The Stencil Theme Platform

Stencil is BigCommerce's current theme platform that incorporates the latest best practices in technology, design standards, conversion, and SEO.  It allows you to build a stunning storefront that engages shoppers and encourages checkouts on any device. Merchants and developers can choose from the best responsive ecommerce templates on the market, or build a completely custom site.

Themes Marketplace

• Five free themes (one with four style variations, two with three styles, and two themes offered in one style)
• Filter themes by industry or by paid and free themes, and sort by newest or featured themes
• Preview themes with your store

Stencil Themes

• Themes optimized for various catalog sizes, verticals, promotions, and content
• Fully responsive designs optimized for mobile, tablet, and desktop browsers
• The Page Builder, which allows you to customize and manage storefront attributes such as colors, fonts, and number of items displayed, with no coding required
• Drag and drop content like text blocks, images, videos, and products using widgets
• Mobile-optimized checkout designed to reduce cart abandonment rates

Theme Development

The only hosted solution to offer:

• Flexible local theme development that allows your developer to use your storefront’s assets, without disrupting your live store
• Development in languages and standards developers know and love (e.g. Handlebars, YAML conventions, Sass/SCSS)
• Out-of-the-box Browsersync to preview changes across mobile, tablet, and desktop

Blueprint, our legacy theme framework, was built on a rigid, proprietary codebase, making it difficult for developers to customize and extend theme functionality. Stencil themes are built on non-proprietary, open-source code to minimize the learning curve for developers and to provide access to the best developers in the industry.

See the table below for a comprehensive comparison of Stencil and Blueprint themes.