7 Things to Consider When Choosing an Ecommerce Theme

Ecommerce has been growing steadily in popularity over the last ten years. Digital revenues increased by almost 15% across the board last year and are expected to rise only in the future. If you start a company and sell goods and/or services, an e-commerce platform is critical in order to capitalize on this exponential rise in online sales.

Although you could employ a web developer to get your business going, those costs will hinder your ability to grow quickly. Opting for a fully-developed eCommerce theme saves both time and money.

However, one problem is that you have lots of choices available — how do you know you ‘re choosing the right one? This article describes the criteria you’ll need to consider when looking for the best eCommerce theme for your new brand.

7 Things to Consider When you Choose an eCommerce Theme

1. Mobile-friendliness:

More than 77 % of Americans already own a smartphone. Mobile users are making up for a significant portion of organic eCommerce traffic. It’s important to appeal to your mobile audience when selecting an eCommerce theme for your app. Once you go for the most attractive theme out there, make sure it’s built to be mobile responsive.

Responsive design means that the web content is tailored to the screen size of the devices used to access it. Nevertheless, responsive design is just the beginning of a mobile theme. Many theme providers offer other mobile-friendly functions to ensure that mobile users don’t miss out on sale promotions and newsletters. If you’re using WordPress, some themes require plugins to make your website mobile-friendly. When you’re looking for a theme, make mobile-friendliness the priority.

2. Design:

It’s important that you like the theme you choose, but it’s more important than the theme suits your brand and appeals to your customers. You may see a theme with some flashy high-tech functions that you like, but it won’t work if you run a small, handmade gifts company.

You also want to ensure that your home page, category page, and product page have features that help showcase your products. View it at the full-screen size of your PC, and down to sizes of mobile devices – just take the edge of your browser and make it smaller to see how the theme looks at different sizes.

3. Pricing:

Although this can sound like a common-sense idea, the fact is that different platforms may deliver various features at differing prices. Many sites offer one flat rate without paying extra transaction fees. Some platforms have a base rate, charged per transaction, and require subscriptions for more advanced features. This can easily add up if you don’t pay attention, which means that your total cost will be far higher.

4. Easy Navigation:

User-friendly design is necessary to give your website a great experience browning your products. By replacing a complex interface with simple user-friendly and streamlined elements, you can make your users’ journey smooth. Holding the number of UI elements to a minimum, such as font types, font sizes, icons, would also boost the overall user experience.

The design of world-class websites is intuitively understandable. If the interface is hard to navigate, your website visitors would be confused and leave. The easiest way to verify the interface’s usability is to ask your grandma to test it. Ask her to put a product in your cart. Is that easy for her? If not, there’s something that needs to be improved.

WooLentor WooCommerce Builder

On top of that, icons, fonts, colors, and other UI elements should be consistent. When your users complete their tasks without interruption and contemplation, you scored a goal, and your website interface is decent. Visitors will quickly locate the item they are searching for, review the product, and process the payment seamlessly. And if any of these three moves fail to please them, your reputation will be partly hurt. You can potentially prevent such issues if you prefer to use ready-made themes with a well-thought-out user interface.

5. SEO Friendliness:

Search engine optimization is essentially a function of great content, but the content needs to be picked up by search-engine bots searching for information to address search queries. Topics that rely heavily on JavaScript and Flash technologies are hiding content from web crawlers. Make sure that the material on the sites that use them is identifiable.

Good SEO practices appreciate the importance of using links to related content, both internally and externally. On the eCommerce website, this means linking relevant content to one another, hyperlinking images to content, creating metadata for each image, and a meta description for each page. When you are using WooCommerce, the Yoast plugin is an incredibly useful tool and checklist.

6. Customer service:

For new eCommerce entrepreneurs, technical support for your chosen platform is of great value to your company. Most websites only provide assistance during business hours in their time zone, Monday through Friday. Some sites provide support 24/7.

Support Genix - Support Ticket Plugin for WordPress

This is also necessary to consider the form of support provided. Some organizations can only provide help online or via a call. Certainly, the amount of assistance that you will be eligible to offer will be closely related to your service plan. Larger sites also provide FAQs and self-service help tutorials.

7. Scalability:

Business owners certainly hope that their company will expand in the future, but you may not know to what degree. Nevertheless, it’s important to look for a platform that can scale with your company.

You don’t want to pay for apps and storage that you don’t need when you launch. You want to keep up with higher demands as your company starts. Use a theme that you can scale to the size of your company and that won’t charge you any excessive fees for doing so.

Now that you have a clear strategy to choose the right design template for your eCommerce brand, you’re good to go. Start searching the available choices thoroughly and pick the one that you see fit.

It’s a good idea to take a paper and draw up a plan. Which kind of features do you need? Put everything from SEO resources that you think will level up your Google site (or Bing, Yahoo, whatever) to marketing strategies that will maximize your audience.   And cross out the choices that seem to be redundant. If you’re not sure about any features right now, you might not be going to use them in the near future.

To help you choose the right theme without having to go through exhaustive lists of themes on the Internet, here are two options that I would recommend you to choose and I believe that either of them will be good enough to accommodate your needs.

Flone – Minimal WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Flone – Minimal WooCommerce WordPress Theme is a super-smooth and innovative website template. The developer is providing top-notch demo websites as they are studying the demand and predicting the potential development in this industry. They have successfully applied all the highest quality features and user-friendly attributes to the Flone WordPress theme.

Feature-wise, Flone comes with 7 Header Styles, 25+ Sections, and 4+ Footer styles that add a new taste to your site every day. Flone is developed with Bootstrap 4, W3C validate code, and HTML 4. The best thing people can enjoy on your website with Flone is multi-currency, cross-browser compatibility, and responsive layout.

get your shopify store up & running in 72 hours

On top of that, the Flone theme has an excellent product showcase with selection sorting, product video, and product analysis. In addition, Discuss Comment, Product Share, and Smooth Scroll will further engage your clients on the web. Remember, the more your clients are engaged with your website, the more sales you will have.

In addition, this sleek, clean, and quick website has a very fast configuration and a smart-SEO-friendly coding pattern that will carry your website to the top ranking in a short time. Flone will be a great tool for you to create a profitable eCommerce company.

99fy

99fy is a responsive and fast-loading WooCommerce WordPress Theme. 99fy is a FREE theme, and it uses Elementor Page Builder to easily build pages and supports the popular WooCommerce Addon-WooLentor. WooLentor helps develop custom templates for shop and product pages.

All the common niches for the WooCommerce Stores are included in this theme such as Pets, Books, Cosmetics, Vehicles, Electronics, Clothing, Furniture, Fruits, Plants, Flowers, Handmade, Health & Beauty, Minimal Stores, Jewelry, Kitchen, Kids Shop, Matcha Shop, Perfume, Maternity, Plant & Nursery, Athletics, Shapewear, Tools & Equipment, Watch, etc. More niches are introduced on a regular basis.

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Bonus: How to detect an eCommerce theme with a single click

Have you ever come across a Shopify shop that has the look and features you’re searching for? Now if only you could find out what kind of Shopify theme they’re using. Shopify has over 100 themes to choose from, and with so many themes, how are you going to tell? Fortunately, using this Shopify theme detector, you can find out what that is with a single click.

Final words

Starting any new business is challenging, and moving away from the traditional brick-and-mortar store to the online store can be a little daunting — especially with so many theme choices for you to start with — which is why choosing an eCommerce platform is so difficult for many business owners. Using the criteria in this guide as a checklist when looking for an eCommerce theme, you will be able to find a decent one in no time. Please feel free to leave comments below for further discussion.