Announcing the 2014-2015 Shopify Ecommerce Design Awards

Update: With thousands of jaw-dropping ecommerce entries and countless hours of assessment, the verdict is in! Check out who won the 2014-2015 Shopify Ecommerce Design Awards!

Today, we launched the 2014-2015 Shopify Ecommerce Design Awards. We’re throwing down a challenge for you to submit your best builds for the design battle of the year.

This is your chance to earn a $5,000 cash prize by sharing the most beautiful websites you’ve built for your clients.

Submit stores with show-stopping aesthetics, seamless integrations, and flawless functionality that was previously thought impossible on a Shopify store.

Our goal is to celebrate the talented designers and developers that create and customize themes for the Shopify platform, and to showcase ecommerce sites that display exceptional design, creativity, and usability.

You can follow the hashtag #shopifydesignawards to find out competition updates and tips for success.

Don't have a Shopify Partners account yet? You'll need one to enter, so set one up here for free.

Let’s talk about the details.

The prizes

1st place

$5,000 USD and a feature on the Shopify Partner Blog

2nd place

$1,000 USD

3rd place

$500 USD

Honourable mentions

We will choose up to five shops to highlight as finalists.

Winners will be selected based on the overall aesthetics, creativity, and usability of the site.

And who will select these winners?

Meet the judges

We’ve assembled an expert panel of judges to pick the best entries.

Veerle Pieters | @vpieters

Veerle is a graphic / web designer living in Belgium. Her interests include drawing, illustration, Swiss typography and design, and art work from around the world. Besides being a rockin’ coder, her unique talents consist of naturally writing her name and other words backwards and her ambidextrous ability. Under the name Duoh!, Pieters began a career in print in 1992 and later added website design, multimedia development, and user interfaces to her skill set.

Vitaly Friedman | @smashingmag

Vitaly loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. Vitaly is a writer, speaker, author and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine. He runs responsive Web design workshops, online workshops and loves solving complex performance problems in large companies.

Daniel Weinand | @danielweinand

Shopify's very own Chief Design Officer, Daniel is responsible for managing the design team as well as UI and UX design. He is passionate about design, photography, and composing music.

The rules

• You must be a Shopify Partner in order to enter. (To create a Shopify Partner account, click here.)

• You must reside in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Spain, Denmark, New Zealand or Australia. (We’re not trying to discriminate; competition legislation prohibits us from opening the contest to all countries.)

• You must create a custom theme for the store.

• The store must have been launched between June 1 2014 - August 31 2015.

How to enter

You’ll enter through your Partner Dashboard. There are two ways you can do so:

For stores you’re about to launch:

When creating a development store, click the opt-in button at the bottom of the form:

 

For stores you’ve already launched:

Click on the Design Awards banner at the top of your Partner Dashboard: 

We’ll ask you to submit the URL of a site you’ve already launched:

As long as it went live after June 1, 2014 and you’re in an eligible country, you’re good to go.

Unable to enter your store? Perhaps you've done a recent redesign on a site that went live before the competition period. No worries, just email me at [email protected] with the store's URL and I'll manually enter you into the competition.

Keep ‘em coming!

There’s no limit to the number of shops you can enter into the competition. Show us all of your favourite client stores, and use this as motivation for future launches.

The competition is now open! Let’s see what you’ve got.

Questions? Take a look at our official Terms & Conditions. Don’t see the answer you’re looking for? Ask us in the comments below.