When you type "Shopify store" into Google, you want to see. What does a store that really runs look like, one that loads fast, one that makes you want to pull out your card.
Here are examples worth the detour, from global giants to French gems. And what I take from them, as a developer who spends his days inside the code of stores like these.
Shopify is 4.4 million merchants and $94.46 billion in gross merchandise volume in the last quarter of 2024 alone. Behind that number, two worlds that each have something to teach you: the DTC heavyweights and the young French brands on the rise.
What separates a good store from a forgettable one
I open the source code of plenty of stores. The best ones almost always have the same reflexes.
They load fast. Google has shown that 53% of mobile visitors abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to display. A gorgeous but slow store loses half its crowd before the homepage even shows. I've laid out the levers that count in my guide to optimizing a Shopify store's speed.
Their product page does the job: sharp photos, a clear benefit at the top, visible customer reviews, and a buy button you don't have to hunt for. The rest is brand identity. A paid theme won't save you if your world looks just like your neighbor's.
And all of it plays out on mobile first, where the majority of e-commerce traffic lives today.
The global references you can draw from
Gymshark built a community before building a catalog. The fitness brand runs on Shopify Plus and holds enormous traffic peaks on launch days without flinching.
Allbirds bets everything on minimalism and the story around its materials. You land on the product page and understand in five seconds where the wool comes from and why the shoe exists.
Fenty Beauty launched its direct commerce at a global scale on Shopify Plus, with an inclusivity promise you read right from the homepage. Glossier, for its part, remains one of the best-designed stores on the web: editorial, understated, built around its community.
And then there are the brands you don't expect. Heinz set up its first online store in three weeks during lockdown. Red Bull sells its merch on Shopify. When groups of that size choose the platform to move fast, it says something about what it makes possible.
On the French side, the DNVBs showing the way
The French market is far from being left behind.
Le Slip Français migrated to Shopify Plus in October 2023. Shopify turned it into a case study: the eco-responsible apparel brand saw its conversions climb after the switch. A nice proof that a well-run migration shows up in the numbers.
Respire sells natural hygiene products with a clean design, consistent with its eco positioning. Merci Handy goes the other way: an ultra-colorful, joyful world, often cited as the most beautiful Shopify success in France. Two opposite styles, the same rigor on the buying experience.
Stores I've built
The examples above, I didn't make them. These ones, I did.
Mabonatur, a Spanish store, was dragging on mobile. After the performance and technical SEO work, +42% mobile performance. That's exactly the kind of gain you can't see with the naked eye but that shows up in the average cart.
Aum World, a furniture store, got a full redesign: UX, technical SEO, product pages reworked from top to bottom. Faire De La Mode is a jewelry store I launched for the Canadian market. L'Aubalieu, a Swiss cosmetics brand, I pulled out of WooCommerce and rebuilt cleanly on Shopify.
And L'Enjeu RSE Jeunesse, a non-profit, I moved from WordPress to Shopify: site redesign, new features, and a page-by-page redirect plan so it wouldn't lose its rankings in the process.
You can browse the rest of my projects in my work section.
What I take from all these stores
What the good stores have in common comes down to one word: consistency. A clear identity, a speed that keeps up, a buying journey you don't have to think about to finish. A store that loads fast and simply tells you what it sells almost always beats a slick but sluggish one.
If you want to know where yours stands on these points, that's precisely what I look at in my audit: the code, the speed, the journey. I tell you what's holding it back, and how to unblock it.
