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Blog / Ecommerce platform guide / 8 Best Shopify Themes for Dropshipping

Ecommerce platform guide

8 Best Shopify Themes for Dropshipping

8 Best Shopify Themes for Dropshipping
Paula Scerbinina

By Paula Scerbinina

12 min read

Dropshipping is a perfect business model if you’re thinking about starting a clothing brand without the hassle of managing inventory, packaging, or shipping. 

When building your dropshipping store, nothing is more important than choosing the right platform. 

From many choices available, Shopify is the leading ecommerce platform for dropshipping business owners. It offers 173 free and paid user-friendly themes with powerful features and beautiful designs. 

In this article, we’ll look into the 8 best Shopify themes for dropshipping and key factors to consider when picking a theme.

What to look for in a Shopify theme for dropshipping

Every year, the number of people using a dropshipping business model on Shopify is growing. 

Why? Firstly, setting up your ecommerce store on this platform is very simple. You don’t need any coding experience and can do it in a few clicks.  

Secondly, Shopify is seamlessly integrated with many solutions to boost your dropshipping business. 

For example, you can connect your store with Printful. This print-on-demand company allows you to design custom products without worrying about order fulfillment (Printful takes care of that automatically).

Thirdly, Shopify offers a large library of dropshipping-ready themes suitable for different products and catalogs of any size. 

But with so many great templates available, it might be hard to pick the best theme for dropshipping. To simplify this process, let’s review the main factors you should consider when selecting the Shopify theme for your dropshipping store.

Customizable design

Because your website is a reflection of your brand, the first important factor of the theme is customizable design, as you should be able to tailor a store to your liking. 

When choosing your Shopify theme, look at its initial default design and layout. If you don’t want to bother with making many changes, pick a theme close to your brand vision and tweak the fundamentals like colors, logo, and copy. 

Another option is to go full in and use powerful Shopify design customization tools to their full capacity, changing the theme’s design almost completely. 

All of that can be done directly from the Shopify theme editor—you can preview your theme and make changes to the theme’s content with the help of easy and intuitive drag-and-drop functionality. 

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Conversion-focused features

The next important aspect of the theme is its functionality. 

While all Shopify themes have similar features to some extent (like the Mega Menu, a Sticky Header, a footer, etc.), each theme has something unique to offer. 

What determines these distinguishing features is the niche they’re suited for. To ensure you choose the best theme for your niche, use Shopify’s industry filter search.

Start by assessing whether your theme has the basic features—like product filtering, currency switcher, Card and FAQ pages, and more. 

Then, think one step further and ask yourself what can help you sell your dropshipping products with a high profit margin and grow your business.

For dropshippers, some of the most important conversion-focused features of the Shopify theme are:

  • Cross-selling option

  • Countdown timer

  • Shipping time estimator

  • Popups (for emails, up-selling, or social proof)

Mobile-friendliness

As mobile traffic has overtaken desktop in the last 6 years, it’s safe to assume that most store visitors will view your page on mobile phones and tablets. 

With most users searching and buying from their mobile devices, making your site responsive (mobile-friendly) is a non-negotiable if you want to compete on the market and drive sales. 

Whatever Shopify theme you choose, make sure it looks, loads, and works well on any device. 

Pick a theme built with a mobile-first approach in mind. Consider features like a mobile-optimized layout, slide-out navigation, and card preview.

To check your theme’s appearance on mobile devices, visit a demo store and switch the view version to mobiles. 

Loading speed

How often have you been discouraged by how slowly a website loads? 

Ensure your customers never have to experience slow loading speeds on your website. With more than 47% of consumers expecting a web page to load in under 2 seconds, a slow loading speed can damage your business, leading to decreased retention and conversions. 

That will make your customers think your site (and brand) is unreliable and low-quality. Also, the loading speed is crucial to Google SEO ranking, which can “punish” your site for its slow loading speed by not showing it on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). 

When picking a theme, analyze the speed of its demo page using a website test speed tool.

SEO-friendliness

Last but not least, you have to ensure that your Shopify dropshipping theme is SEO-friendly. In its essence, this term stands for a website with structure and content that can be easily analyzed, included in a database, and understood by search engines.

While most Shopify themes are built to rank well on search engines, there are many critical factors to consider in your Shopify theme to make sure it’s SEO-friendly:  

  • Various language support

  • Image optimization capabilities

  • Customizable metadata

  • User-friendly navigation

  • Clean, clear, and hierarchical content layout 

Apart from these factors, the previously mentioned responsiveness of the theme and its loading speed are vital elements that contribute to the SEO ranking of your page.

a diagram of a customer experience

Source: BSS Commerce

8 best Shopify themes for dropshipping

Spotlight

Let’s start with Spotlight—a simple yet powerful free Shopify theme, ideal for clothing brands or other businesses operating through a dropshipping model. Spotlight is one of the most popular free Shopify themes thanks to its quick setup, straightforward layout, and handy features. 

Key features

With its minimalistic product-focused design and intuitive interface, Spotlight ensures a pleasant buyer experience by highlighting the most important part of your business: your products. 

It’s enhanced with product filtering and sorting features, advanced search, recommended products, quick buy, stock counter, image galleries, lookbooks, videos, and slideshows. All these features help your products stand out and be remembered. 

Price 

Spotlight is a free Shopify theme and comes at no cost. 

Best for

Unless you run a one-product business, Spotlight is a great choice for you. 

It’s an effective solution for small and large inventory merchants selling fashion within the dropshipping or print-on-demand business model. For example, you can use it to sell your custom t-shirts or custom hoodies. 

Startup

The name of this theme speaks for itself. Startup is designed to serve direct-to-consumer online stores with few products. It’s a neat, modern Shopify theme for dropshipping packed with features that allow you to showcase your products from every angle and build customer trust. 

Key features

Startup is an easy-to-customize theme with a focus on your products. For example, it has a rich product page that allows you to add information on your product’s components, dimensions, and materials. 

Plus, you can play around with different styling and showcase your products in different sizes and colors. 

When it comes to conversion-focused features, Startup has it all—promotional banners, store locator, quick buy and quick view options, and more. To build customer trust, you can also add videos of your product, customer testimonials, reviews, an FAQ section, and more.

Price

Publishing Startup on your website will cost you $220. It’s a one-time payment, and the theme can only be used for a single store. 

As with any other paid Shopify theme, you can preview and customize it in your Shopify admin for free until you decide to publish it.

Best for

This theme is best for a one-product or small inventory direct-to-consumer online store thanks to its design and features that make your product the center of attention. 

Canopy

Canopy is one of the most versatile Shopify themes for your dropshipping business. Suitable for stores with large catalogs, this theme turns your site into a marketplace while keeping its appearance stylish and clean.

Key features

Canopy comes with four different theme styles and is equipped with every tool for the success of your dropshipping business. 

It’s SEO-friendly, fully customizable, and has an impressively fast loading speed regardless of how many products you decide to display on your site. 

With its product-first, highly visual design and handy features such as a sidebar cart, store locator, stock counter, and cross-selling, Canopy gives your site a marketplace look and feel while offering a lot of space to tell your brand story. 

Price

Canopy is a paid theme. It costs $300 to use this theme on your website.

Best for

Canopy is an excellent choice for large ecommerce dropshipping stores with big inventories. 

You can choose your preferred theme style to sell almost everything—from home decor to crafts, gadgets, food, and clothing. 

Warehouse

Warehouse, designed specifically for dropshippers, is another versatile Shopify theme. Great for large catalogs, it allows you to display as many products and categories as you want (in any way you want). 

Key features

Although this theme is designed for high-volume stores with as many as thousands of products, it ensures a seamless shopping experience for your customers and an optimized performance for your site. 

All of this is thanks to features like collection page navigation, enhanced search, recently viewed, and time-based promotions. 

a screenshot of a website

Source: Shopify

 

The theme comes with a clean, not over-saturated, adaptable layout to create a unique display of your products and content. 

In addition, the theme comes with color swatches, so you can play around with colors, tints, gradients, and patterns to stand out with your website.

Price

Warehouse comes with a one-time payment of $300 (charged when you publish the theme on your website). 

Best for

Warehouse is a top choice for large inventory dropshipping online stores selling home, gardening, sport, and electronic equipment.

Dawn

Dawn is another highly popular free Shopify theme for apparel brands of any stock size. It’s a responsive, flexible, and visually rich theme that will captivate your visitors’ attention and help them get your product’s look and feel in full.

a woman holding a bag and a bag

Source: Shopify

Key features

This clean and minimalistic theme creates a visually appealing look with high-quality pictures through features like a slideshow, image rollovers and galleries, a media-forward product page, lookbooks, product videos, a lightbox mode, and more. 

The best part? Its focus on visual storytelling doesn’t impact the page loading speed, regardless of how many images you use. This ensures your website will load fast, giving your customers a seamless user experience.

In addition to rich media options, Dawn comes with a set of powerful features to help you boost conversions and grow your business. 

With Dawn, you can use sitewide cross-selling, create promo banners, feature product reviews, add a quick buy option, feature recommended products, and more. 

Price

Dawn is a free theme—using it on your ecommerce site costs nothing.

Best for

Dawn’s theme presets are a smart choice for apparel brands. 

But the good news is that the theme’s design is easily customizable, so you can tweak it to your liking and align the design and functionality to your brand. For example, Dawn can also suit those selling beauty products, furniture, and home decor. 

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Create and sell custom products online
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District

District is another product-first Shopify theme that is best suited for displaying featured products and collections of high-volume stores with a large catalog.

Its design and layout emphasize the rich imagery and contrasting standalone blocks. Whatever your product is, District can be easily customized to reflect your brand and highlight your product in the best possible way. 

Key features

District comes in 3  theme styles—each with a distinctive color palette and a slightly different layout that will give your dropshipping store a stunning, high-end look. 

Each style is highly visual, allowing you to showcase your product and its story through the most effective approach—visual storytelling. 

a collage of people posing for a photo

Source: Shopify

For marketing and conversion, this theme is equipped with useful features like promo banners, popups, tiles, recommended products, and even badges to build trust with your customers from their first visit.

In addition, District ensures your customers get the most straightforward and pleasant user experience through enhanced product discovery features like breadcrumbs, collection page navigation, product filtering, sorting, and recommended products.

Price

Using this theme for your ecommerce dropshipping website will cost you $220. 

Best for

The theme is ideal for selling clothing, accessories, sports equipment, and cosmetics.

Expression

Expression is one of the most enhanced, sophisticated, and powerful Shopify themes for big dropshipping stores. It has four theme styles, a unique layout design, and a vast collection of features that secure everything—from SEO to responsiveness. 

Key features

Expression comes with a flexible content-led design that includes a customizable sidebar, mini collection cards, and editorial-style image and text columns. 

This puts your content in the spotlight and allows you to compete with other big retailers in your niche.

With its high-powered functionality and comprehensive customization options, Expression works just as well on desktops as on mobiles and is fast to load.

Price

This theme will cost you $240. Like any other paid Shopify store, it has an unlimited free trial.

Best for

This versatile theme suits high-volume dropshipping with large catalogs in almost any industry—clothing, accessories, home, garden tools, art, and entertainment.

If you’re looking for a theme that will support the visual storytelling of your Shopify dropshipping store as much as a longer-form text section, Expression is the way to go.

Masonry

Last but not least, there’s Masonry—a modern, visually appealing, and user-driven theme focused on visual storytelling to put your products at the center of your brand.  

Key features

The most distinguishing thing about this theme is how it creates immersive ecommerce experiences across every device. 

Its fully responsive layout features user-friendly sidebar navigation, fluid grid-based design, custom stickers, and outstanding product and collection display options.

In addition, this theme is packed with multiple features to boost your site’s SEO and increase conversions. For example, there’s predictive search, advanced product filters, promotions (popups, in-menu promotions, tiles, banners), and more. 

Price

While you can enjoy Masonry at no cost within your unlimited free trial, you have to pay $240 if you want to publish it for your online store. 

Best for

Because of its design and features, Masonry is well-suited for high-volume Shopify dropshipping stores in industries like health, beauty, sports recreation, clothing, and accessories.

What is the best Shopify theme for your dropshipping store? 

Shopify offers a lot of useful themes for your dropshipping online store. 

When it comes to the final choice, make sure you pick the theme that supports your brand’s vision (whether you want it to be focused on the product, your brand story, or your customers). 

While all Shopify themes are easy to customize without needing to learn how to code, it’s better to choose a theme design that’s already aligned with your brand.

Apart from the theme’s design, consider its features, loading speed, responsiveness (how it looks on other devices), and whether it’s SEO-friendly. 

What’s your top choice when it comes to picking a Shopify theme for your dropshipping business? 

Read also: 12 Best Free Shopify Themes

author

By Paula Scerbinina on Jan. 23, 2024

Paula Scerbinina

Guest author

A free-spirited creative with a psychology and marketing background, Paula spends her days creating stories for brands and individuals. Her heart belongs to writing, mental health advocacy, and beach volleyball.

A free-spirited creative with a psychology and marketing background, Paula spends her days creating stories for brands and individuals. Her heart belongs to writing, mental health advocacy, and beach volleyball.