featured in high-quality and attractive images. It’s advisable to have a professional photographer take photos of your products and have consistency in how they are positioned or how they appear:

Having an organized and thought-out assortment arrangement of product images makes it so much easier for your visitors to navigate, and ultimately, buy!

Having a random assortment of product images is just counterintuitive to attractive design and could be repellent to potential customers.

If you have the means and depending on the type of product you are selling, it may be worth investigating the potential of Shopify AR. This gives visitors the chance to experience a 3D model of the items and grants a 360 degree perspective of the product precisely to scale. Going forward, this will be a game changer in how online shoppers assess their purchases and we are only just on the precipice of its capabilities now.

08. Be A Grammar-Police, and a Good One At That

While this may seem like a given truth,  when you have so many other factors to consider it can be easy to overlook seemingly minor errors. Typos or grammar slip-ups can stick out like a sore thumb to visitors and can be costly in that they negatively affect the perception of your store. The potential customer could assume that the store owner did not pay enough attention to details and it can cause them to not feel “safe” in purchasing.

It may seem like this is blown out of proportion, but some good advice is to imagine each bit of text on your landing page as a billboard.

If a mistake is made it will truly stand out!

09. Leverage Online Stores With Videos

Videos are always the most stimulating form of media and will really give you the chance to highlight the best parts of your products. It’s wise to invest in having a professional video made that conveys the personality of your online stores and possibly additional videos for each of your featured products.

Videos are entertaining, visually engaging, and drastically underused to convert leads.

10. Best Shopify Stores Have The Best CTAs

Depending on what your goals are for the page, you need to have a clear CTA that matches these goals. Use visual cues to lead visitors to the intended place and use words like “Now” and “Start” to create urgency.

Shop the Sale, Come on in, Sign up: 3 effective CTAs

11. Use a countdown timer to create urgency

If you’re having a temporary promotion, make sure to use a countdown timer so you’re visitors are aware. There is nothing more persuasive than the awareness that these deals will be unavailable at some point in the future.

If you’ve ever watched a venture investment program like Shark Tank or Dragon’s Den, you’ve likely seen the situation where an entrepreneur receives an offer, but it is withdrawn when the pitcher is not immediately decisive or takes too much time. The countdown clock is the eCommerce psychological equivalent to that scenario.

12. Be Supportive with FAQ Page

Even if you have great response times to your customers questions, the ultimate goal of your store is to convert that lead immediately, right when he steps on your door,

If the visitor has a question and needs to contact you or address other support systems it vastly increases the potential that that individual will not be returning to buy.

Include a quality FAQ on the landing page so the user can solve the problem for themself. This will increase user-friendliness and also improve trust based on your transparency.

13. Calculate The Length Of Each Page

A longer or shorter page does not definitively create higher conversion. It’s all dependent on the content on the page and the type of person that will be visiting.

Ideally, each page should play an impactful role in propelling customers farther into your online store's customer journey or funnel.

To determine the best length for your landing page, consult the analytics from the other pages on your Shopify store to figure out which pages perform best for which function and then assess the length and style of those pages to decide which is most suitable.

This checklist will surely help you optimize your landing pages. As each Shopify store is unique, it’s impossible to identify the perfect landing page for each one, but all the best Shopify stores experience trial and error to arrive at where they are today.

Being attentive to the behavior of your customers, you will be increasing conversion in no time.

We will continue to update the Shopify Landing Page Checklist with new tips going forward. For now, let dive into what we promised: Best Shopify Stores