17 things I need to see on Shopify homepage + Examples

A homepage is usually the first part of the website your customers see. It should convey what you sell and how that is relevant to potential customers.

An effective homepage will help your customers to find out more about you and your company at a glance, find out what products you offer, and get a notion of how using the products can benefit them, while keeping the page easy to use and navigate.

Here are some of the elements of the Shopify homepage that are essential for any progressive online business.

1. The announcement bar

The benefits of the notification bar are the abilities to display a message throughout the website experience. The popular visible information is related to Black Friday, delivery time, ship fee promotion, and so on. This grows exposure and can make your visitors communicate with your shop better.

Thus, adding a small space to announce this information on the homepage is a great way to raise the customer’s demand. As you can see Dreamland Baby shop informs about their free shipping program in the New Year.

Discount information or current events are usually updated on the announcement bar

2. A well-functioned search bar

If any customer would like to research more deeply information about your business or products, let’s them experience a well-functioned search bar

Thus, it should be simple to access and always visible, providing visitors with the full options to immediately find out the product they intend to see. That’s the reason why it also gives research results even faster. 

 In this example, BrüMate shows their search bar on the top of their homepage. This is also a common position to place a search bar where users firstly see it.

3. A navigation bar

If you have an aim at supporting people to browse your website more effortlessly, designing a navigation bar is a prominent way to make it come true. It is always suggested to place a navigation bar at the top of your website. 

About the navigation menu, it includes internal links. These ones connect to all the pages that show what your visitors can read. As you see the example of Powerblanket, they express their categories in a navigation bar are:

• Products
• Solutions
• Custom
• Lern 
• Blog

Some other pages also mention FAQ, Services, Contact us, etc in the navigation bar.

4. Shopping cart link

Nearly a quarter of shoppers will leave their cart to come back later, sometimes on a different device, to make the purchase.

As a result, your shopping cart should be visible on your site’s homepage as well as all other pages. It’s also useful to highlight the fact that items have already been added to the cart. 

Midori Bikini places the shopping cart icon on the right of the header, next to the search and personal information button. This is also a common position to show this feature. 

5. Promotional banners

In order to capture a customer’s interest from the first sight, using a promotional banner below the navigation is the right way to advertise a big offer or other attractive free-ship programs.

You help your customers concentrate on the highlight information they need first, and then, you can assist them to facilitate buying decisions.

This is an example of a fashion store – FEAT, they use the top homepage’s space to hang their banner with a bold title “new look, same feel”. They want to tell a message of their redesigned products but with the same quality as the previous ones. 

6. Offer bar 

Many people often make mistakes between offer bar and announcement bar on websites, however, their functions are different. The offer bar is a place where retailers can highlight key information, often around delivery and returns, or perhaps current promotions.

As Contra example, they pin their promotional series on offer bars like 10 sizes with a unique cut, free delivery, 90 day free returns and supporting parkrun. These ones help encourage visitors to pay for their products, then, the customer can receive all the benefits from Contra.

7. Popular / Best selling products

By showing clearly what popular products in your store are, the customers can make a decision of which section they want to investigate next.

Not only that, you can present your bestseller products here. The customers would want to know straight away what the best things you are offering them. FELONY CASE store makes a strong impression when investing in big and highlight pictures of their mobile cases.  Not only that, they also classify which style cases match your satisfactions. 

8. Recommended products

If you want your customers to be happier when experiencing a buying journey, and  discover more items, let’s apply recommended products. It can match what your customers extremely expect to their interests and help decline barriers to purchase.

Again, Contra shop uses a bold title as “YOU MAY ALSO LIKE” to make call-to-action. When the customers scroll down your homepage to research in a short time, they really need more than just to buy only one item. Recommended products stimulate customer’s demands. 

9. New-in section

New-in section is a great way to give exposure to seasonal items or new collections you’ve recently added to your catalog.

It’s important to give new products some spotlight on your homepage because visitors are likely to head straight to the ‘new in’ section rather than a specific category.

Examples from Next used the New-in section to highlight the newest products within their store.

10. Recently viewed products

The recently viewed products section is quite unique as it will contain different products based on each individual customer’s site experience and the products they’re checking out.

Examples of Contra display recently viewed sections when visitors click on specific products and scroll down.

11. Inspirational content

What’s more powerful than content that tells your brand story? The best way to do it is by showing inspirational content, enabling influential members of your audience to share their experiences with your business and displaying them on the homepage.

You can also create content that provides exclusive tips, reveals hidden functionalities, or offers helpful user hacks, shortcuts, or personalized offerings that can deepen engagement and help customers get more out of their investment in your brand.

Here’s how Paintvine the paint and wine night service in New Zealand, showcases their site.

12. Social proof: Testimonial, customer reviews, endorsements, trust badge/awards and press

Based on the real feedback or sharing from experienced customers, their appearances are persuasive evidence to gain the trust from new visitors, and that they’ve had a great purchasing journey on the website.

Like the instance from CLOTH & CABIN, all of their testimonials not only have text, but also represent relevant pictures. This leads customers to have reason to believe about their products.

13. Email signup box

It is obvious there are not many visitors who add products to cart for the first time access to the website. That’s why email sign up suggests it is one of the effective ways to create marketing communications. Enhance, you can select and save and build a list of potential customers.

The footer of a website is the popular position of many shop owner’s choice for email signup box, this zone helps to trigger more outstanding messages after a while the users have not interacted with other tabs on site.

There is another common type of signup box – Pop up display. By using this form immediately after visiting a page may decline users’ intention to exit. This is a pop up email box of St.Frank for example, the shop shows a clear promotion for exclusive access to sales, events, and more. Then, they can get personal information from the prospects. 

14. Social media channels

Bringing all of your social media channels together and displaying them in one place keeps your site fresh, gives your audience a reason to visit again, and increases time spent on the site.

If your marketing team updates new content weekly or even daily on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other channels relevant to your business, you should add these channels to your site to show that you’re active online and interacting with your customers and fans regularly.

Example of Liltracker apply social links on the site:

15. Ancillary links

By adding all of the important information in the ancillary links section, you provide your visitors with the quickest way to discover any information about your brand.

Why should you have this section on your site? Because some buyers nowadays are likely to seek out as much information as possible to gain trust in the company before making a purchase, and ancillary links help them do that with just a few clicks.

Here’s how galenleather displays ancillary links on the homepage.

16. Accepted payment methods

Aparted from using credit and debit cards, the customers perhaps seek for different payment methods.  There are various ways to pay for what customers selected after visiting online shops, so they also want to know if they can buy with PayPal or other alternative payment features.

With an understanding-insight ability of customers, online store owners should display these payment symbols at the footer page. So, the customers can recognize how they can pay straight away. OUTTIRE shop applies this instruction for their homepage full of their payment methods. 

17. Live chat

In today’s world, customers don’t want to wait.They also don’t want to be phoning businesses and spending a long time on hold, they want to talk to an agent who can answer their specific questions straight away. So adding a little live chat button to your homepage is a must-have.

To add live chat to your site, you can choose to use a Facebook chat widget or use a general native web chat.

East Meets Dress provides the live chat option for visitors to easily get in touch with them.

Are you ready to start building your Shopify homepage? When you decide to dig a little deeper, new problems will probably come up. Don’t worry, keep going, you will find ways to handle it. 

So, start now! Take inspiration from these elements and build your own homepage today. Remember that you are just a few clicks away from designing your dream store.