Building an online store requires careful deliberations on everything from hosting, design, content, marketing to seamless functionalities. Developing an ecommerce store from scratch can be time-consuming and lengthy.
Besides the inventory management, which in itself is a tenuous process where you have to gather the product listings and come up with detailed content for each product, you have many more extra steps to take when you launch an ecommerce store.
Building Your Online Store
Here is a quick rundown on the steps you must take to launch an online store:
- Register a domain name
- Develop a website
- Get the legalities and paperwork sorted out for your business
- Choose your hosting platform
- Find the perfect theme for your ecommerce site
- Establish secure payment gateways
- Figure out delivery and shipment channels.
- Launch the site
- Market your brand.
Each of the above steps is crucial to determining your success. You cannot start marketing before a proper functional SEO-friendly website is already in place. And by the time users do reach your site, it has to be completely functional, be easy to navigate and have seamless checkout and payment facilities.
Developing such a full-fledged online store from scratch takes a lot of effort, money and time. You also need to test your site for proper functionality and security before launching it.
All of it can sound overwhelming when you are just starting out into the world of ecommerce. That’s exactly why setting up an ecommerce site with WordPress is widely preferred.
Building your site with WordPress and WooCommerce
WordPress considerably shrinks the effort and time it takes to launch your website.
- You can launch a free ecommerce website with just a few clicks.
- You have full customization control over your site
- It is a cost effective solution.
WordPress provides you with access to many free and paid plugins that can be used to add additional functionality to your website and enhance its performance with ease.
Even if you have zero coding experience, you can launch a fully-functional well-tested WordPress website in a short amount of time. So, that covers about a quarter of what you need to be successful online.
For an ecommerce store, you need to be able to drive traffic and sales. That takes a little more effort. You need a beautiful user friendly site, a solid Business plan, SEO, ecommerce features and online marketing.
Let us start with choosing the right plugin for your ecommerce operations like product listing, payment gateways, checkout and cart features. While the choices for an ecommerce plugin are numerous, WooCommerce is undoubtedly the best ecommerce plugin currently available with about 30% of market share. It has everything you need to run a smooth scalable online shop.
WooCommerce is an open source free plugin that provides you with a range of features such as:
- Product, cart and checkout pages
- Secure payments
- Configurable shipping options
- Easy integration with Google Analytics, Mailchimp and Facebook
- Central dashboard with usable metrics.
It is fully customizable and can also be modified to add in new features. You can choose your own theme and make it fit with the WooCommerce plugin so that your site reflects your vision perfectly.
Choosing the Best WooCommerce Themes
Next comes the part where you actually work on making your site unique and attractive to your visitors. Choosing a theme that integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and is able to provide easy ways to boost your online presence is critical to making your business click.
Here are some pointers you need to look for in a theme to qualify its usage:
- It should have the appropriate designs. Beautiful and fitting the purpose of your site.
- It should be optimized for performance
- Should provide customization options
- Must be SEO friendly
- Should have a responsive design
- Most importantly, support the latest WooCommerce and WordPress features.
Here are some beautiful WordPress WooCommerce themes that deserve your attention.
Best and Free WooCommerce Themes
Spacious
Spacious is a top rated multipurpose responsive theme that can be used for any type of business site. It has lots of customizable options and a good deal of support in the form of well documented help pages.
Some of its design features include:
- 13 widget areas
- 4 page layouts options
- 2 page templates
- 4 blog display types
- 5 custom widgets for use on a business template
- Color options to match your brand logo
- Light and dark modes
- Translation ready
Flash
Flash is a free theme that works well for any type of website — be it blog or an online store. It is compatible with WordPress versions above 4.9 and is regularly updated. It has some cool features like Flash Toolkit that enables rapid website development.
If you are crunched on time, Flash is a good option for you. You can import its more built-in demo themes into your site with just a few clicks using the ThemeGrill demo plugin.
Some more features include:
- WooCommerce support
- Multiple color options
- Responsive design
- Multiple blog layouts
- Multiple header styles
eCommerce Market
eCommerce is a widget-based theme that is focused on providing widgets for WooCommerce sites. It has a full responsive design that renders well on all types of devices. It can be customized for any type of ecommerce store from a simple apparel store to an educational platform.
Some options provided are:
- Customized theme options
- SEO optimization
- Full responsive design
- Performance optimization for faster loading
- Background image options
- Translation ready
Shopay
Shopay gives full WooCommerce support and has some of the most elegant and beautiful designs you can ever find. It integrates easily with WooCommerce and YITH WordPress for added value.
Some of its features include:
- Multiple color options
- 7+ homepage widgets
- Sidebar layouts.
- Customizable header and footer options
- Live customization previews
- One click demo import plugin
- Responsive design
- RTL support
- Threaded comments
- Translation ready
Storefront Business
Storefront provides attractive themes combined with loads of features that help you build unique web stores. You can build a WooCommerce website on the go with this theme. It also facilitates digital download shopping carts.
Some of its features are:
- Blog support
- Custom color options
- Custom logo, typography, header and footer options
- Product slider
- Product grid
- Featured images
- Sticky post
- Threaded comments
- Translation ready
- Responsive
- Custom menu
Envo Storefront
Envo Storefront presents a clean minimal design that supports WooCommerce. It is a free theme with full-responsive design elements. It can be easily customized and works well with popular page builder plugins like Element or, KingComposer, Beaver Builder, SiteOrigin and so on.
Some of the additional takeaways are:
- SEO optimization
- Mobile friendly design
- Well documented
- Fast loading
- WPML support
- RTL ready
YITH Proteo
YITH Proteo presents modern sleek designs and powerful optimization for speed and SEO. It is compatible with the WordPress native editor Gutenberg. The UI is super easy to navigate and presents a minimalist look. It requires very little technical knowledge to get started with this theme.
Further, the theme suits well for all types of sites, be it an ecommerce site or a personal blog. Some main features are:
- Customizable colors and typography
- Sidebar management
- 3 different header layouts
- Google fonts support
- Shop theme options
- Custom WooCommerce messages
- Animated WooCommerce alert notices
- Responsive design
- Full screen search
- Translation ready
- Gutenberg support
- CSS animations
- Supports all YITH plugins
- SVG icons for high-definition screens
Refru
Refru helps you create storefront web pages pretty quickly and is best suitable for running a creative online business. It is also suggested to be a good theme for referral business from multipurpose marketplaces like Amazon.
It is Gutenberg compatible and has several flexible options to create unique looks. More features include:
- Grid layout
- RTL support
- Sticky post
- Threaded comments
- Featured images
- Translation ready
- Footer widgets
- Custom background, colors and menu
Almaira Shop
Almaira Shop is a lightweight ecommerce theme that can be used to create any type of online store. It loads faster and has some easy website building features like theme option panel. Some more theme features provided are:
- Product comparisons
- Quick view
- Translation ready
- Specialized desktop and mobile views
- Shop with category
- Hero slider
- Product filter
- Instagram feed
- Call to action
BCF Shop
BCF shop is a product of the Business consultant finder theme. It is a free theme that contains all the latest features helping you to make a smooth and fast working ecommerce site. It is highly customizable and provides numerous options to make a flexible site. The design looks clean and can accommodate eye catching animated slideshows and effects.
Some of its cool features are:
- Compatible with Google Amp, WooCommerce and Gutenberg
- YITH WooCommerce wishlist
- Blog support
- Customizable background, header and menu.
- Featured images
- Threaded comments
- Full width templates
- Post formats
- Translation ready
- Responsive design
The Next Steps
These were some of the best WooCommerce themes that left us wooed. Undoubtedly, the success of your online store, to a large extent, depends on the user-experience that you cater. This, in turn, depends on the ecommerce theme that you have chosen to go for.
We hope this article would have helped you in selecting the best ecommerce theme. So, what are your views on this? Let us know in the comments below.