Shopify Minimal Theme Review: The Less Is More Design To Sell More!

Written by Franklin Hatchett

Our goal at EcomElites is to help readers get the information they need, we partner with companies to help bring you that information. If a purchase or signup is made through our partners, we receive compensation for the referral. Learn More

Some themes were designed to be bold and daring, while some say so much more being less.

Web designs that don't have a lot of content are those that capitalize on minimalist art.

An example of this is the Shopify Minimal theme, which provides three designs, that focus on putting as little clutter on your store as possible.

This theme is designed to be a “less is more” theme.

In this Shopify Minimal theme review, we will try to find out what the theme is best used for. We will look at how to operate it at a basic level and what benefits you get from using it.

I would also look at choosing your theme wisely because you can't really change it once you have setup your store.

After uploading all your products and pages, and you decide to change them, you will start from scratch.

What this means is that you will re-upload everything again. Having said this, you must carefully review the themes you are considering.

Think carefully how they will complement the products for your Shopify store and once you have made a decision, there is really no turning back.

Free Minimal Shopify Theme

The Minimal Shopify theme is built by Shopify and its one of the free themes that new drop shippers can use. The theme has three styles, and these are Vintage, Fashion, and Modern.

The Vintage uses a flat white background. The sliders occupy roughly 60% of the area where a bold slider should be.

The slider is immediately linked to the blog, where you can share updates and tips to your customers. If you want to run a blog, you can change this.

Right after the blog is two rows of your products, and below that is a single product that you want to highlight.

The Fashion style is made to show a lot of photos to promote your products.

The slider occupies a larger horizontal space than the Vintage and right below slider are the different collections.

Below the collections are several areas where you can highlight individual products, or you can put a map that shows your store’s physical location.

The Modern style combines the features of the Vintage and Fashion styles.

It has a short slider, but it allows you to create collections and put them right under the slider. In the Modern style, you can put up to eight collections on your home page.

With three styles, you have a good selection of how you want to show your products. If you are aiming for a really minimalist design, the Vintage style is a good choice.

But if you want provisions from various collections, the Modern style is what you should be gunning for.

Best Minimal Theme Features

Let us now take a look at the features that you can expect from the Minimal theme for Shopify.

These are important components that your customers can see and you have to decide if these features can deliver what you are looking for.

Slideshow – the different styles allow you to put several product images, banners, or announcements in slideshow format. The good thing about the slideshow is that you can put clickable buttons which will take your customers to your desired page

Home Page Video – Minimal is one of the few themes that allow you to embed a video right at your home page.

If your business is one that is best marketed with videos, you can take advantage of this feature.

All you need is the link to your YouTube or Vimeo video so you can embed it in your home page.

Product Image Zoom – if you have shopped on Amazon or eBay before, you would have noticed that the images zoom in if you hover your mouse on top of it.

This theme has this feature. This is great, as this allows your customers to see the minute details of your products.

Product Filtering – if you use this theme, you can set up filtering options to make it easy for your customers to narrow down their search. In it, you can create categories, brands, prices, and other groupings.

If you are selling cameras, the customer only has to check some boxes, like Nikon and Canon, and your website will only show products from these brands.

Show Related Products – a good marketing ploy is to show products relate to what a customer is currently looking at. All big e-commerce stores like Amazon, eBay, and AliExpress have this feature.

On this theme, your store will automatically show similar products, making your customer aware that he has other options.

So, what we have here is a total of five features, all of which will definitely help you market your products.

That's not it, this theme has plenty of other features!

Home Page Customization – what this means is that you can choose to add or remove some elements of the homepage. If you do not want to have a footer, then you can take it off. It is also your choice if you want to show a map of your location or not.

Mobile-friendly – the theme is responsive, and will automatically adjust to any mobile device. As the servers detect that a customer is viewing your online store via a mobile device, the theme’s look and functionalities will adjust to mobile mode.

Color Palettes – the theme has a pallet of colors that you can toggle to change the background, link highlights, border lines, and so much more. Apart from it, you can also change the font styles.

Search Engine Optimization – each web page and product page have SEO built with it. What this means is that you can edit the tags, descriptions and page titles according to what search engines love. Use keywords in these areas to make your site searchable.

Footer – this is the part of the page where you can put important documents like your refund policy, how your customers can contact you, and more. A footer is an important segment of any website, as this is where you can put legal documents that have nothing to do with marketing.

So, these are just five of the most important backend features that you can benefit from. What you have to do now is think of ways where you can maximize these functionalities.

How To Modify The Minimal Theme

Now, we will show you some of the ways you can modify your online shop if you use Shopify Minimal theme.

Here are some of the features and how to use them to make the theme match your store’s personality.

Header – you can customize your header if you log in to your Shopify store and follow this path.

Online Store > Themes > Minimal> Customize > Theme Settings > Header

What you can do with this is to add your custom logo, which will give your website a professional look.

You must upload the appropriate image size, which is 450 x 200 px.

This is also the section where you can put a message that customers will immediately see. This message can be a slogan, an announcement, or an invitation.

Product Page – to get to this page, you have to follow this path:

Online Store > Themes > Minimal> Customize > Theme Settings > Product Page

This is not the area where you upload a new product.

This is where you make adjustments to the settings. For example, you can enable social media sharing.

If you do this, all product pages will allow customers to click on the social media icon so they can share your products on their pages.

Slide show – after loading your images, you have the capacity to change how the slide show behaves.

To do this, go to Online Store > Themes > Minimal> Customize > Theme Settings > Slide Show.

Once you are in this section you can adjust several items such as slide height, rotation frequency and time gap, text size, button style, content and where they lead to, and slide headings.

Video link – toggle this area by going to Online Store > Themes > Minimal> Customize > sections > video.

What you can do is embed either a YouTube or Vimeo link.

What happens is that once the link is activated, your website will create a video panel like as if they are on YouTube.

They play the video or pause it, adjust the sliders, sounds, and also share it on social media.

Featured Collection – this is a part of the website where you can show several products that belong to a category called Feature Collection. You can add and remove products here at any given time, even of the products already belong to a different collection.

To go to this setting, you have to follow this path: Online Store > Themes > Minimal> Customize > Sections > Featured Collection.

Here, you can adjust how many rows of products you want to show. You can also show or hide the name of the product vendor.

You also have the option to show all products that are already sold out.

Advantages When Using This Theme

Now, let us take a look at how you can benefit from the theme.

In this section, let us review the advantages of using the Minimal theme for Shopify.

Newsletter – the theme has a provision where you can ask your site visitors to give you their email address. Once you get the email addresses, you can send campaign materials, updates, promotions, and so much more.

The subscription is placed at the bottom of the theme.

Use good marketing text to entice your consumer to enroll such as giving free eBooks, free tips, or coupon codes after subscription.

Free – the theme is free to use, there is no monthly subscription fee. You can also rest assured that the updates that come with the theme from time to time are all free of financial commitments.

Blog – the theme allows you to write blog posts, then publish them. You can share these blog posts through your social media channel, and use it to invite people to come to your online store.

Some themes do not have an option for a blog. You should consider this a bonus because it can help you drive traffic to your Shopify store.

Customer Feedback

In this Shopify Minimal theme review, we also want to see what users have to say. The theme holds a rating of 88% positive reviews out of 72 people who bothered to rate it.

Let us take a look at some negative feedback here:

Social Media Icons – social media icons sometimes do not work and are replaced with numbers.
Colors are not changing – the colors you choose do not reflect on your website.

So far, this is only minor negative feedback about the theme.

In fact, there are only four people who rated it badly.

In our opinion, these problems are easy to fix. All it takes is to disable the social media icons and then re-activate them.

Also See: Brooklyn: Is The Most Popular Free Theme Good?

Both of these are fixable, as you can easily contact customer support to fix any glitch or bugs.

These two issues should, in no way, affect the quality of your customer’s experience upon navigating the site.

Conclusion

Overall, we will rate this theme only 3.7 stars out of 5 stars. It meets basic expectations, but there is something that is lacking in the theme.

While it is true that the Minimal Shopify theme is one of the best free themes out there, it pales in comparison to the others like the Venture, Brooklyn, and Supply themes because there is too much white space in the Minimal theme.

It also doesn't give you the option to combine a huge slider with lots of collections.

You need to choose only one because the styles are built differently.

Despite this, it is still a highly-recommended theme.

It is easy to use, and those that are just starting out in their business can spend more time marketing than creating a website.

You Might Also Enjoy