What better way to buy stuff than from the comfort of your own sofa… or bed? Online shopping has revolutionised the way we consume, but why let Amazon grab all the profits? If you’ve got an online business idea, now’s probably the best time to get started, and if you’re using the popular website builder and web hosting solution that is WordPress, then we’ve gathered round five impressive e-commerce themes to help you hit the ground running.
Astra is a very popular WordPress theme. They recently celebrated their one millionth active install, which is no small feat. It’s designed to work with various page builders such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy and Gutenberg, and comes as a free and paid for version, but if you’re looking for e-commerce features, you have to go pro.
Some of the sales-friendly features unique to the pro version include Infinite Scroll so your products load dynamically as the visitor scrolls down the page, Off-Canvas Sidebar, an ideal place to incorporate filters and widgets to make finding what your customer is looking for quicker and easier, and multiple Checkout Options, to customise the layout to suit you and your users’ needs, such as two-step checkout, or distraction-free checkout for instance.
The customisation options are quite impressive, all without having to delve into code; you can alter the layout, the typography, even turn off the title page and sidebar if you want to. And best of all, Astra is advertised as a fast responsive theme, meaning it’ll load fast to keep your visitors on your site.
Astra offers three different plans, starting with Astra Pro, currently for $47 per year (or $249 for a one-time fee), right up to $249 a year for Growth Bundle (or $699 for a one-time fee).
The main focus of Flatsome is on e-commerce and this theme is designed to not only be easy to use for your visitors, but also to create and maintain for yourself. Alterations are done via its UX Builder which offers you a live preview as you make your changes. You can for instance, mix and match headers, pages, colours and fonts using the Theme Option Panel. It’s extremely versatile, allowing you to change any aspect of the page to suit your requirements with drag and drop ease. Such power makes it easy to alter the numerous available templates to create a store that is unique and ideally suited to the products you have on offer. As with Astra above, it boasts fast loading times for an enhanced visitor experience.
Getting Flatsome will cost you $59 which includes future updates, and 6 months of support. You can extend that support by a further 6 months for an additional $17.63.
Porto is an e-commerce-specific theme, and comes with over 30 different layouts to help you configure your store to best showcase your products. Of course, if this doesn’t suit, you can always use the theme’s page builder straight from your WordPress Dashboard.
There’s a good variety of layouts on offer, along with sidebars, sliders and shop category pages. As you’d expect, it’s a fully responsive website so your visitors can purchase what they want from the comfort of their computer or portable device.
The price is very competitive: only $59 for a licence (as with Flatsome, you can purchase an additional 6 months of support for $17.63). However this price also includes two premium plugins, WP Bakery Page Builder, and Slider Revolution, which makes the deal even sweeter.
Shopkeeper is a very well received e-commerce-focused WordPress theme. It comes with good looking templates which you can use straight away as is, or as the starting point for a more customised experience. Like all the others on this list, there’s no need for coding experience to create an online store – shopkeeper takes care of it all for you in the background. There are many options to your page’s layout. You could for instance have an on-screen or off-screen sidebar, organise your products by categories, choose how many items to display per row or page, allow for variables, digital downloads, affiliate links, set items on sale, or list them as out of stock. Everything you’d expect, really.
As it’s a WordPress theme, you can also populate your site with bios and contact information, and Shopkeeper even comes with three different blog layouts, should you wish to entice your customers with some juicy tidbits of information.
As with Flatsome and Porto above, Shopkeeper will cost you $59, which includes all future updates and six months of support (with a $17.63 add-on to keep your access to support for an additional six months).
Although WooderShop advertises itself as a “mobile-first” e-commerce theme, that doesn’t mean to say its experience on a desktop isn’t on par. On the contrary, accessing a store built with this theme works great on any platform. Although it does make sense to focus on mobile, since this is the way more and more people shop these days, and making the experience there feel flawless is crucial to a successful business plan.
The loading speed benchmarks are impressive, and being SEO ready will help you stay competitive. We really liked the sandbox feature on offer to let you try the theme for free for seven days (no credit card required). This is a great way to explore the product and determine if the features it offers are right for you and your business. WoodersShop is full of nice little features, like a cross-selling widget to encourage your customers to get additional related products, a real-time filtering option, an signup form which can be linked to an email provider such as MailChimp, and a translation-ready interface to boot.
You can buy WooderShop for $79 which allows you to install it on a single site and includes six months of support. Alternatively, there’s also the option to join the “Proteus Club” for $149 per year, which grants you access to all of Proteus’ 21 themes, which you can apply to an unlimited number of website, and also gain unlimited support.
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