Our e-commerce themes – What’s included?

In our re-launch post, we mentioned our upcoming premium wordpress themes with e-commerce platform built in. Here’s an intro post that lists some of the features of the same.

Why a platform?

We always wanted to create e-commerce themes as we know many of our customers do sell digital products or, manage stores. There are several open source shopping cart scripts but most of them are way too much complicated to understand and get started.

There also exists some e-commerce plugins but then, you can’t get a good, elegant design that plays key role in converting visitors into customers. Also there are some free plugins available but they come with limited functionality, ultimately you end up paying a price to avail rest of the features that are must-have into e-commerce themes.

We understand that people use WordPress because it’s easy.  It’s a CMS that makes website management easy, without hassles and that is why, managing your online store from within wordpress is a very convenient option to have. And that is why, we built an e-commerce theme platform of our own based on which, we will be rolling several themes so you can build an online store of every kind. Here’s preview to some of the features.

Salient features in our e-commerce themes

Here’s a quick list of some of the key features in our e-commerce themes. The features are balanced as we didn’t stuff every e-commerce features out there. Including only those that are must-haves for a well functional e-commerce store.

• Different modes of Shopping Cart: You may sell anything – tangible or intangible using our themes. You have an option to create your website in any mode.
  • Shopping Cart: Like the standard shopping cart that you see on other e-commerce websites. You may choose to have “add to cart” mode and let the users add all the items they want and then lead them to checkout or, you can have “buy now” mode and take them straight to checkout when they select a product.
  • Digital Shop: If you are selling digital product of any kind, this is a perfect option for you. Are you selling icons, digital art, PDF, e-books, scripts or any other kind of digital goodies? Select this option and when a user makes a purchase, they will have an account generated at your site and they can download their purchase any time. You don’t have to worry about third party digital delivery sites.
  • Catalog mode: Maybe you only want to showcase your items and don’t want to sell it online. Simply choose this mode and you will have “send inquiry” button instead of buy now / add to cart. Visitors thus, can send an inquiry on the products they like.

• Manage Products: Add / Edit / Delete products are as easy as you create a wordpress blog post. You have a custom panel where-in you can edit the product description, different parameters, upload product images etc. real easy.
• Order Management: Depending upon the settings from your admin panel, you can manage the order – approve, process or cancel / reject an order.
• Shipping Options: As an admin, you can choose Free, Flat rate; Weight or Price based shipping option for your store. What’s more you can even set free shipping for particular items in case you’ve set other option for your store.
• Multiple Payment Gateways: You have PayPal, Authorize.net, 2CO, Google Checkout, WorldPay, bank transfer and Cash on Delivery as payment gateway options. Choose the gateway you prefer.
• Manage Tax: You may specify overall tax percentage that applies to all your products and, you may choose to leave individual products tax free
• Usability: One of the reason it took us long time to complete the backend of the e-commerce themes is, usability. We studied best practices of building e-commerce websites, studied lots of successful online stores and brainstormed some of the key pages and functionality that may impact the sales process that your customer goes through. We reduced the steps of the process, restructured the purchase experience, debated on the small elements such as button / text / colors / notifications etc., finally concluding our base e-commerce theme to be one of the very easy to use and best performing purchase experience so far.

• Grid view / List view: Whenever you are browsing the product collection, you have an option to see the products in list view or grid view. It’s built-in by default.
• User registration: Users may register on your site or, they will be taken to registration page on the checkout procedure. They will have their own user area where they can keep track of their order, manage profile and download purchased digital products.
• Bulk Upload ( csv ): Using another shopping cart solution  for your store and want to switch to our store themes? No worries. You can export your data from there in .csv files and import it in your wordpress installation when you use our store themes.
• Coupon codes: Admin can generate coupon codes for occasional sales promotion.
• Product Images: Built in multiple product image upload. Uploaded images are auto re-sized to fit various thumbnails required throughout the site. Also the product zoom functionality is built it.
• Other parameters: Specifying Tax, weight, color(s), size(s) are easy. Also you  may specify different prices for different size/colors just in case.
• Miscellaneous: You may specify Size chart if applied, When viewing a product Similar Products are automatically displayed, Several additional custom widgets are built in such as customer support, Subscribe, socialize, promo banners etc. that you can use for your store website.
• Blog: Of course the themes come with blog, pages etc. functionality with some page templates so you can have a blog for your website.

Why our themes?

Because you can have design + functionality everything built-in into our strategically designed, elegant designed themes. You don’t have to buy a theme and a plugin separately. This week, we will release first of our e-commerce theme followed by several other themes for various purposes. They are easy to use, and we have included the features very thoughtfully, neglecting to stuff every feature out there into our themes.

So, what do you think of this? Thoughts / critics are always welcome via comments. Are you excited yet?