There are plenty of WooCommerce and eCommerce WordPress themes on the market. The last 2016 year was booming with adding over 400 WordPress themes in the eCommerce category on ThemeForest. Almost all of them looks the same with attention to “design” and missed part here is the online store functionality.
When there are plenty of “beautiful themes” we’ll need to focus on finding the theme that matches eCommerce store from functionality and smooth shopping experience point of view.
In this review, we’ll pick up the one which looks most promising eCommerce WordPress theme for shop owners to start 2017 year.
The review will take two main parts of WordPress theme including product presentation, and eCommerce features. We searched a lot and finally found the one that could match above requirements, it’s called Nitro WooCommerce theme. Why this or not another theme? Well… let’s take to the reasons behind it.
Product presentation. It starts with showcasing the product.
For the product showcasing in eCommerce websites, there are three essentials pages surely every shop owners pay attention: Home, Shop and Product pages. The typical shopper journey flow comes with such step sequences when the first touch point is the home page. Across the al eCommerce page that page get most of the traffic and that’s why we have to showcase products in the right and smart way.
Product showcasing on the home page
The primary purpose of this page is presenting different text and graphic information about the store and what assortments it has. Does the online shop offer the product that we’re looking for?
Is this a reputable store with the blog and social proof like Instagram images from their customers? Or whether there are any promotions where we get a great deal? For those and thousands of customers’ questions, the home page layout should be designed to catch the shopper’s mindset. Let’s take a look at the list of products to feature.
In this area, the shop owner could set the 3 or more filters such as “Special”, “Exclusive”, “Featured”, “Best Sellers”, “ON SALES” or any kind that might catch the attention of shoppers. Looking further with product items you can notice that there are the standard and on sales layouts.
The sale badge by default is coloured in red, but it’s customizable to other colours as well to match the overall design. The original and discounted price is presented clearly. I shop from time to time and often notice the discounted item with “20% OFF” but questioning myself whether it’s the price before or after discount? Well, I don’t have to think too much now. It’s clear.
Shop owners surely want to sell products items in the bundle like the set or collection. To present it we just make a great hi- quality photo but how to show it and quickly direct users to the interesting item?
From users eyes behaviour left to right we pay attention to the image first then we’ll think is there any item that we want to buy. When we decide with an item, we look at the real products items that are available on that image and voila there are 5 product items. The shopper can whether go to the Product page details of the item or just click “Add to cart”.
“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” – Jeff Bezos
And that’s true, we believe and shop because of brands. They worked hard to establish hi – quality product on the market.
Make it fit customers needs and we follow them when the new product item is available for sale. With this thought in mind, the products can be showcased via famous company brand. When you click on the brand logo, you’ll go next to the category page showcasing products only from that company. The intuitive shopping experience isn’t it?
Shop or Category page. Its role in filtering the products.
When there a lot of items in the stock, we keep them all on the product category page. Helping the shopper to choose the right product and going to the details is the primary purpose.
Nitro WooCommerce theme solves that problem well with advanced filtering functionality. With this WordPress theme, the filter of the products covers product types, its size and price, colour variation or custom attributes. WooCommerce by default support standard product attributes, but to fully enhance the filter functionality it’s good to use additional custom attributes.
Product Page. We find what we want and ready to buy the product.
Ok, so the shopper get interested in the product item and visit the product page of your WooCommerce store. This page usually comes with product information, product images and custom attributes such as colour, size or material. This is an essential piece of information that any online store should have.
However, to sell the product and have higher conversion rate the shop owners need to put more valuable information about the product. In summary, need to customise the product page as well. With Nitro WooCommerce theme you can build additional content with a support of Visual Composer plugin.
Using custom-written shortcode, you can add video, testimonials, graphic and text block explaining the benefits of the product item. At the end of product page just enable “Related Products” for cross-selling other items as well.
Customizer & Header Builder
Customization is the essential feature when it comes to building eCommerce store and one of the reasons why shop owners choose WordPress as the platform to get a try.
Customization in Nitro theme happens mainly via WordPress customizer enhancing its functionality. Whether you want to change the overall layout or enable that or other eCommerce features, it’s going on in the customizer. Customizer in Nitro WooCommerce theme is the breeze because the clear separation of sections like Layout, Typography, Color, Header, WooCommerce and other.
The vast customization possibilities led to creation more parameters. To solve that issue Nitro comes with a quick live search at the top of Customizer. Just typing keywords in our mind and it automatically displays the set of relevant results. Quick live search in the WordPress customizer is another one worth thing to mention. We’ve never seen such functionality in the customizer dashboard.
Digging deeper into the customization possibilities of Nitro theme we’ve found fun to play with the Header Builder. This feature allows you to build custom header element and assign it the whole site on the global level or to the particular page.
I’ve to fall in love with Drag n Drop mechanism because it’s easy to use and flexible with customization. One thing that I care mostly in the header/menu area is whether it’s sticky. So yes, with Header Builder you can build sticky menu as well.
eCommerce features overview. It’s all about the smooth shopping experience
Under eCommerce features, we define the features designed specifically for eCommerce websites. When visiting the online store, we are searching for the product item that set in our mind, learn more about it and decide to buy or find the alternative store.
The performance with page loading time also matters from both eCommerce and UX point of view. The page loading time should not be more than 3 seconds for any pages at eCommerce store. Another essential thing in eCommerce website is SEO.
SEO for an online store is a little bit different than the typical business website. It adds additional requirements if we want our store rank higher among competitors. The last but not least is connecting our store with a social network. Let’s take a look at details.
Product Search. Find the product easily and buy it
The inspiration comes from Amazon.com and big eCommerce sties when I do shopping frequently. It starts from a search for the product that we already know.
WooRockets Team built the search functionality based on AJAX which let us see the result instantly without reloading the page.
When playing with the search on Nitro demo sites and reading docs I’ve noticed that search feature cover Product name, SKU and content description as well. There are different styles of search as well, so it can be easily customizable to match the shop owners needs. The settings of search are intuitively located via Header Builder feature.
eCommerce SEO site. Takes time but wins on the long run
Nitro WooCommerce theme is optimised for SEO a quite good. Just looking into the code base, you can notice that it follows the Schema markup standard. Just use Inspect feature of Google Chrome, and you can make sure about that.
Also, as we know SEO is about putting valuable content on the page, don’t we? One of the important pages that we rarely pay attention but has high SEO impact is the Product Category. With Nitro theme, you can add block HTML text simply with text links as well.
In that way, you can increase the internal linking between category pages and regular pages. From this point of view, I see Nitro theme has been built with SEO mindset taking into account benefit of shop owners.
Email popups. Collect lead emails effectively
Nitro theme comes with advanced popup plugin called Ninja popup – best selling WordPress popup plugin on Codecanyon marketplace. Usually, WooCommerce theme on the market comes with 1 – 3 default popup styling Not really many options. How many popup styles in Nitro WordPress eCommerce theme?
24. YES. That’s 24 email popup styling designed for each eCommerce niche with different colour variation matching the overall layout style. Buying just single license Nitro, we get 24 email popup styles bundled in 1 package nicely.
Popup Single Product eCommerce niche
Popup Pet store eCommerce niche
Popup Sports equipment eCommerce niche
Popup beauty store eCommerce niche
Popup kitchen store eCommerce niche
Social network is essential
Two things to worth mention here related to Social side of Nitro WordPress theme. First, is the WordPress plugin called WR Share For Discount developed by WooRockets team.
It allows the shopper to get a good discount for sharing his favourite product via social network. And the second one is the Social block icons which the shop owners can put his social links from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and other.
Moreover, the particular attention takes Instagram with horizontal image gallery bar plus Call To Action “Follow Us”. This is the great user experience for both shop owners and fans who want to get latest updates from their favourite brand.
Below is the snapshot of the WR Share For Discount plugin applied to both Product and Checkout pages.
And at the cart page as well. The shopper has a great opportunity to share about the store and earn the discount. It’s automatically applied to the Cart totals.
The story about performance
Page loading speed matters as mentioned early. When we look at the code base, I’ve noticed that they do not use any theme framework available on the market. Instead, Nitro theme is written from scratch, and each line of code is counted. It’s amazing when you see a good performance score from Pingdom almost on all 24 eCommerce niche demos.
It tells a lot how Nitro theme is flexible but still keeping the good performance. Even taking into account that these guys use CDN and performance optimisation plugins it does show a good result.
They also offer random performance test tool so that we can test drive any niche demos. In my case, it was niche demo #5 about selling kitchen equipment.
Just from personal experience, I can tell you guys that theme itself is only the part of overall performance. Other things which we must pay attention is the reliable hosting provider and content itself, I mean optimize images of your online store.
Final words
Nitro WooCommerce theme is a new player on eCommerce WordPress theme market which can make the serious competition to the existing theme providers. Looking at the Customers Reviews section at the product page I can find easily that the right product is backed – up by a great team.
They provide direct support assistance, so there is no “middle support layer”. It means a lot for shop owners who can do give feedback directly to the makers and that feedback are applied to a product with next release. In short, worth to give a try for building next eCommerce project.
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