Get Your Section Game On

Supercharge your theme with sections and get bonus superpowers over your store’s content along the way.

Why sections?

Sections can be the difference between a good theme and a killer theme. So what are they? In a nutshell, sections are the individual puzzle pieces that come together to form the picture of your theme, making customisation simple and keeping features that would otherwise be complex, easy to maintain.

Out of a nutshell, sections are the building blocks upon which almost any feature in a theme can be built; giving merchants access to settings and options that can be tweaked using the built-in theme editor in your Shopify admin. With this control, merchants can avoid having to use a developer or resorting to apps to implement some specific features. These settings can help dramatically when uploading content such as images, especially when creating layouts with repeating blocks of content.

But wait, what about theme settings?

Sections differ from standard theme settings in a number of ways, in the simplest form, sections are sets of page-specific options that affect content that’s currently on the page. In contrast, theme settings are global options that affect the entire theme. If you're interested in more technical section jargon, check out Shopify's section documentation.

 

Into the wild

Announcement Bar

An announcement bar is a sure-fire, unobtrusive way of getting quick messages out to customers while they browse your store. By building this into a section, we were able to streamline the process of creating store announcements. We also added the ability to create multiple messages and show them one-by-one, keeping the clutter down and the readability up. Merchants can create as many announcements as needed using blocks, a built-in feature to manage content in sections, and set up custom settings such as colours, links and icons for each one.

Featured Products

This featured products section lives on the homepage and shows a curated collection of products. While it may appear to be a simple feature on first glance, the power of this little gem comes to life when we dive into the section settings. Inside the theme editor, merchants are given a range of settings from tweaking the text on the page to curating which and how many products are displayed. Another great feature of this section is the ability to display products as a slideshow, keeping content on the page dynamic, even for returning customers.

Badges

Ever wanted to make a product in your store stand out? Giving products in a collection a badge to show that they’re “New” or “On Sale” sounds like it should be easy, but unfortunately for most themes, unless you’re uploading custom product images with photoshopped badges on them, you’re out of luck. Enter the product badges section. With the badges section, giving a collection item a badge is as simple as adding a product tag. Create new badges with custom text, colours and positioning, and best of all: badges can be applied to multiple products using the bulk product editor.

Popups

Used correctly, popups are a great way to inform customers about new products and offers. They can highlight almost anything on a store which is one of their biggest advantages, but this strength is also a weakness if they’re less than ideal to update. Need a popup newsletter form? How about an offer that only shows on the product page and appears after 10 seconds? Thankfully this popup section has got you back! Using section blocks, adding multiple popups each with it’s own set of conditions determining what and when to show is a cinch. Just make sure to hold back sometimes and let your customers browse your store without being bombarded!

Size Charts

So, you’ve just bought those awesome new kicks on an online store and you can’t wait to get them on your feet, but what’s even worse than the wait? Putting them on and realising that they’re one size too small. Don’t you wish you could try them on before you buy? Well… we’re not quite at that level of Virtual Reality yet, but a size chart would be pretty handy in this situation wouldn’t it? Now, your customers won’t be denied fitting into their awesome kicks ever again. Our size charts section allows for simple creation and management of charts for all kinds of products by uploading chat graphics and adding notes for each product type. What’s great is that this section uses the same product tag system as the badges section, meaning it’s simple to add size charts to multiple products using the bulk product editor.

Lookbook

Lookbooks are the go-to medium to show off seasonal apparel styles for online stores, and you can often see why. Photography is one of your most effective tools to communicate the look and feel of your products to potential customers. Keeping a lookbook up-to-date with each season or style is integral to it’s impact, especially on returning customers who are looking for something fresh and new. Our lookbook section, which uses blocks, makes managing lookbook content super straightforward, presenting images in a simple slideshow that’s compatible with all device sizes. It’s also easy to adjust other settings settings such as slideshow autoplay speed so you can keep your lookbook finely tuned.

Regions

Selling across borders is one of the huge advantages of an online store. Anyone with an internet connection can browse and purchase your products from the comfort of their couch. Sounds like a flawless shopping experience, however multi-region selling presents it’s own challenges. Which currency should I use? Which product should I sell to which region? Creating a custom storefront for each region is time consuming and costly and how do you know which particular regions to spend time customising? Thankfully, our regions section is coming to your multi-region rescue. We made it super simple to add custom settings for specified regions, set local currencies as the default and add region-compatible products automatically to the cart. Best of all, most of the process happens in the background: when a customer visits internationally, they’ll automatically see prices in their local currency and a flag in the header allowing them to switch to a different region at any time.

Out of the wild

The possibilities are endless, some other sections for your next store could be:

• Hero slideshows
• Featured articles
• Featured videos
• Calls to action
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Galleries
• Social feeds
• Custom contact forms

Game on?

Sections give you the power to set up your theme the way you want it to be. Along the way, they can also add some jaw dropping features that give your online store the edge it needs to stand out in the world of commerce. Save time when small tweaks are needed by quickly adjusting settings yourself, come out of the initial theme building process with a store that allows for more flexibility later on.

Have an idea for your next online store theme? Want to spruce up an existing theme with some new functionality? Talk to us about upping your game with a section-based theme.