Color is one of the most powerful tools in a designer’s toolbox. It draws attention and conveys meaning—all while driving conversions and solidifying your brand identity. A good website color scheme is especially important in ecommerce website design, where you must communicate information quickly and clearly to turn casual browsers into committed buyers.
Ahead, discover eight of our favorite ecommerce website color schemes and learn how to choose a palette for your website.
What is a website color scheme?
A website color scheme is a curated palette of three to five core colors that defines a site’s visual identity. These colors are applied across all elements of a website, from backgrounds to buttons. The right color combinations evoke specific moods, create visual harmony, and reinforce branding.
Business owners, graphic designers, branding professionals, and web developers often collaborate on color selection when designing a website, considering factors like industry norms, target audience preferences, and legibility. When done right, a color scheme becomes integral to a website’s success, communicating the brand’s essence and enhancing the overall user experience.
But you don’t need to be a design pro to choose the right website color scheme for your brand. Shopify themes come with design presets to help you get started. And with Shopify’s new theme foundation, Horizon, you can generate a custom theme with AI in seconds.
Why is your website color scheme important?
The right website color scheme can accomplish two goals: create a strong brand identity and drive conversions.
Builds brand identity through color
“Color is a way to differentiate your brand,” says Sara Mote, co-founder of design firm MOTE. A signature color palette doesn’t just make your brand stand out from competitors, it can make it instantly recognizable to consumers—just think of the iconic McDonald’s red and yellow, or Coca-Cola’s red and white.
To build a strong brand identity, you’ll need to use your chosen color palette (as well as other branding elements like brand voice and logo) consistently across different customer touchpoints like print ads, online ads, social media posts, and on your ecommerce website.
This branding consistency matters for a few reasons. “It builds trust in your consumers and customers if they feel like you have a clear, consistent point of view,” says Ky Allport, creative director at branding agency Outline.
Margaret Pilarski, Outline’s head of strategy, reinforces this: “You’re creating a recognizable environment so that your shopper is confident and they feel like they’re part of a community.”
Drives conversions with strategic color choices
Brands often add a contrasting accent color to their website color scheme to make certain site elements stand out. They use this color to draw viewers’ eyes to important features like Buy Now call-to-action (CTA) buttons.
When selecting your color scheme, “It’s important to make sure there are enough colors to create contrast and personality,” Sara says. One way to do this is by selecting complementary colors, or those opposite each other on the color wheel.
8 beautiful ecommerce website color schemes
- Nostalgic and bright
- Minimalist
- Vibrant neon
- Vintage neutral
- Nautical
- Pink and brown
- Bold
- Faded retro
Here are eight real-world website color schemes to inspire your brand’s unique color palette:
Nostalgic and bright
Heyday Canning Co. puts a contemporary spin on canned goods with offerings like Harissa Lemon Chickpeas and Tomato alla Vodka Cannellini Beans. The company’s founders worked with Outline to bring Heyday’s vintage-inspired yet fresh brand personality to life.
“We put together a color palette that felt a little bit nostalgic, really bright, really vibrant,” says Outline’s Ky Allport. It was also important that all the colors felt natural. “Nothing artificial,” Ky adds.
Heyday uses its lightest color (Butter Bean) and its darkest color (Grassy Green) for website text. Its other brand colors, like Sungold Orange, Lemon Yellow, and Blue Linen, appear as CTA buttons, digital stickers, and backgrounds.
Minimalist
The skin care brand Klur uses just two colors in its website color scheme: light gray for backgrounds and dark gray for and text and CTA buttons. This creates a minimalist feel throughout the site, which is fitting for a brand that sells products designed for simple skin care routines.
Klur carries this aesthetic into its product packaging, too. Bottles and jars of Klur products include minimal text and only two colors. Text is always beige, and vessels are always black or brown. This helps create a cohesive brand experience.
“It is very tightly coordinated with the branding and packaging,” says Sara Mote, whose team designed Klur’s website. “It feels like a harmonized experience from the moment you land on the website to the moment you receive and unpackage her products.”
Vibrant Neon
Magic Spoon makes healthy, grown-up versions of nostalgic childhood cereals. The company uses three core colors—violet, deep purple, and light blue—with vibrant accents. On product pages, backgrounds are often coordinated with the flavor, such as light brown for cocoa cereal or pink for fruity cereal.
You’ll also notice a gradient background on the landing page of Magic Spoon’s website, which the brand then repeats throughout different pages. These gradients introduce colors like bright yellow and peach, which help emphasize Magic Spoon’s high energy and playful brand identity.
Magic Spoon worked with Gander on both its product packaging and web design to create a vibrant color palette that, according to their case study, would “infuse the brand with a sense of wonder that would bring out the kid in us all.”
Vintage neutral
This website color scheme features cream, peach, and terra cotta to create a serene, vintage-inspired atmosphere for shoppers. Adored Vintage’s products—feminine, antique-inspired women’s clothing items—often share the colors of the company’s neutral website color scheme, creating cohesion across the site.
Nautical
Clothing brand Velasca’s palette is defined by cream, grays, and a cool blue tone reminiscent of the Mediterranean Sea. This is a fitting choice for the company, which centers its Italian identity in its product collection and brand story.
Velasca uses sea blue for headers and CTAs, sandy beige for the navigation bar, and dark gray for text. This palette complements the brand’s nautical lifestyle photography.
Pink and brown
Beauty Bakerie sells makeup and skin care products inspired by baked goods (think setting powder packaged in a mini flour bag and primer sold in a mock butter stick). The company’s website color palette features a light pink for backgrounds, a darker pink for banners and CTA buttons, and cocoa brown for text.
The pinks and browns mirror the shades of Beauty Bakerie’s products. An occasional pop of teal adds contrast and can also be found in the product packaging.
Bold
Fly By Jing, a sauce and noodle brand, worked with Day Job on a rebrand that focused on “letting the vulnerability of the founder’s story speak as loud as her flavors.” This translated to a website color scheme of deep red (reminiscent of the brand’s signature chili crisp condiment), warm yellow, forest green, and purple.
With such bold hues, Fly By Jing relies on black and white to keep its website text legible.
Faded retro
The sunscreen brand Vacation has a distinctive brand identity grounded in 1980s aesthetics. Its website color scheme matches the packaging of its Classic Lotion, which features a faded yellow cap on a sandy cream bottle with ocean blue text. Pops of teal can be found throughout the site and on the brand’s Mineral Lotion tube.
How to choose the right website color scheme
- Reflect on your brand identity
- Brainstorm color schemes
- Choose your core colors
- Check color contrast
- Decide on color combinations
Follow these steps to build out your website’s color scheme:
1. Reflect on your brand identity
Before choosing any colors, consider your brand identity and how different colors can help express your brand personality. You’ll also want to think about how different colors can help you communicate your mission and value proposition, and ultimately, how you want your customers to feel as they’re looking at your website.
In an episode of Shopify Masters, Heyday Canning Co. founder Kat Kavner explains how her company’s brand personality, mission, and brand values informed the company’s nostalgic and bright color palette.
“This new brand was going to be very joyful and vibrant and fun, and kind of vintage-y and retro in a way—but very forward-looking,” Kat says. “We had this foundation of knowing who we were and what we stood for and what we wanted to convey, that we were then able to take to our design partner and brief them on creating our brand identity, our logo and colors and fonts, and then eventually the packaging.”
Ask these questions to get to the root of your brand personality:
- What three to five adjectives best describe your brand personality? Some examples could be cheerful, playful, and family-focused, or luxury-oriented, serene, and sophisticated.
- What emotions do you want people to feel when they think about your brand and navigate your website?
2. Brainstorm core colors
Now that you’ve solidified your brand identity, it’s time to explore existing color palettes to look for inspiration. Start by analyzing the core colors in your competitors’ website design, then decide whether you want to align with industry standards or deliberately stand out.
You can also look outside your current brand category for inspiration.
Once Kavner had communicated Heyday’s brand personality to branding agency Outline, and expressed a desire for a retro color scheme, Outline’s Ky Allport started looking at older color palettes.
“We looked at a lot of vintage inspiration,” says Allport. “We looked at some vintage label designs from fruit packaging that felt slightly farm-y and nostalgic.” The team also found inspiration in Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans.
If you’re feeling stuck, you can also use an online color palette generator to help you explore potential color schemes.
3. Choose your core colors
Once you have a general color scheme in mind, you’ll need to decide on specific colors and shades.
Make sure you have at least one of each of the following:
- Background color. Many brands use light background colors that contrast with darker text, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. You can also use a darker background if you pair it with light colored fonts.
- Text color. This should be highly contrasted with your background color for readability purposes. Most brands use gray or black, but you can also opt for a dark brand color.
- Accent color. This is typically a bright color that will draw viewers’ attention to site elements like CTA buttons and banners.
Once you’ve decided on which colors to use, hone in on specific shades. For example, Outline wanted Heyday’s colors to be bright without feeling artificial. So instead of neon orange, they went with a subtler Sungold Orange.
4. Check color contrast
Prioritize readability by making sure your chosen colors have high contrast when used together. This might mean creating a website mockup and testing your font and background colors with a website accessibility tool like WebAIM’s Contrast Checker. If your colors aren’t legible, you’ll need to experiment with lighter or darker shades.
“Having a core color palette that maintains legibility and contrast for the website is definitely going to strengthen the overall user experience,” says Sara. “When you are presenting information such as text, you want to make sure it’s really clear and legible. So having dark text, for example black text, on a white background provides a lot of legibility.”
5. Decide on color combinations
Now that you’ve chosen a core set of colors and experimented with readability, decide how your colors will work together and note your decisions in a set of brand guidelines. This means laying out which colors will be used as backgrounds, which will be used for text, and which will be used for banners and CTA buttons. You’ll also want to note which color combinations work and which don’t.
“In the brand guidelines, we usually give a table of certain approved color conventions, then colors from the brand palette that aren’t meant to be used together,” says Outline’s Allport. This can help designers and newer team members use your core colors as you intended.
In most cases, you’ll want to use the same color for body text across your site. You can use different colors for headings or special text, but be consistent with these as well. This helps ensure your website looks unified.
You’ll also want to note which color is the most important, since you’ll likely want to include this color across different pages of your website and, if you’re selling a physical product, on your packaging.
“Typically there’s also a hierarchy,” says Allport. “Heyday’s core brand color is that dark green that is a consistent throughline across labels, and then they use different background colors.”
Create better browsing experiences with the right color scheme
Website design is an ongoing process. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different combinations and get customer feedback to find the right fit. Your colors should work together to create a cohesive and appealing website that represents your brand on the internet.
Website color scheme FAQ
What is the most eye-catching color?
Bright, saturated hues like red, yellow, and orange typically catch the eye most effectively. However, an individual color’s ability to stand out depends largely on its contrast with the colors surrounding it.
What is the best color scheme for a website?
The best color scheme for a website depends on its purpose, the target audience, and the overall design aesthetic. Generally, lighter and softer colors (like a light blue background) are calming and inviting, while darker and vibrant colors (like royal blue and lime green) provide more energy and excitement. It is also important to consider how colors interact with one another and how they will appear on different devices.
What are the seven major color schemes?
- Monochromatic. Tonal variations of a single color.
- Analogous. Colors next to each other on the color wheel.
- Complementary. Colors opposite each other on the color wheel.
- Split complementary. A base color complemented by the colors next to its complementary color on the color wheel.
- Triadic. Three colors equally spaced around the color wheel.
- Tetradic. Complementary pairs of colors.
- Square. Four colors equally spaced around the color wheel.
What is a website color scheme?
A website color scheme is the combination of colors used on a website. Companies often choose particular website color schemes to reflect their brand identity. When choosing a website color scheme, companies also pay attention to contrast, vibrancy, and individual colors’ ability to work together to create a cohesive look.
Which is the best background color for a website?
Generally, a neutral color such as white or light gray is a good option, as it can create a clean and modern look. If a more dynamic background color is desired, blues, greens, and other softer colors can provide a more inviting feel.
