Theme Shopping: Comparing Themes

Love our themes, but having a hard time choosing between them?

Here are a few key differences and some tips on what to consider when theme shopping…

Theme history and changelogs

Out of the Sandbox currently has 7 themes available exclusively for the Shopify platform:

Theme styles

Each theme has several built-in styles which mostly relate to the default fonts and color settings for elements like buttons, links, background colors and more. These are known as styles, but sometimes are also referred to as presets.

• Turbo: Portland, Seoul, Chicago, Florence, Dubai, Tennessee
• Parallax: Aspen, Los Angeles, Madrid, Vienna
• Retina: Austin, Montreal, Melbourne, Amsterdam
• Mobilia: Sydney, Milan, Tokyo, Napa
• Responsive: New York, London, Paris, San Francisco
• Artisan: Barcelona, Phoenix, Victoria
• The Flex theme is unique as it includes all of its demo shops when you purchase the theme! This means, that you can use the all of the sections, content, and images in the demo shops in your own shop as a starting point. The demo shops for Flex are: Swagger, Studio, Nourish, Moda, Techno, Wink, Trending, Fresh, Emporium, Luxe, Glow, Bloom

While these styles are a great starting point, you are of course free to change things up as you wish, once you set about customizing your shop through the theme settings.

Similarities and differences

All of our themes have settings for colors and typography that you can configure as you wish, as well as options for the features, content and sometimes layout of various pages in your shop. But you'll want to pay attention to some of the styling and layout differences between the themes because some of these are not configurable and will be tricky to change without paying for extra development work, so it’s best to choose a theme whose default styling you prefer, especially when it comes to the following:

Header area

Your logo and main menu navigation are part of the header section, and these elements have limited options for their placement. For example, most of our themes have been designed to have the logo display in the far left corner, with the main menu somewhere to the right of it. Currently the only themes that has a built-in option for centering the logo above the main menu are Responsive, Turbo and Flex, so keep your desired logo placement in mind when choosing between the themes.

Drop-down menu styling

The Mobilia and Responsive themes use a hidden 'popout' style, where the 2nd tier submenu only appears when you hover over its parent link in the initial drop-down. On the other hand, in Parallax and Retina the submenus are always visible, with the second tier indented under its parent link:

To help you decide

View the demo shops

We have several demo sites for each theme which are intended to give you a sense of what a shop could look like with a particular theme and style. You can access these from our main theme page, selecting a theme and style and clicking on it. Then, click the "demo" button.

Note that if you don’t see a certain element or feature showcased in at least one of the demo shops for that theme, it may not be available for that theme (but you can always ask us to confirm).

Preview the theme in your own shop

The Shopify Theme Store allows you to install our themes in "preview mode," which is a great way to try a theme on for size, play with the configurable theme settings, and see if you like the way the theme looks with your products, logo, images and other factors. Find out how to preview themes here.

If you'd like to try out Turbo or Flex, you'll need to install our Shopify Theme Updater app. Although this app lets you upgrade your Out of the Sandbox themes, it also lets you preview Turbo or Flex in your store under Apps > Shopify Theme Updater by Out of the Sandbox.

This blog post also contains some excellent tips to keep in mind when shopping for themes and trying them on for size.

See what others chose

Check out our "Featured Shops" lists for each of our themes, and look especially for shops that are similar to your own products or industry for some ideas and inspiration:

• Featured shops using Reponsive
• Featured shops using Retina
• Featured shops using Parallax
• Featured shops using Mobilia
• Featured shops using Turbo
• Featured shops using Artisan

In the end, deciding on a “look” for your shop — which will certainly be influenced by the theme you ultimately choose — is a highly subjective thing, as it really comes down to what you feel will best reflect your own products, brand, market sector, and also what you think will appeal to your main shopper base. So do some research, try some on for size, and go for a theme whose styling and available features meet your particular needs and appeal to you most.

Happy theme shopping!