Which of the 11 layouts suits your catalogue, and when to switch
Two products and eleven products want different layouts. Match the layout to your catalogue size, your photos, and what people already know when they arrive.
You have finished your first product, the storefront designer is open, and there is a row of eleven layout options staring back at you. They all look fine in the preview, because the preview is small and your catalogue is small. So you pick one on instinct, publish, and quietly wonder for the next month whether a different one would have done better. The honest answer is that layout matters less than the product and more than the colour palette, and the right one is decided almost entirely by three things you already know: how many products you have, how good your images are, and whether people arrive knowing what they want.
Why the choice feels harder than it is
Layout choices feel high-stakes because they are visible and permanent-looking. In reality the storefront designer applies a layout to your live page instantly, and you can change it again before your next visitor arrives. Nothing about the products, prices, files, booking slots or link cards is tied to the layout you chose. What actually creates the anxiety is that you cannot judge a layout from a preview built out of one or two items — the whole character of a grid or a masonry column only appears once there is enough in it.
The second difficulty is genuinely hard, and no amount of choosing fixes it: layouts that look best are the ones that lean on photography. Showcase, Masonry, Polaroid and Bento are all built to make images do the selling. If your products are a PDF workbook, a Notion template and a coaching call, you do not have photography — you have three rectangles, and a picture-led layout will show that honestly. Creators who are frustrated with every layout are usually frustrated with their images.
The third thing to accept is that your visitors do not compare layouts. They arrive from a bio link or a caption, glance, and either find the thing they came for or leave. Layout is not a design competition; it is a question of whether the item that most people want is easy to spot in the first second. Everything below is a way of answering that with what you have. If you want to see the full set of controls before you decide, the storefront designer overview lists what is adjustable.
Choosing without a designer, and choosing with one
Most creators arrive from a generic link page, where layout means a vertical list of identical buttons and the only lever is the order. That is a stable, safe default, and it is also why so many creator pages look like each other. A layout system gives you a second lever: how much visual weight each item gets. Here is the practical difference.
| A plain link list | With store.fan |
|---|---|
| Every item gets identical weight, so nothing reads as the main offer | Spotlight puts one product in a large featured card with the rest in a grid beneath it |
| Adding a sixth item just makes the list longer | Grid, Bento and Masonry absorb new items without adding page length |
| Product images shrink to a thumbnail or vanish | Showcase and Polaroid make the image the card, for catalogues where the picture is the pitch |
| Text-heavy items are squeezed into a button label | Editorial and Magazine give titles and descriptions room to be read |
| Changing the look means rebuilding the page | Switching between all 11 layouts is one click, and nothing else changes |
| Design is decided once, at the start, when you know least | You can change layout as the catalogue grows, as often as you like |
Match the layout to what you have today
Open the designer, and work through these in order. Each step assumes the previous answer, so it should take under two minutes to land on a shortlist of two.
- 1Count your live items. Include link cards, not just paid products. One to three items total: use Stack, Spotlight or Editorial, all of which give each item full width so a short page still looks intentional. Four to eight: Grid, Bento or Compact. Nine or more: Masonry, Carousel or Grid, which handle length without endless scrolling.
- 2Look honestly at your images. Open your product covers at full size. If they are real photographs or properly designed covers, Showcase, Masonry and Polaroid will reward them. If they are screenshots, mock-ups or plain colour blocks, go to Editorial, Compact or Magazine, which lead with words.
- 3Decide whether people arrive knowing what they want. If most visitors come from a caption that names one product, choose Spotlight and feature that product, so the thing they came for is the biggest object on the page. If they arrive to browse, a grid layout serves them better.
- 4Check whether your items are the same kind of thing. A catalogue of eight templates suits an even grid. A mix of a course, two downloads, a coaching call and a membership suits Bento or Spotlight, where different sizes signal different kinds of offer.
- 5Preview on your own phone, not the desktop preview. Open your storefront address on your phone and scroll it the way a visitor would, at arm's length, without zooming.
- 6Give the shortlist a day each. Publish one, leave it, publish the other tomorrow. You will form a much clearer opinion on the second day than in the first ten minutes.
A worked example: an illustrator with four items
Say you sell a brush pack, a procreate tutorial, a print-on-demand poster and a free colour palette used as a lead magnet. Four items, and every one of them has a genuinely good image, because you are an illustrator. Grid gives you a clean two-by-two, which is tidy but treats the free palette as equal to the tutorial you actually want people to buy. Spotlight is the better fit: the tutorial takes the large featured card, the other three sit in the grid below it, and the visual hierarchy now matches the commercial one.
Three months later you have eleven items, including a small poster series. Spotlight is now doing too much work, because ten small cards under one big one reads as clutter. Masonry suits the poster series, since the images vary in height and the columns absorb that naturally. This is the normal path, not a mistake — the layout that fits four items is rarely the one that fits eleven, and it takes seconds to move. If you are still deciding whether to start at all, the plans page shows that the designer, all 11 layouts and all 28 themes are included on the free plan.
Try all eleven layouts on your own products before you commit to one.
Build your storefrontThe mistake most people make
The common error is choosing the layout that looks most impressive in the picker and then trying to make the catalogue live up to it. Showcase with full-bleed posters is striking; it is also merciless if two of your four covers are placeholder gradients. The reverse order works better: get the products and their covers right, then choose the layout that shows them at their best. A modest layout with strong images beats an ambitious layout with weak ones every time, and visitors never know which option you passed over.
The second-most-common error is switching layouts weekly in response to a quiet day. Traffic varies for a hundred reasons. Give a layout at least a week, and use the per-product view and buyer counts in your analytics to judge it rather than a feeling.
No. Your storefront address, product page addresses, files, prices and booking slots are unchanged. Storefront and product pages are statically rendered with their own titles and descriptions, and those stay the same when you switch layout.
The layout applies to your storefront page as a whole. Individual product pages have their own consistent presentation, so the way to give one product more prominence is to feature it — Spotlight is built for exactly that.
Yes. The storefront designer is included on Free, with all 11 layouts, all 28 themes, all 16 fonts and cover photos. Paid plans add things like a custom domain and hosted course video, not design options.
Stack and Compact both handle a page made entirely of link cards well, because they are built around rows rather than images. You can add unlimited link cards on any plan, so a link-only page is a perfectly reasonable first version.
Treat the layout as a setting, not a decision. It is one field in the designer, it is reversible in a second, and the version you choose in your first week is not meant to be the one you keep. Choose the one that fits the catalogue you have today, get the page live, and revisit it when the catalogue has changed enough to deserve a different shape.
Your storefront address is store.fan/you, and the designer is free to use for as long as you like.
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