According to recent research by the international courier company, FedEx, nearly 70% of consumers believe you can tell the quality of a company’s products and services by the quality of how it presents itself. For eCommerce companies, that presentation is your website. And if having a better your website means customers are going to think you have great products, that can only result in more sales.
For WordPress eCommerce sites, the key to a well-presented website lies in having a great theme. It has to be a theme that works seamlessly with your chosen eCommerce plugin (e.g. WooCommerce), is responsive, customisable, and has all the features you need to give your customers a great shopping experience. This includes having an attractive layout and design.
Finding a theme that meets all your criteria can be a challenging task. There are hundreds to choose from, many of them very similar, and it’s easy to get swamped when reading all the details and spending hours looking at the demos.
To make things a little easier, we’ve done some of the searching for you, and have produced a shortlist of seven great themes which we think are the pick of the bunch from 2017. Hopefully, you’ll find one from here that’ll tick all your boxes.
- Atelier
Designed specifically to work with WooCommerce, Atelier is one of the most in-demand eCommerce themes currently on the market. It has everything you would need in a well-presented theme: attractive design, easy on the eye layout and even a tailored responsive display.
Beyond the look, however, Atelier has much more to offer. With Google’s insistence on ever faster loading times, it’s good to find an eCommerce theme that performs well, and with A (90+) Ratings on both PageSpeed Insights and YSlow, this theme doesn’t disappoint. With Google in mind, you’ll also be glad that it’s developed with SEO best practice: it’s schema.org compliant and has streamlined code.
When creating your store with Atelier, you’ll find it jammed packed with customisable features, both functional and design related. Together, they enable you to create unique and stunning online stores. - Scalia
A multi-purpose theme that’s designed for WooCommerce based online stores, Scalia offers a wide array of features with a focus on great visual presentation. If you have an attention seeking, high-end website in mind, then this theme has everything you need slideshows, galleries, profiles and product showcases.
For creating great pages, you have an inbuilt visual composer, mega-menus and over 100 page templates. In addition, the theme provides on-page optimisation, responsive display, unlimited fonts and colours, customisable icons, and 150 demo pages, which you can tailor for your own use or use as inspiration. Overall, this is a much sought-after theme which can produce very attractive eCommerce stores that perform well. - Jevelin
Only released in April, Jevelin has managed to attract a lot of attention since its launch, selling over 3000 copies and earning a rating of 4.64.
With a one-click install, responsive display and SEO-friendly build, this WooCommerce based theme has a lot to offer. Its features include easy customisation with hundreds of options to choose from, built-in Slider Revolution, Contact Form 7 compatibility and over 40 custom-crafted shortcodes. Jevelin comes with a wide range of website demos, each with unique templates and layouts all of which can be modified to fit in with your brand and to create the perfect shopping experience for your customers. This is certainly an eCommerce theme that will give the right impression. - Shopkeeper
Shopkeeper is the ideal theme when it comes to building simple but elegant online stores that are easy to create and manage. Its quick setup, easy maintenance and simple to use customisation options make it a breeze to use whilst producing stunning results. Whilst simple, the theme is anything but limited. Although it has pre-built layouts, its drag and drop interface enables you to easily create new ones to suit your brands own style. It’s also a theme that understands the way businesses use content marketing to bring in business. It has both an inbuilt blog and can support YouTube video in galleries. The customers shopping experience can also be enhanced by image zooming and various lightbox techniques.
With over 13,000 copies sold, Shopkeeper is a very popular eCommerce theme and one of the reasons for this is because it’s developers continually update it to improve its features. Overall, Shopkeeper is a user-friendly theme that produces customer-friendly stores. - Flatsome
With 56,000 sales and a 4.8 star customer rating, Flatsome has an awesome reputation when it comes to creating eCommerce stores. Boasting a live page builder together with an extensive element library, Flatsome lets you create eye-catching and user-friendly eCommerce stores with ease, even for beginners. For example, you can change the layout and add customised slide effects, banners and backgrounds in an instant. And for stores that don’t want to go offline, you can achieve this without the need to go into maintenance mode. What’s more, Flatsome’s is SEO friendly, fast loading and fully responsive, and, like all good themes, kept constantly up to date with software improvements. Check out the demos to see why so many online stores are built using this theme. - Polaris
Like the submarines it shares its name with, Polaris seems to have slipped under the radar, selling only 775 copies since its launch in 2015. However, it has an impressive 4.78 review rating from its users and has some exceptional features.
Although it describes itself as a minimal theme, it is, in fact, anything but. Whilst its drag and drop functions make it simple to use, it is full of useful features. It’s fully responsive (it even has a responsive slider), has custom sale tags, switchable collections, hover effects, quick shop functions, Google Maps, product filters and even email subscription popups. The theme is jQuery powered and enhanced by CSS3 effects and animation that can give your site and brand real kudos in the market place. - BeTheme
BeTheme, like Divi from Elegant Themes, is one of the most popular premium themes available. The reason for this is that they have taken every feature that you could possibly want to use when creating a website and put them all together into one mega-feature-rich theme. That’s quite a mouth-watering prospect.
However, this is really a theme aimed at developers who can buy one theme and use its 250 pre-built website layouts to create and customise for sites for their customers. If you’re not a developer, the theme is still awesome, but be aware that only 12 of the 250 pre-built sites are stores. That said, you can customise these stores in any way possible using its visual builder and drag and drop functionality. These functions are easy to use but there are so many possible customisations you can make, it will take you time to get your head around them all. Other great features include loading speed optimisation, which is a real positive for a big theme, and the essential WooCommerce compatibility. In the end, BeTheme is an amazing piece of software that can let you build professional quality, stunningly attractive websites. However, it is a big theme and you’ll need to spend some time playing around with it before you learn all its features and tools.
Conclusion
Whilst there are many more eCommerce themes available from the WordPress Repository and from vendors across the internet, the 7 themes we have included here offered users everything they need: attractive designs, lots of useful features, optimisation, mobile-friendliness and quick loading.
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