Choosing your store theme before your Shopify launch isn’t something to take lightly. You have many options with nearly the same features, but not all themes will work on your store.
Choosing wrong can be a major setback, especially since you’ll have to redesign your store to fix it.
Free themes are almost never recommended, but is Shopify Supply an exception?
What is Shopify Supply?
Shopify Supply comes directly from Shopify, and it offers a clean design that’s easy for your users to navigate; it’s particularly good for larger inventories since you can add over 50 products and 6 collections.
You have 2 different styles, Light and Blue, and they differ in their palettes and fonts.
You can show 6 collections below your slideshow on the homepage, as well as a featured collection under it for best-sellers and promotions. You can do the same with specific categories.
The Light theme only let you show 4 collections on your home page and 1 featured one below it.
However, both styles are fully customizable, and it’s quite hard to clutter your pages.
Features
Large catalog
You can add way more products than what’s allowed by most free themes, which often cap at 50.
Therefore, it’s an excellent choice for entrepreneurs with larger inventories, which makes it great for fashion-related stores and even phone accessories with lots of variety.
Featured collections
Again, free themes tend to limit how many collections you can showcase with your home page. Shopify Supply raises that bar with 6 collections, which lets your customers purchase on your site a lot easier.
Filtering collections
You can also enable your customers to check the elements they want to filter. That way, they can focus on prices they can afford, brands they prefer, and a lot more.
Slideshows
Finally, you can add several images for your slideshow on the home page. Unfortunately, you’re limited to images, so don’t expect to add videos.
Another issue with this theme is that you can’t place links to send your customers towards specific collections or products.
Backend features
Customizable sections
You can set how your home page sections look. You can remove featured collections if you don’t want do display them.
You can also establish how many product rows you want to show, and your footer can be customized to fit your needs.
Customizable slides
You can play with the amount of slides for your home page, but note that the slider isn’t full-screen.
Similarly, you can set the frequency at which your want your slides to change.
SEO
You can change your meta title and description to optimize your store when search engines go through thousands of results, finding and indexing yours.
Drop-downs
You can activate these from the menu, and they’re great for organizing your items into categories.
Your visitors can also navigate your website seamlessly, and they can go straight to what they’re interested in.
For instance, you can set a main category like “footwear” and display sub-categories under this one like “sandals”, “sneakers”, “heels”, etc.
Business information
Finally, you can link your social media pages directly to your store. You just need to paste your profile’s URL into the settings for the theme, and it’ll integrate them automatically.
That way, your customers can check out your social media presence with a single click. You can also offer more information like an “About” page, shipping info, policies, and even your blog.
You always want to provide as much information as you can to ensure the best experience.
Advanced features
Header
You can set your header to show the features you want. These can be logos or even simple messages. You just need to click on your Sections tab, header, choose the menu, and save.
Footer
The footer is the best place to leave the relevant information regarding your business. You should add your “about” and “contact” pages here. The same goes for your shipping, refunds, and returns policies, payment options, and email sign-up forms.
You just need to go to “Themes” under “Online Store” on your admin interface. There, click on Supply and then Customize before heading to Sections. Here, you want to click on the Footer option and choose which features you want displayed here. Then, just save.
Payment icons
As mentioned, you can show the payment options on your footer. You can show their icons so that your customers are aware about which options they have for paying.
Setting these up is also very easy. Just click on the icons for your accepted payment options and your theme will show them automatically.
Product pages
Here’s where your customers will see the information they need before they buy an item. You can add discounts and show how much money they’d save if they’d bought the product. Other Shopify themes (even paid ones) will have you installing an additional app for that.
Another great feature here is that you can zoom on the images by hovering your cursor over any area of the image – similar to how Amazon’s zoom works.
You can display how many items you have left in stock; your customers will get to see if they still have a chance to get them. More than just helpful, it’s a great way to create a scarcity sensation.
There are several more features you can leave on your product pages, like sharing on social media, reviews, dynamic checkouts, and related products.
To edit these pages, you just need to go into your Themes tab and Product Pages. There, click Sections and then Product, where you can check which settings you’d like to display on your product pages. Once done, save.
Advantages
First, let’s get the obvious out of the way: the product is 100% free. You won’t have to pay anything other than your Shopify subscription to access all the features from this theme.
The theme doesn’t sacrifice customization for this benefit, either. You can fully customize most elements in the theme to have them fit the identity and style of your brand. The same goes for responsiveness, which makes it one of the rare free themes that are fully mobile responsive.
You can also have your customers subscribe their emails by having a sign-up form display on your store for your newsletter. You can also offer different benefits in exchange of emails, like discounts and even gifts, to entice your customers to enter your mailing list.
The best part is that this form is very subtle, so you won’t have to worry about annoying your customers with pop-ups and distractions from their shopping experience.
You can also integrate product reviews to add the opinions from customers who have bought in your store earlier. This is a great way to boost trust for new clients – and even create recurring customers.
Finally, this theme comes from the Shopify team itself. That means that you have access to a dedicated developer team that will keep it updated and always working 100% with the platform.
Also, since it comes from the same people behind Shopify, you won’t have to worry about theme updates clashing with Shopify updates and vice-versa
Conclusion
If you check customer reviews, you may find 2 common issues with the theme:
- Older browsers won’t load the theme properly, and features like drop-downs won’t work.
- The theme might be a bit harder to customize to your own needs due to the same coding language for Shopify.
However, these problems aren’t really large, especially considering it’s a free theme and how these problems are also present on many premium options.
The benefits from this theme largely outweighs those issues.
You’ll often see people saying you should stay away from free themes, and I mostly agree, but this is definitely an exception. It’s a free theme that stands comfortably with many premium candidates.
But, if you are interested in taking your Shopify Store to the next level and don’t mind getting a Premium Theme, I highly recommend you check out eCom Turbo which is one of the highest converting themes out there. You can read my eCom Turbo Review here on my blog.
