More sales from the traffic you already have
Quick buy, slide-out cart, stock counters, back-in-stock alerts, pre-orders and shoppable hotspots — a walk through what the Fuse theme puts on the path between a product photograph and a completed order.
Most of what people call conversion optimisation on a storefront is not clever. It is the removal of small reasons to leave.
A shopper who has to open a product page to add a thing they already chose. A cart that navigates them away from the grid they were enjoying. An add-to-cart button that scrolled off four screens ago. A sold-out variant that offers nothing but the back button. Each one leaks a little, and none of them are visible in an analytics dashboard as anything other than a number that is lower than it should be.
Fuse, the Shopify theme UTD BV released on 25 September 2026, ships with most of those gaps already closed. This is a walk through which ones, and what each is for.
| Feature | The step it removes |
|---|---|
| Quick buy | Opening a product page for an item already chosen |
| Slide-out cart | Navigating away from the collection being browsed |
| Sticky add-to-cart | Scrolling back up a long product page |
| Image hotspots | Hunting a styled shot’s product down in the grid |
| Shoppable lookbooks | Remembering a campaign item and searching for it |
| Swatch filters | Scrolling a collection for the right colourway |
| Back-in-stock alert | Leaving a sold-out variant with nothing captured |
| Pre-order | Waiting for launch day to take a decided order |
| Enhanced search · mega menu | Failing to find the product at all |
Quick buy puts an add-to-cart on the collection grid. For a repeat customer restocking a colour they already own, that is the entire journey in one click instead of three.
The slide-out cart opens over the current page rather than loading a new one. The shopper adds, sees the cart, and is still looking at the collection they were browsing. The alternative — a full page change — is a hard break in attention, and a share of people never come back from it.
The sticky cart bar keeps the buy button reachable on a long product page. Visual brands have long product pages by design: galleries, video, size guidance, styling. Without a sticky bar, the deeper a shopper reads, the further they are from the button.
None of this is exotic. It is simply the difference between a page that holds an intent and one that quietly loses it.
Two features here matter more than their size suggests.
Back-in-stock alerts. A shopper arrives at a sold-out variant. Without an alert, that visit is gone — you paid to acquire it and received a bounce. With one, it becomes an email address attached to a specific product, which is among the warmest signals a store ever collects.
Pre-orders. For a brand that works in drops, a pre-order sells the next release before it exists and tells you how much to make. The demand is there at announcement; the question is only whether your storefront can take it.
Alongside them, stock counters work the live inventory, and countdown timers work a dated promotion. Both are honest when the underlying fact is honest, and both wear out quickly when it is not.
This is where Fuse is built differently from a general-purpose theme.
Image hotspots let you tag products onto a styled photograph. The shopper clicks the bag in the shot. They do not have to remember it, describe it to a search box, or find it among forty thumbnails.
Shoppable lookbooks do the same thing at the scale of a campaign: a seasonal shoot becomes a page that sells, instead of a page that inspires and then asks people to go looking.
Fashion, beauty and accessory brands already produce this photography. The gap has never been the content; it has been that the content lived in one place and the catalogue in another. Closing that gap is the point.
Supporting it: before/after sliders for skincare, product video, image zoom and rollover, colour swatches and swatch filters so a shopper can filter by the colour they want rather than scrolling for it, and size charts — which quietly do returns work as well as conversion work.
A conversion conversation that skips navigation misses where a good share of the loss happens. Fuse includes a mega menu, enhanced search, filtering and sorting, swatch filters, infinite scroll, breadcrumbs and a sticky header. For a catalogue of any size, search and filtering are not a convenience — they are the difference between a deep catalogue and an unusable one.
Fuse has a signature: a frosted-glass interface. Menus, badges and the sticky bar sit on a translucent panel that blurs the imagery behind it, so the controls float over the photography rather than covering it. It is handsome, it is distinctive, and both its light and dark variants are set from one colour control.
What we will not do is attach a conversion figure to it. We have not measured one and neither, as far as we can find, has anyone else. What a distinctive storefront plausibly earns is recall — being the shop someone remembers from a browsing session — and that is a different claim from a lift in checkout rate, with a different and much slower way of showing up in your numbers.
The features above are the ones that do mechanical work on the path to the order. The glass is why the storefront looks like yours and not like the other six in the category.
Five presets ship with the theme — Fuse and Node for clothing, Fluid for beauty, Clio for footwear, Bond for bags — and Shopify allows a free trial on your own store before purchase.
Install it, load your real products, and walk your own funnel: grid, product page, add, cart. The steps you stop noticing are the ones that were costing you.
See Fuse in the Shopify Theme Store →
Method: every figure on this page — presets, categories, capabilities, languages, price and version — is read from the Fuse listing and its five preset demos in the Shopify Theme Store, checked across all five on 4 October 2026. Nothing here is estimated.
CRO Diary is published by UTD BV, the developer of the Fuse theme. Features, presets, price and version above are taken from the public Shopify Theme Store listing and were checked on 4 October 2026.
The ones that remove a step or capture an intent that would otherwise be lost. Quick buy removes the trip to the product page for a shopper who already knows what they want. A slide-out cart keeps them on the page they were browsing. A sticky add-to-cart bar keeps the button reachable when the page is long. Back-in-stock alerts turn a sold-out dead end into an email address. None of these are magic — they are each one fewer reason to leave.
Yes, both ship with the theme, along with a sticky cart, cart notes, gift wrapping, in-store pickup, pre-orders and Sign in with Shop. They are theme features rather than apps, which means no additional subscription and no extra third-party script on the page.
Fuse includes shoppable lookbooks and image hotspots. A hotspot is a tag placed on a styled photograph that links to the product in the shot, so a shopper who likes the jacket in your campaign image can click the jacket. The alternative — asking people to remember what they saw and find it in a grid — loses some of them at every step.
Fuse ships back-in-stock alerts, which replace the dead end with an email capture, and pre-orders, which let you sell an item before it arrives. Both convert a visitor you had already paid to acquire into something other than a bounce. Stock counters work the other side of the same problem by showing low stock while the item is still available.
The listing has five live preset demos — Fuse and Node for clothing, Fluid for beauty, Clio for footwear, Bond for bags — and Shopify lets you install the theme on your own store for free before purchase. Loading your own products into the trial is the only test that answers the question for your catalogue.