Find the best ecommerce templates for your online store

You are probably at the stage where you are almost ready to launch your ecommerce store.

You have the product, you have the name. What about an eCommerce template for online store?

Choosing the right ecommerce template is as important as picking out a brick and mortar store.

For an online store owner, the look and feel of the store is everything. If you select a theme that is an accurate reflection of your brand and is easy to use, people will return to it. If it’s a confusing theme that does not work well on their portable devices/ desktop, they will exit your site, never to return.

So how do you find the best ecommerce templates for your online store? We have some answers to help guide you.

With the template create a bit of magic

Let’s start with the most ambiguous bit of guidance we have to offer. Creating a world of magic appeal for your customers. How do you do that with an online store? This will require a bit of thinking on your part. Think about your brand, your product – what is its USP? What does it represent to customers? What is the one thing that makes it stand out? Spend some time to creatively think about the problem that your product or service wishes to address so that you can choose a theme that best brings out its appeal.

Use an appealing design

This is probably obvious, but it is always important to use a design that looks good. You can get a modern, clean ecommerce template designed by a web design company or you can pick from options that are available on multiple pre built platform providers. Your design theme should features large images to appeal to an audience that is increasingly visual. The colours should not clash with each other and every element should be tactically placed on the site for maximum appeal.

Match the template to your brand

If your brand already has a design theme, it is well worth weaving that into your ecommerce template. This should include any fonts that form part of your design as well as the colour theme that you associate with your brand. Your ecommerce template should highlight your brand so that your customers will always associate the design theme with the positivity of your product.

You can easily find a template to match your product on Shopnix, which powers Sapna Online, an online bookstore. The site is tailored to meet the expectations of book lovers, with an intuitive menu, responsive design and easy to find search bar to look for books by favourite authors, etc. It boldly calls out the Sapna Book Mall theme on each page so that the reader better associates with the brand.

Don’t force your customers to think

Shopping is supposed to be a carefree experience. It’s what people do when they want to unwind, or when they really need a product. It is certainly not a place they go to puzzle over how to find the item that they need. Provide the best experience to your end users by letting them shop in peace, easily finding what they need, being able to look at recommendations just for them and viewing reviews left by others. The more intuitive your ecommerce template is, the more positive the impression it is bound to make on your customers.

Intelligent design is important to make your site easy for customers to use. For instance, when you shop on Amazon for a product, you find that the search can autocomplete your entries. This is a great feature that saves you time. This can be combined with other great features like search filters, ability to sort by price or ratings, and so on to provide for a rewarding customer experience.

A good example of an intuitive, easy to use design is that of online store RGC Fashion, which is hosted on Shopnix. The store offers simple yet detailed product descriptions for its various items of clothing. Users can quickly glance through the features of an item and decide if they want to buy it or not. This makes it a breeze to select one, without a lot of researching required on the part of the customer.

Ecommerce Template For Online Store – Make it work across devices

A good ecommerce site should be accessible across all devices. Over 40% of sales for online stores come from mobile devices. That means that your users will want to be able to pick up their phone and see the same great website they know and love, without any hassle. The best ecommerce templates for online stores are responsive, which means they display well on both mobile as well as desktop. If you are choosing to build your site through an online provider like Shopnix, chances are their templates already allow you to preview what the site will look like on mobile as well as on desktop. This will help you to look ahead, see what elements need to be highlighted and where call to action elements need to be placed so that you can give your shoppers the best user experience. This can mean making phone numbers clickable to call, optimising images to appear larger on small screens and other small tweaks for a seamless shopping experience.

Leatherd.com is hosted on Shopnix and has optimised their site for mobile as well as desktop, through Shopnix’s responsive templates. As a result, users can just look for the store on their mobile and browse through products quickly and easily.

Quick to load, means it’s sold!

If your user is accessing your site to buy a product on their mobile phone, they are looking for quick results. It’s already a well known fact that mobile users today have short attention spans and are looking for quick gratification. They will not spend 20 seconds waiting for a heavy page to load up on their phone. You will have to make use of an ecommerce template that is lightweight and loads quickly on devices to prevent your shoppers from signing out forever. According to a recent Google update, one of the criteria for higher page ranking apart from meta data, will be the page loading time. Therefore, if you have a slow website, packed with heavy images that takes more than 5 seconds to load up on a mobile device, chances are people will not find you within the first few page results of a Google search. You do not want that to happen to you! Page loading speed is one important factor that needs to be considered when selecting n eCommerce template for your online store.

Fortunately, all the ecommerce templates provided by Shopnix are lightweight and user friendly. They offer quick page loading times and are a great way to get a better page ranking on Google. That will make you more popular with potential customers who are looking to get shopping done quickly and smoothly.

Speaking of search engines…

So glad we brought this up. When Google crawls your page to determine its page rank, there are several factors it will look at to rank your page higher. As we mentioned, meta data are one of these criteria. Meta data includes text behind the scenes, that a user sees as a brief description of the page on Google. An accurate meta title and meta description of the page will let users know what they will find when they click a search results link.

The  best eCommerce templates that have features built in to optimise them for search engines to find. They make use of the latest mark up languages, like HTML5. All Shopnix templates are packed with these powerful features, making them easy for site owners to add relevant keywords to so that users can find what they are looking for.

Ecommerce Template – Combine intelligent design with effective marketing

Another feature any ecommerce site owner should look for when planning to find ecommerce template few your online store is how best to market the site or its services. Today’s ecommerce site templates come bundled with a quick way for marketers to promote their site. There can be an embedded bit of code that will allow recommended products to appear in banners across the web that are tied up with partners. Therefore, when a user happens to use their social media credentials to register on your site, they would be reminded of your services no matter where on the internet they are!

Other marketing features include banner displays for attractive offers, indications when new items are introduced to the inventory and so on. There are also the regular image carousels that offer the latest information on products for customers to see as soon as they land on your site. These may seem like a nice to have, but they go a long way to securing a customer’s interest in your site.

Shopnix templates come bundled with marketing features like this, making it so much simpler for you to grab the interest of your customers and keep them coming back to your site.

Make social work for you

We live in a social world. You cannot afford to ignore that even when you are planning your ecommerce site. The customers who visit your site will want to share the products they are viewing with their friends and family to get a second opinion. That’s why it’s important to have easily located social sharing options available on your site for each item on your catalogue. The template for your online store should enable the visitor to do the same. There are benefits to having these items shared. For one thing, it’s free marketing for your site through word of mouth! It’s best to have these on your side ready to use as part of your ecommerce template.

Asha Sweet Center uses a template from Shopnix to offer its customers the ability to share products from their site on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Keep an eye on the latest trends

Once you have settled on an eCommerce template that you love, try it out on a select audience to test how they respond to it. You can always tweak the initial version based on the feedback you receive as part of this testing. On an ongoing basis, it’s definitely a positive if you can keep an eye on the latest design trends and see how far you can incorporate these elements onto your existing site. The more modern your site, the more relevant it continues to be to customers both old and new. Your site provider should be able to keep you informed of any new updates that are recommended to help optimise your website.

Constantly changing your ecommerce site template could have a negative impact on customers. They would be left feeling confused if they always went in to see a completely different site. So once you find a template that works for your brand, use it for the next 2 years or more. While we don’t recommend a complete overhaul of your site design every year, it is recommended to keep updating it with the latest trends.

In conclusion

The best ecommerce template for your online store should load quickly, work on multiple devices and place a huge emphasis on user experience and design. You can weigh your options and check your budget to see if you would like to start off with a free template or if you would be willing to spend more for a template that is customised to your brand and services. You can do a lot even with a free template as long as you make use of the social and marketing features that are available as part of the ecommerce template. eCommerce platform providers like Shopnix are on your side to help you show off your products or services to potential customers, maximising your ROI and getting you more conversions.

So what’s next? We recommend you head on over to Shopnix and check out some of the great templates that are available to kick start an ecommerce store. Take a look at what some of the existing users of the Shopnix templates are doing as well and make up your mind to see how you would like to customimse this for your brand. Your first impression should be the best one for your customers – so wow them with a great ecommerce template!