7 Things to Consider When you Choose an eCommerce Theme

What makes one eCommerce WordPress theme superior to the rest and how can you navigate through a confusing and crowded theme marketplace?

Whether you are creating a site for the first time or revamping your site to meet the needs of increasingly mobile consumers, take each of these factors into consideration as you look for your perfect match.

1. Mobile First Design

If your site is not responsive and designed to captivate mobile users, you could be missing out. Even Google has begun to shift to a Mobile-First strategy, prioritizing and rewarding sites that are designed with mobile users in mind. Creating your ecommerce site with mobile users in mind from the start ensures that you are ready to serve the needs of this rapidly-growing demographic group.

What do mobile users want – and need—to have an ideal experience on your site? The best eCcmmerce sites have great mobile designs. A fluid, mobile-friendly layout that adapts its look automatically to adjust to differences in screen sizes makes your eCommerce site easy to navigate.

Clear navigation, one click/one step controls and a helpful user interface ensure mobile users can get an ideal experience when they visit. When you choose your eCommerce theme, look for versions that are mobile-responsive and designed a with mobile first experience in mind.

2. Immersive Hero Home Page Design

An oversized hero image makes a big impact for eCommerce sites; a large, bold hero image can help set your site apart and allow you to make a statement. When the scaled-up hero image first started showing up in theme design, it was often crowded in with other content and was originally not ideal for mobile.

Now, just a few short years later, hero images are here to stay and have stopped becoming a part of the homepage and begun encompassing the whole thing. Mobile responsiveness matters for these upscaled attention getters; they still need to show up well on mobile devices and swiftly adapt to different sized devices and browsers. Your theme should make it easy to have an impressive hero image and that image should show up well on mobile and desktop devices.

Bold backgrounds and headers that make an impact are more viable than ever for eCommerce, since they can scale to fit screens of all sizes. Ideally, your theme should support a stunning hero image that clearly represents your USP and value proposition.

3. Intuitive Zooming on Product Photos

A theme that makes it easy for visitors to take a closer look at one of your products is simpler to navigate and can help place your merchandise in the best possible light. Intuitive zooming ensures that the product looks its best and that the customer can easily see what they need to make a decision.

Zooming needs to be accurate and easy; the customer shouldn’t have to jump to multiple pages, end up with a huge image that makes no sense or have to turn their device to new angles to understand what they are seeing.  When your eCommerce theme supports responsiveness and intuitive zooming, you won’t have to struggle to give the customer an ideal experience.

4. Information is Properly Layered on Product Pages

Your prospective customer should be able to swiftly assess each product and locate cost, availability, key details and more at a glance. When your data layer is standardized, robust and easy to keep up with your site will not only look and perform better, your customer will rapidly learn “where” they need to look on each page to find the information they need. The right eCommerce theme supports layering and will have these functions and abilities already on board.

5. Mobile Page Speed Score

How fast does your site load when viewed on a mobile device? Mobile users are notoriously impatient, most consumers expect your pages to load in two seconds or less. Even seconds count; abandon rates increase 30% every 2 seconds.

You can check your site’s mobile page speed score to determine how you are doing and take steps if needed to speed things up. If you’re theme shopping, then terms like “fast loading” and “high mobile page speed” matter when it comes to eCommerce. A theme with clean HTML and CSS can also help speed things up.

6. Free of Unneeded Features and Code Bloat

Since speed and responsiveness are so important to the user experience and to the success of your site, the theme you choose needs to be streamlined and free of bloated code and features you don’t really need.

Too many features and elements are overwhelming and can even cause users to look elsewhere. Once you have shortlisted a few themes with the information you want, examine them to see which are free of unneeded features and extras.

7. Clear Feedback on Add-To-Cart

Add-to-Cart needs to be easily accessible and work with a single click. Your visitors need to be able to instantly add items and be sure that those items will be waiting in the cart when they are ready to check out. Shopping cart abandonment can be caused by a variety of issues; making sure your Add-to-Cart features and buttons are working should not be one of them.

Your chosen eCommerce theme needs to support clearly defined Add to Cart processes and make it easy for customers to buy. Your theme should support an easy-to-find, easy-to-use cart that is more prominent and user-friendly than the WooCommerce default.

The default settings and options offered by WooCommerce are often not robust enough to provide the performance and look you need for your eCommerce site. Custom solutions and themes that go beyond the basics can help you get the best ROI from your efforts.

Themes like Atelier have great success mimicking the king of ecommerce—Amazon.com. Clear photos, compelling descriptions and a familiar, easy to intuitively navigate site make this retailer site easier than ever for consumers to navigate.

Finding The Right Theme

From paying attention to both responsiveness and load times for your mobile site to making products easy to see, navigate and purchase, your eCommerce theme needs to be able to perform consistently across all devices. By carefully examining your shortlist of themes from the start, you can be sure you made the best possible decision for your brand.

Guest Post By: Darren DeMatas

Darren has an MBA in Internet Marketing, but hangs his hat on 10+ years of experience in the trenches. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn to learn eCommerce.