How To Choose The Best Template For Your e Commerce Store?
So finally you have decided to sell online? Decided to DIY your website?
No worries building a website is not that difficult chore. All you need is to decide upon the product catalog, purchase a template and start adding your content.
Easy! Isn’t it?
But is your brand’s new template all capable to share your story? Does it have all the features you need? Or it is full of features but it is not you? Don’t worry you are not alone. This happens with every merchant who are new to this business.
Choosing a template is not about getting the prettiest one. It involves a set of the whole process to get along and find the best one. Read the article, answer the questions yourself and find the best website template for your online store.
WHAT IS YOUR GOAL?
The first and foremost thing that you have to look for is the purpose you are going to serve with your online store website.
For example- if you have some products or service to sell then your goal is to sell. Ultimately the goal of an online website is to generate revenue!
For me, it always starts from a goal like an online store with grocery products has to look different from that of a website created for an actor or artist. It may be possible that you would need an online store to host your eCommerce products and sell online. Or you would require building a service based website to share information about each service, such that people may hire you or buy your services
Or your goal can be to educate people with your videos, content or a blog or just to demonstrate your work through a portfolio.
MAKE A CHECKLIST OF THE FEATURES YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IN YOUR E-COMMERCE STORE.
What all features you are looking for your eCommerce store? Do you need an image gallery? What kind of product pages do you want?
Knowing these features will narrow down your choices. Once you have decided upon the features list then start separating out the website templates that do not possess them.
There are some of the common features that one might look into their online store website template.
- Header & Footer
- Customer winning product pages
- Category Pages
- Search Capability
- Navigation Bar
- Image Gallery
- Scrolling or Parallax Capability
- Perfect Design & Color Scheme
CHOOSE THE TEMPLATE-
1. IS THE TEMPLATE VISUALLY APPEALING?
Your eCommerce theme should be appealing to your brand. Everybody has different tastes when it comes to good design. Try to take multiple opinions from the people who are good at designing. Also, make sure the theme’s color scheme and visual appearance of your store depict well your brand story.
2. DOES IT MAKES JUSTICE TO YOUR BRAND IDENTITY?
Why are you going online? To build a brand identity and to reach the masses.
The style of your eCommerce website theme should fit your brand identity. This is one of the biggest mistake people do while choosing the website theme.
A website selling jewelry has to look different from that of selling car parts and accessories. In a similar manner, the jewelry theme is designed with a lot of pictures and emphasizing the design whereas the car parts & accessories themes has to look a bit elderly.
3. DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH SPACE FOR YOUR PHOTOS AND TEXT?
Depending upon the requirement themes lay down their emphasis on this factor. As an eCommerce theme, there should be a proper display of product images. Beautiful picture supported with well-drafted content makes the eCommerce website look live.
Prefer an eCommerce template which has a lot of space for you to display banners of discounts and offers along to professional quality product pages.
4. IS YOUR ECOMMERCE WEBSITE THEME CUSTOMIZABLE?
Some themes allow you to customize many features such as adding banners, CTA button and other advanced features such as one-page checkout, guest checkout, changing colors and lot more.
While many themes allow customization but their interface is difficult to understand so choose the eCommerce theme which is easy to use.
5. IS YOUR E-COMMERCE THEME RESPONSIVE?
Whatever eCommerce theme you choose it should be responsive. Responsiveness means your online store should adopt whatever device size it is accessed from. As you customers will not stick to a device size, they will access your online store either from mobile or tablet or a desktop.
Test your website on different devices to ensure it fits well all screen sizes.
6. IS THE THEME BROWSER COMPATIBLE?
Like the screen size, not all of your customers will browse from the same browser. Each browser has a different configuration and they support different data formats.
Check your eCommerce theme with all the popular browsers both in mobile and desktop-like Mozilla, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer Safari and Opera.
7. IS THE WEBSITE THEME SEO FRIENDLY?
Search Engine Optimization means your site is designed well to be easily found by Google and therefore more likely to come on the top of searches. It is not a good sign that you have your store ready and well equipped with features but nobody visits it. This can result in losses.
Find an eCommerce theme which comes with features of SEO and you do not need to add extra to it.
It is worth to put up an extra hour to find the perfect eCommerce theme for your eCommerce website but at the end, you have to check the usability and how much your sales are affected. If you choose an eCommerce website theme that suits well your business, brand and products or services then it is likely to give you greater success.
