The TooCreative‘ team is building our first ecommerce web site and with that, we’ve been looking at some premium WordPress themes that are designed to be used for an online store. There are several options out there, and this is the first in a series of posts that discusses them.
The latest design trends include large colors, smooth gradients and solid vector shapes. Retro is in, so long as it isn’t cluttered and the images are optimized correctly (no pixelation folks!). One of Templatic‘s newest themes, “Store” illustrates clever use of current design trends in a great example on how dynamic a premium WordPress theme can be. Please note, Templatic was previously PremiumThemes.net.
When you arrive on the home page, you are clear as to why you are there – you are looking for a product. The “featured” product list is rotated to the right with a quick navigation to the left. Actually, there are two tiers of navigation: Pages navigation and Products navigation. Having these distinguished is important so as to provide easy quick access for your potential shoppers to find your product line without having to sift through terminological interpretation (you like that? I think I just made up a word ).
Another thing I really like is the dynamically updated shopping cart. When you add a new product, the shopping cart is updated without the whole page reloading.
In the back end, this sweet theme supports product import using .csv, payment gateway management (PayPal, Autorize.net, Google Checkout, and WorldPay), order management, e-product built in support, integrated order management area for customers amd so much more.
Feature List (from the theme developer’s site)
Usability – Theme developer 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. They reduced the steps of the process, restructured the purchase experience, debated on the small elements such as button / text / colors / notifications etc., finally concluding their base e-commerce theme to be one of the very easiest to use and best performing purchase experience so far.
Different modes of Shopping Cart – You may sell anything – tangible or intangible.
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, Autorize.net, 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
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. (sample .csv file included with the theme)
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.
Specify product size(s), color(s), and other miscellaneous features – 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.
Pricing
Single License Purchase (one use): $65
Developer License (use this theme all you want): $99:
Annual all theme access to all themes: $279
Adorned in bright colors and flashy style, Aloha Themes newest design, Showbiz, offers celebrity gossipers a fresh look for 2010 in the Premium WordPress Theme category.
Featuring two home page layouts, Showbiz will display your most recent content in a magazine style format or traditional blog-style with the posts flowing down the page chronologically. Plus, the navigation is huge separating the page and category navigation with drop downs allowing plenty of room for multiple categories.
With a Twitter box in the sidebar that automatically grabs the tweets from the account you specify in the control panel to the automatic image resizer to the built in ad manager, this theme has it all.
Feature List
Unique, multi-purpose design – easy to customize
Smart navigation – Showcases categories and pages
Home page image slide show with post teaser
Comes with PSD files (optional)
Auto sized images on home page
Twitter Integration
Theme Options page to easily manage your site
Multiple Ad Spaces for banner ads or AdSense
Widget Ready
Tabbed comments and Popular posts in sidebar
Documentation included for easy setup
Pricing
Unlimited Usage No Restriction Price: $77
Multi-use License: Don’t need it, you can use it all you want for $77!!!
Continuing to maintain their clear superiority in the premium theme development world, WooThemes has upped the ante with an improved backend framework that improves efficiency and makes it easier for you to customize your shiny new premium WordPress WooTheme.
Per the WooBlog:
As we have mentioned in the last week, we’ve been working on a new version (2.0) of the WooFramework, which we’ll be releasing with Optimize tomorrow. The integration of WooFramework 2.0 with Optimize, serves as the public beta of the new framework and we’d like to fix all of the possible bugs first, before we integrate it into all our older themes (all 54 of them).
So all of our subscribers who will get access to Optimize tomorrow, will have the opportunity to play with the new options panel & framework. For the rest, the following preview video will have to do the trick…
I’ve gone through the video (below) and am anxious to dive into working with the framework. I never really like the accordion style set up they had before, but it was easy to get along with because they give you so many customization options to work with. The new layout and functionality is sure to be a huge hit.
StudioPress has done it again with a sleek new Premium WordPress theme specifically tailored to businesses. Keeping to their roots, StudioPress has released Executive, another dark theme with dynamic front page designed to showcase snippets of all the important stuff about your business. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Feature List
CMS style theme
Separate blog section
Ability to have static full-width pages
Looks like a web site, not a blog
Drop down navigation
Widget ready
Custom back-end that allows for quick, easy customization
Brought to you by StyleWP, the So Apple Premium WordPress Theme is well organized and extremely easy to navigate and read. With a smooth and modest look, this premium WordPress theme is a great magazine style theme that can showcase all the topics you want to talk about. Offering a cool visual representation of the content excerpts, the home page is laid out nice and allows for attention to be drawn quickly to the varying forms of content on your site.
Over time I find it entertaining to watch theme developers grow and their skill increase. One can often look over their theme portfolio and see time go by as little attributes improve. You can see hints of framework upgrades and witness tiny little accents get a little cleaner with each theme.
For a while now, I’ve kept it no secret that Woo Themes is my favorite designer, but ElegantThemes is quickly catching up. It is pretty easy for me to know when I really like a theme because I start justifying in my shiny head how I can use it. The latest addition to their family, Lumin, is a premium WordPress theme that very well may soon be the new portfolio site for Too Creative, my “parent” company to all my blogs. I love the smoothness, the gradients, the subtle fades of elements, the dramatic accents and the clever use of shadows. I feel good when I look at it, really good. I know other people will think I’ve got a great site if I’m using it; and impressing people is important when you are showing off your stuff.
ElegantThemes has a great number of themes and they have a backend framework control panel that has become much more sophisticated over time. The Lumin premium WordPress theme comes packaged with 3 preset styles, a smooth featured content slider on the home page, a gallery display preview by just mousing over the thumbnail, built-in advertising management, and a slew of other features that are sure to make your mouth water.
Pricing: one of the best things about ElegantThemes (and what could be the start of a trend!) is the low barrier of entry when it comes to price. The number of theme developers are growing and what many of them are doing is offering subscription pricing that gives developers and users alike the opportunity to have access to all the new sweet themes they come out with with a flat monthly fee. ElegantThemes comes in at just shy of 20 bux a year; that’s right, I said $20 A YEAR. Not too shabby, indeed!
Features List:
Opera compatible
Netscape compatible
Safari compatible
WordPress 2.8 compatible
Three Color Schemes
Threaded Comments
Optional Blog-style Structure
Gravatar ready
Firefox compatible
IE8 + IE7 + IE6 compatible
Advertisement Ready
Widget ready sidebars
Theme Options Page
Custom thumbnail images
PSD files
Valid XHTML + CSS
Smooth tabless design
Pricing
Unlimited theme membership for only $19.95 per year.
If you are looking for a premium WordPress theme that is simple and elegant, yet refined, the Zoom Technic Theme from Viva Themes is the one for you. Shrouded in darkness with vivid highlights, this dark business premium wordpress theme has a featured content rotator at the top of the main page, a separate blog section and a full on back-end control panel designated to customize this theme without having to meddle in the code.
Some of the many features include:
Theme compatible with WordPress 2.8.x
100% tableless css design.
Very lightweight and fast loading theme.
Advanced theme options panel.
Attractive front page slideshow with ability to link each slideshow to an internal url.
Additional page oriented top menu.
4 level dropdown main navigation with ability to include also categories.
Widget ready front page and right sidebar.
Additional full width and blog page templates.
Threaded comments.
Integrated blog pagination.
CSS & XHTML valid.
Cross-browser compatible.
IE 6 png fix.
Delivered with .png source files (.psd files delivered upon request)
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