“Outstanding!”
“Awesome theme!"
“...chic and aesthetically pleasing...”
That's what people say about the Impulse Theme Shopify, a premium theme created by the accomplished Archetype theme developer.
Whether you have a small number of collections or a store with large inventories, Impulse can still push your brand images with a professional look. It’s a theme with powerful promotion attributes.
Is that true? Is “Impulse” simply just a name, or it can make your Shopify store attractive enough that people would desire to fill up their shopping carts with your products? In today's article, we will walk you through the features, feedback, and 5 real stores using the theme. After reading this, you find out if Impulse is the right theme option for your store.
💡 We meticulously evaluate Shopify themes and apps based on our hands-on experience. Read more about our comprehensive review process and methodology.
Check out Shopify Impulse theme demo here
An Overview of Shopify Impulse Theme
As mentioned from the first start, Impulse is designed by Archetype, which also happens to be the creator of the 2 popular Shopify themes: Motion and Streamline. Archetype’s themes have been powering more than 500,000 stores so far, and the company has worked with such big brands as Kappa, Vogue, Mugo, etc.
Impulse is NOT a free theme. Like most of the premium themes on the Shopify Theme Store, its price is $380 for a one-time purchase. So, if it's a reasonable price for investment according to your business budget, you can totally give it a try.
Who Would Use Impulse Theme?
We have taken a look at some highlight features of Impulse Theme. Hence, here are some merchants that might be interested in using:
- Physical store owners. The theme can support these merchants with useful cart and check-out features such as in-store pickups.
- Fashion and Luxury brands. These businesses can display their products in multiple ways with image galleries, lookbooks, image hotspot, and image zoom.
- Global merchants. Merchants who own a large business and want to scale internationally. The theme that can support with EU translations (EN, FR, IT, DE, ES).
Theme Styles
Shopify Impulse theme comes in 3 styles: Modern, Clean, and Bold. Each style brings you different kinds of feelings and fits well with different stores and industries.
1 - Modern
As you look at Modern in general, there's a certain vibe of a high-end fashion store that comes to your mind. A classic brand logo in the center of the header, multi-level menus, big banners with high-quality images of cool parallax effects, large promotion tiles with tempting discounts, and gift cards CTA buttons.
Everything is put together on the homepage, which creates a great experience of browsing with visually-focused tactics. The Modern style seems to work best with large inventory stores, stores with many collections, and catalogs, especially, clothing and fashion shops.
2 - Clean
The Clean style looks simpler than the Modern one. Again, it still captures visitors with big hero banners, but this time the overlay header does make the store look more “clean" and direct from the top.
The style focuses more on the product visuals and collections. You can see right on the home page, there're direct featured collections or medium-sized and product-focused collection banners. This will help people easily browse your store and choose the collections that suit their tastes.
Related reading: Pipeline Theme Review: The Spiritual Brother To Impulse Theme: Clean, Minimal and Perfect For Fashion Store
3 - Bold
The Bold style attracts people in its own way. The video hero is an outstanding point of this style. The homepage has less text content than the other two. Instead, there're many animated videos and banner sections with parallax effects that enhance the visual browsing experience.
The black background creates a strong and compact impact on visitors' eyes, which keeps them surfing your store for more.
Shopify Impulse Theme Key Features
To create the Impulse theme, the Archetype team thoroughly researched Fortune 500 retailers to figure out and deliver the best features of an online store that help them sell.
Impulse does offer vigorous features for an eCommerce store. So, what are the true factors that this theme can help with sales boosting? Let's take a look at its main features:
1 - Mega Menu List
The dropdown menu of the Impulse theme is another level. Merchants can add layered menu items in the header but it still looks organized and stylish. A cool thing about the feature is you can choose to show the mega menu images, which is outstanding.
If you have a large store with many products and want to sort them out into collections on the navigation bar, Impulse can be a good choice. Specifically, many clothing and fashion stores using Impulse theme often utilize its mega menu capability, even the famous brand like Kappa:
Credit: Kappa USA
2 - Edge-to-edge Hero Banners
Let's be honest here. Most of you would love big banners with high-quality resolution because they're very engaging and bring a great sense of credibility to a website. With the Impulse theme, merchants can freely display huge and full-width slideshows on the home page, add large image with text sections, and set up parallax effects or image focal points of a banner.
Credit: Penny Skateboards
Worry about mobile responsiveness? Impulse allows merchants to choose desktop and mobile slideshow images separately to make sure the mobile version of your site is high converting. You can follow the best image heights, recommended by the theme developer, for both devices with many options.
3 - Promotion Customization
This feature is what makes Impulse different from others, and a true sales booster. Impulse can help you create alluring promotion banners with CTA buttons to support your marketing campaigns.
Archetype truly did a great job when designing this theme because they provide promotion features that merchants can make use of in literally every corner of their stores. You can see promotion grids on the homepage, banner promotions on collection pages, large images with text boxes on product pages, and even footer promotions.
If you can place these promotion tiles in the right place on your site and with smart tactics, people might not even hesitate to make their impulsive buying.
Credit: NanaMacs
4 - Color Swatches
Color swatches is a familiar feature that you can see in many Shopify themes. It helps improve the user experience. Adding color options on the product pages with variant images changing through color selection can help visitors visualize the product better.
With Impulse, you can choose to enable “color swatches” on product pages or collections pages.
Credit: Kappa USA
5 - Product Page Content Sections
This is a powerful feature of Impulse theme. If you want to “spice up" your product page, make it a more compelling place to visitors, the theme supports you with an array of cool content sections.
From image with text, image hero, video hero, text column with images to testimonials, and many more, merchants can flexibly add and place the sections on the product page and give a more exciting browsing experience to visitors.
6 - Collections within Collections
If you choose to show this option, when people click on the main menu of a collection, it will display the sub-collections that you have set up in the navigation section. This can help visitors navigate to other collections easily and increase their engagement with your web store.
7 - Advanced Collection Filtering
With a large inventory store, having a robust collection filter is necessary for a responsive collection page. Impulse offers both sidebar and pop-out filter options. If you focus on showcasing products on the collection page, you can use a pop-out filter to increase the space for your product to shine. Meanwhile, for those who want customers to find the products in the quickest way, having a sidebar menu is a good decision.
Credit: Kappa USA
8 - Video features
Using Impulse theme means that you have multiple options to have a visually stunning web look. Why? They give you many video options from video heros on top of the homepage to video sections both on the homepage and product pages, even the video in product media.
Having animated content sections on your site can make it even more attractive to people and increase the interaction between your potentials and your store.
What do people say about the Impulse theme?
If you look at the customer reviews on the Shopify Theme Store, Impulse theme has more than 90% of positive reviews out of 900+ feedbacks. Customers can’t go wrong, right? There must be something about Impulse that makes people love it so much.
Impulse brings a powerful set of customization features, especially promotion attractions that can make a store look responsive, pleasing and professional.
Another reason is Archetype’s support documents are so helpful and cover both common advanced issues, which can be a great assistance for theme users. Many customers also leave a lot of praises for Archetype's support team.
Impulse theme's pros and cons
We've seen many cool sides of the Impulse theme so far, but to give you a more objective view towards this premium theme, let examine its pros and cons:
Pros:
- It's very modern and cutting-edge
- The theme brings a professional look
- You can have flexible header and footer options
- It offers multiple product page and collection page optimization features
- It's mobile-friendly because there are several mobile custom options
- The support documents of Impulse is excellent
- You can find many agencies with external customization services related to Impulse theme like Hulk App, Exibea, or even popular name like Storetasker or Carson
Cons:
- The theme doesn't have customer support chat.
- With content sections on any page, there are no customized options for adjusting padding and margin for the elements. So if merchants want a flexible design, they must edit the code or use a 3rd-party page builder app like PageFly, for example, to easily drag, drop and customize the elements the way they want.
For more in-depth Shopify Theme Reviews, check out:
- Shopify District Theme: Is It The Perfect Theme For Fashion Niche?
- Booster Theme Review: Is It Worth The Price?
- Shopify Minimal Theme: Pros, Cons & Everything In Between
- Parallax Theme Shopify: Deep-dive Review and Tutorial
- Shopify Venture Theme: The Perfect Starting Free Theme?
- Ella Theme: Does It Have The Features You Need?
- Shopify Dawn Theme Review: Next-Generation Theme Design
What about the loading speed?
We don't want to put the loading speed factor in the pros or cons section because the loading speed of a site doesn't only depend on a theme, but many other reasons like apps, images, network, devices, etc.
According to a report by Rvere, after auditing 83 Shopify themes, Impulse rank #49 among the themes. The index for time to interactive, which is the amount of time it takes to show useful content and respond to users, is 9017ms, a bit higher than the average which is 8485 ms. However, in general, other metrics like First Content Paint or Time to First Byte, and so on are all faster than the average.
PageFly Verdict
Impulse stands out as an exceptional theme, boasting a wide array of features tailored for product showcasing and visual storytelling. This makes it particularly beneficial for merchants in the clothing, luxury goods, and decor sectors, as well as for those who conduct sales in person, where extensive product visibility and robust offline selling capabilities are crucial. In comparison with similar options within the Selling in Person category on the Shopify Themes Store, Impulse's price tag of $380 may seem slightly elevated. In terms of customization, upon a brief examination of its three styles, we've noted potential challenges in making modifications to enhance branding elements such as color schemes.
Nonetheless, the theme is well-equipped with features that enable sellers to create a store that not only presents their products effectively but also aligns with their brand's aesthetic.
Blum Theme: A Compelling Alternative to The Impulse Theme
The Blum theme presents itself as the perfect solution a friendly alternative to the renowned Impulse theme. Designed to cater to a wide range of industries, the Blum theme offers a unique blend of modern design, user-friendly features, and powerful customization options that make it a strong contender for your online store.
Blum Theme, which is only available through the Shopify Theme Store, has received numerous positive reviews for its exceptional product quality and user-friendly features
Like Impulse, Blum is visually stunning and has three distinct styles, each designed to suit various business types and preferences. Whether you have a large inventory store or a luxury brand, this theme can support your needs with its intuitive mega menu, customizable promotion banners, and mobile-first design approach.
Blum theme puts a strong focus on product visuals and user experience, making it an excellent choice for stores looking to showcase their products in the best possible light. With its edge-to-edge hero banners, color swatches, and product page content sections, Blum ensures your products stand out, helping you drive sales and engage customers.
One notable aspect of the Blum theme is its impressive page speed. This ensures a smooth and efficient user experience for your e-commerce customers, providing your store with a competitive advantage in the industry.
While the Blum theme might not have some of the extensive promotion customization features found in the Impulse theme, it still offers plenty of flexibility to create eye-catching promotions that resonate with your target audience. With its clean and simple design, Blum is a fantastic option for businesses seeking a professional look and feel for their online store.
5 store examples of Impulse Theme
1 - Kappa USA
2 - Anita Herbert
3 - The General Co
4 - Anaya Home
5 - Lotus Leggings
Conclusion
At the price of $380, Impulse offers merchants a great number of awesome features to promote their brands with cutting-edge and modern storefronts. We would say it’s worth the price. Even though the theme still has some limitations and needs to be improved (no theme is perfect, obviously), if it fits your brand and business budget, then why don’t you try it?
