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Shopify Ride Theme: A Dynamic Theme For Sports Businesses

November 30, 2023
Written and researched by experts at AvadaLearn more about our methodology

By Sam Nguyen

CEO Avada Commerce

This article will show everything you need to know about the Shopify Ride Theme, its features, pros and cons, and how to try and publish it.

Key Takeaways

  • The Shopify Ride Theme is a free, customizable option packed with advanced features such as quick setup, high-resolution images, convenient page navigation, promo banners, etc., to help transform your store’s appearance and boost sales.
  • It’s perfect for Shopify store owners with a limited budget seeking a dynamic website in industries like sports equipment and sportswear, fitness and more.

What Is Shopify RideTheme?

The Shopify Ride Theme, designed specifically for Shopify stores by Shopify itself, offers a dynamic and fashionable design. This unique and engaging theme delivers an extraordinary website experience. The greatest advantage is that this impressive theme is absolutely FREE in the Shopify Theme Store, making it a perfect choice for Shopify store owners operating on a limited budget. 

The theme comes with an innovative and flexible layout, sleek, sports-centric look and feel, which will best suit businesses in sports industries, such as sportswear, sports equipment, and health products. 

What Is Shopify RideTheme?

The Shopify Ride theme provides several helpful features for store owners. These include high-resolution media for a detailed view of products, a mega menu for effortless navigation, and cross-selling and product recommendations to increase sales. It also offers a quick buy feature for a smooth purchasing experience, and promotional banners to spotlight special offers and deals.

7 Features That Make Shopify Ride Theme Perfect For Sports Stores

High-resolution Images & Video For Visual Storytelling

The Shopify Ride theme offers a robust feature: the ability to showcase high-resolution images and videos for visual storytelling. This feature is especially beneficial for sports startups and small businesses in the industry. It allows them to create engaging online stores that capture their products’ or services’ excitement and passion.

High-resolution Images & Video For Visual Storytelling

For example, a sports startup selling innovative running shoes can display detailed images and videos of its products in action, helping customers make informed purchasing decisions. This feature enhances brand presence, attracts customers, and drives sales in a competitive market.

Mega Menu

A standard menu can become messy and hard to follow, but the Mega Menu helps you arrange your products neatly into clear sections. Shoppers can easily find what they need by moving their cursor over the menu to view a dropdown list of all categories. This could involve sorting items by sport, brand, size, or equipment type for a sports business. 

For startups or small businesses, this easy navigation can give you a competitive edge against bigger rivals by providing a smooth, easy-to-use browsing experience.

The Shopify Ride Theme includes features that suggest related products – for example, it might propose a helmet when a customer is buying a skateboard, or pair a yoga mat with a yoga ball. These personalized recommendations enrich the shopping experience for the customer and create opportunities for boosting revenue with each transaction.

Cross-selling and Recommended Products

Quick Buy

The Shopify Ride theme’s Quick Buy feature enables customers to skip the usual cart process and go straight to checkout with just one product. This feature can be particularly useful for sports startups and small businesses where impulse buys, like fitness accessories or team merchandise, are common. By speeding up the shopping process, the Quick Buy feature can help cut down on cart abandonment rates and pave the way for faster sales.

Rich Information

The rich information feature offers extensive details about products, shipping, and usage. In the sports industry, customers often require comprehensive information about the products they’re interested in, such as materials, weight, dimensions, and perhaps even usage instructions. The Ride Theme enables sports stores to provide all these crucial details in a clear, accessible format, helping customers make informed purchasing decisions. 

In addition, it allows for detailed shipping information, essential for customers who may need their sporting goods within a specific timeframe. The ability to offer usage information can also enhance the customer experience by guiding them on how to get the most out of their purchase, which can be particularly useful for complex sports equipment or innovative new products.

Rich Information

Product Reviews

Product reviews are an essential part of the Shopify Ride theme. It allows customers to share their experiences and opinions about your products, acting as social proof. For instance, having positive reviews on a new baseball bat could significantly increase its credibility and drive more sales. This builds community and trust in your brand, encouraging more customers to shop with you.

Promotion banners

Lastly, the Shopify Ride theme allows you to create promo banners highlighting sales, discounts, or new product launches. This feature can be used for a small sports business to publicize an end-of-season sale or introduce a new product line. These banners catch the customers’ attention, encouraging purchases and effectively communicating critical updates about your brand.

Shopify Ride Theme: Pros and Cons

ProsCons
  • Free to use
    Captivating design and flexible layout
  • Supports high-resolution images and videos
  • Provides helpful marketing and conversion features
  • Optimize for mobile
  • User-friendly interface
  • No built-in timers tool
  • No live chat support
  • Delay loading speed sometimes
  • Who Should Use Shopify Ride Theme?

    The Shopify Ride theme is perfect for:

    • Startups and small businesses who are looking for a quick setup theme with visually appealing designs that effectively showcase services and products.
    • Businesses in the health and fitness industry like fitness centers, gyms, and sportswear retailers.

    How To Try And Publish Shopify Ride Theme?

    To try and publish a Shopify Ride theme, you must follow several steps to ensure a smooth process. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you:

    • Create a Shopify store and log in to the admin panel.
    • Go to “Online Store” and select “Themes.”
    • Browse the “Shopify Ride” theme in the Theme Store.
    • Click “Preview” to see the theme’s design and features.
    • Install the theme by clicking “Add” and confirming the installation.
    • Customize the theme using the built-in editor.
    • Preview and test the theme’s responsiveness and functionality.
    • Click the “Publish” button to make the Shopify Ride theme live on your store.

    Which Shopify Theme Is Better: Ride or Crave?

    The comparison of the Shopify Ride Theme vs. the Shopify Crave Theme is conducted under the following criteria. 

    Feature set:

    • Ride is a distinct, dynamic theme that champions the world of sports. It includes support for editorial content, quick setup, visual storytelling, cart notes, in-store pickups, quick buy, blogs, cross-selling, FAQ page, press coverage, product reviews, promo banners, recommended products, high-resolution images, image galleries, image rollover, image zoom, ingredients or nutritional information, lookbooks, product videos, shipping/delivery information, size chart, slideshow, and usage information.
    •  Crave is an eye-catching theme optimized for shopping on the go. It includes support for quick setup, visual storytelling, cart notes, in-store pickups, quick buy, cross-selling, FAQ page, press coverage, product reviews, promo banners, recommended products, high-resolution images, image galleries, image rollover, image zoom, ingredients or nutritional information, lookbooks, product options, product videos shipping/delivery information size chart slideshow and usage information.
    Feature set

    Design:

    • Ride has a sleek, sports-centric design with a winning combination of a dark background, bold typography, and accent colors that make your sporting goods pop. It also has an innovative and flexible layout with unique page templates and asymmetrical layouts that let you showcase products, teams, and everything in between12. 
    • Crave has a vibrant and playful design with bold colors and distinct shadows that demand buyers’ attention while showcasing your brand’s personality. It is optimized for shopping on the go with mobile-optimized layouts and dynamic checkout options34.

    Documentation and Support:

    • Both themes have extensive documentation and support available through the Shopify Help Center. You can find detailed information on how to customize each theme, including adding and customizing sections and blocks, modifying theme settings, and applying templates to pages. Additionally, both themes are guaranteed to stay up-to-date and work with Shopify’s ever-growing feature set.

    Pricing:

    • Both Ride and Crave are free themes available on the Shopify Theme Store.

    The Verdict: 

    The Verdict

    It is a tie. Both Ride and Crave are excellent free themes with extensive features, support, and customization options. The choice between them ultimately depends on your preference for design and your store’s specific needs. If you are selling sporting goods or want a sleek, sports-centric design, then Ride may be the better choice for you. If you want a vibrant, playful design optimized for shopping on the go, then Crave may be a better fit

    Shopify Ride Theme: FAQs

    The Shopify Ride Theme is highly customizable. You can prepare Ride for your online store by adding and customizing sections and blocks and modifying the theme settings. This allows you to build your online store to suit your business, products, and brand without the need to edit code. The theme also includes a unique design for your “About Us” page, which you can customize by opening Ride in your theme editor, selecting Pages from the drop-down menu at the top of your screen, and clicking About to load the template.
    Yes, the Shopify Ride Theme supports mobile-responsive design. The theme is optimized for a seamless shopping experience on all mobile phones and tablets. This means that the theme will automatically adjust its layout and content to fit the screen size of the device used to view your online store, providing a smooth and user-friendly experience for your customers.
    The Shopify Ride Theme comes with customer support from Shopify. If you’re using the free Ride theme from Shopify, then Shopify support might help you with minor changes to your theme. If you’re on the Basic Shopify plan or higher, then you can use up to 60 minutes of free design support, used in 15-minute increments.
    The Shopify Ride Theme is a free Online Store 2.0 theme from Shopify that is perfect for stores selling sporting goods of any catalog size. While the theme does not have specific features for inventory management, Shopify provides a range of tools that can be used with any theme, including Ride.
    The Shopify Ride Theme is designed to be fast and efficient, providing customers with a smooth and seamless shopping experience. The theme is optimized for speed, with clean code and no deadweight CSS or Javascript files. This means the theme will load quickly, providing customers with a fast and responsive experience. Additionally, the theme is built on the Shopify 2.0 theme architecture, designed to provide the best performance and keep your store up to date with the latest features.

    Ending Words

    The Shopify Ride theme is a fantastic free choice for any Shopify store that wants to make a strong impact online. It has a dynamic and sport-centric design, and you can customize different sections on the homepage and mobile devices. Using the Ride theme, you can create a unique and engaging website that effectively highlights your products and brand.


    Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.