How to Have a Portfolio Website AND a Shop (With Showit & Shopify)

Web Design

Websites fall into two main categories: marketing websites and e-commerce websites. Here’s what those are:

Marketing websites can:

  • Be used primarily for educating their customer about their services
  • Show off the company’s work in a portfolio
  • Be a place for potential clients to inquire

While e-commerce websites can:

  • Allow users to place items in their cart and check out
  • Allow the business to track inventory and manage/fulfill their orders

But what if you’re a creative, service-based business (my people!) who wants to have a section of their business be e-commerce while needing a main marketing website to show off their work?

Enter, the dream team: Showit (or the marketing website platform of your choice) and Shopify. Showit is a beautiful, easy to update drag and drop website builder that gives my studio the flexibility to design the website of your dreams, while Shopify (in my opinion) is the industry standard for e-commerce websites.

Want a beautiful place to house your interior design portfolio but also open a furniture store? Showit for your marketing site, Shopify for your store. How about a site to educate your clients about your coaching services, but you also want a digital download or masterclass shop? Showit & Shopify.

Connecting the two together is simple and seamless – oftentimes, your clients won’t even know that they’re landing on a different URL when they navigate from your marketing site to your shop and back again. We simply build both sites with the same brand identity, colors, font system, and photography style (the power of a good, cohesive brand!) and then link each site in the navigation. So your main marketing site would have a link called “Shop,” which would link to Shopify, and your shop would have a link to “Our Work” (or something similar) which would link to your Showit site.

I’ve seen this done time and time again, especially in the creative service space, because Shopify is unmatched when it comes to ecommerce, but doesn’t typically have the design freedom or beautiful gallery support that we can get from Showit (unless you’re spending an arm and a leg on custom development).

Curious about what building your company’s site on Showit & Shopify could look like? I’d love to hop on a quick free call with you, even if you’re not ready to book yet and are just collecting information. You can inquire right here!