Shopify Impulse Theme: A Complete Review & All You Need To Know

June 17, 2024

January 5, 2022

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6 min read

There are tons of premium themes available in the Shopify Theme Store, each promising to provide you with an attractive store full of desirable features. If you’re choosing to invest in one, you’ll want to be sure that it will equip you with everything you need to get your store up and running. This is what makes the Impulse theme a popular choice for many eCommerce merchants. In this article, we’ll run through the features of the Shopify Impulse theme, provide an analysis on them, and identify which type of businesses would benefit the most from it.

About the Shopify Impulse Theme

Impulse is a premium Shopify theme created by the highly skillful Archetype developer team. To create this theme, Archetype thoroughly researched Fortune 500 retailers to decipher the best features businesses required from an online store to help them sell effectively. This has worked wonders in helping them to achieve a well-equipped and well-received Shopify theme with 96% positive feedback from over 600 reviews.

It is used by over 30,000 stores including Kappa USA, Juicy Couture and Supply. The theme costs $310, but you can try it out for free and pay once you are ready to publish your store.

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What Features Does the Impulse Theme Have?

The Impulse theme is jam-packed with features to help Shopify merchants sell their goods in a user-friendly way.

Mega Menu

For stores with a vast inventory and many collections, this theme comes with mega menu support. The menu can be organized into multiple, succinct layers so that it is not overwhelming for shoppers to browse. Images can also be added above each sub-collection, providing more context for visitors and showcasing your best products. Moreover, if you are making use of sub-collections, a customer can view them when clicking on the main menu of a collection in the navigation bar.

Strong focus on visuals

The Impulse theme places great focus on high-quality images, so you’ll be able to include edge-to-edge hero banners that really engross customers. To make it more captivating, you can make use of the parallax effect or even have a video as your hero banner.

Promotions and customizations

Another focal point of this theme is promotions. There are six promotion types to prominently display your best offers on the homepage, collection pages, product pages, or as a footer. This includes medium-sized tiles, simple banners, and large images with text boxes. These layouts are all customizable so merchants can have them look exactly as they want. You can also set up custom timing to display up-to-date promotions all over your store with ease.

The customization doesn’t just stop at promotions. The content sections on the homepage and product pages can be adapted to your heart’s desire. You can up the engagement levels of your store with the content your customers most care about precisely where you want it to be. From testimonials and reviews, to video heroes, animations, slideshows and more.

Easy journey from discovery to purchase

Moving on to products, Impulse has included some great features that make browsing for products a hassle-free experience. Merchants can better help their customers find the right products for them with basic search and filter functionality. There is also a Quick View feature that allows customers to view product information, select their size and add to cart or buy instantly without any page reloads.

Within the product page, shoppers will find color swatches to help them easily choose their preferred variants. But a particularly cool function of this is to match product images with the chosen variants. For example, when you pick a specific color, the product images automatically change to show images of the item in that color only. You can also include shipping information, size charts and low stock warnings on a product page.

To make the journey to purchasing a breeze, the Impulse theme includes a cart drawer feature. This is an overlay that slides in when a customer adds an item to their cart. This provides a much more pleasant experience for customers. The cart draw helps not break the shopping flow of a customer as they never leave the page they are on when they add to cart.

Shopify OS 2.0 update

Impulse also includes the OS 2.0 update with 20+ sections everywhere, product sales points & metafields, multiple landing, product, and collection templates, and more.

The theme comes in three different styles; Modern, Clean and Bold. Let’s take a quick look at them to see how the features come into action.

Modern - A Visually Captivating Style

As you’ll realize with the Impulse theme in general, the Modern preset is very visually focused. You are immediately drawn to the edge-to-edge hero slideshow at the top of the page that disappears with an impressive parallax effect to reveal even more, large, high-quality image tiles for promotions, and medium-sized ones for collections.

With the vision of catering to high volume stores, this style incorporates a mega menu to help break down larger categories and subcategories into digestible chunks. The banner beneath the menu can be used to display different promotions, delivery and returns information which rotates after a few seconds. There’s also a Top Picks section on the homepage for brands to feature their most highly rated products.

Clean - A More Minimalist Style

This style has a simpler feel with the header overlaying the hero image. The parallax effect is used here again. But this time, there is more focus on products rather than promotions with a mixture of tile sizes.

A mega menu style is only used for the general Shop menu option, whilst the others make use of a dropdown style. A cool feature here is how the header banner changes as you scroll through the page. Beginning with a simple overlay to then a sticky white header to continue with the clean feel as you move from an image background to a white one.

Bold - Amped-up Visuals

With this style you can take your visual storytelling to the next level. This time, the hero content is a video, allowing for more scope when it comes to conveying your brand image or showcasing your products to the fullest.

The parallax effect is used in a more encapsulating way, being the vessel for scrolling from one banner image to another.

The menu overlays the video and makes use of the mega menu style, however, it is not a sticky menu so the homepage is more of a browsing tool. The background in this style is black resulting in a more gutsy feel when compared to the other styles.

What’s Great About the Impulse Theme?

A highlight of this theme is that it provides a lot of features necessary for running a larger store that you’d typically need the best free Shopify apps for, like a mega menu.

You can also upgrade your search and filtering capabilities without compromising the look and feel of your store thanks to Impulse’s integration with Boost Product Filter & Search. With this app you’ll be able to include filters by tag, filters by metafield, and promote specific products in search results.

Try Free Now

With the theme being so image and video heavy, you would be right to be worried about the speed of your Shopify store. Archetype has made sure this isn’t an issue as Impulse is optimized for speed so larger images or videos won’t weigh it down. We tested this using GTmetrix and it passed with flying colors scoring an A grade.

Additionally, the Impulse theme is optimized for mobile, equipped with several custom mobile layouts, which is great as over 70% of retail sales come from mobile. The edge-to-edge hero visuals condense nicely onto mobile, the tiles display singularly for medium-size and as pairs for the smaller ones, and you get an expandable hamburger menu void of images. This all works to retain the chic and organized feel of the theme regardless of the device used.

There’s also extensive documentation covering an array of common questions and problems should you run into any difficulties. What’s more, there are many reputable external agencies that provide customization services for this theme, so even the non-tech-savvy can enjoy bespoke features.

What Does the Impulse Theme Lack?

Despite the extensive documentation, for anything outside of what it covers, you’ll need to complete a support form. There is no customer support chat available. It is worth noting, however, that the Archetype team do have a quick response time.

Also, despite there being great scope for customization, this is limited to just the homepage, collections, and product pages. Other areas of your store, such as FAQs and About Us, can not be customized.

Who Is The Impulse Theme Suited For?

This theme is a good choice for many types of stores. However, it is most suited towards large store owners who need loads of advanced features, and brands that place an emphasis on visual storytelling. You get lots of capabilities right out of the box and plenty of customizations. This is also a great theme for store owners who want to get up and running quickly, and retain control over the look and feel of the store without extensive knowledge of coding.

Take a look at some of the Shopify stores using the Impulse theme:

Kappa USA

Penny Skateboards

Vance & Hines

To Conclude

The Impulse theme is one of the most popular themes on the Shopify store thanks to its aesthetically pleasing look and robust features. Whilst it may be on the pricier side, we think this theme is totally worth the investment.

We hope this review has been of use to you and has made the task of choosing a Shopify theme easier.

Doki Nguyen

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Content Marketing Specialist

January 5, 2022

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6 min read

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