The Strategic Choice: Speed-to-Market vs. Custom Development is a report that highlights the factors that shape a company's choice between these two approaches. Just check here the Shopping blogger template which is a special eCommerce design that full-fill the needs of users.
It sounds like a great idea to have a 100% custom built storefront. Ownership of all pixels, interactions, and code. In reality, that's quite expensive, and most start-ups simply can't afford to have that level of control, and it's not just about monetary costs.
While considering discovery, design, development, QA and deployment, the custom development for a mid complexity e-commerce store can take 3-6 months. The above timeframe assumes that the project remains on scope, the agency meets the deadline and internal stakeholders get on-board fast enough – which is hardly the case. In those months you are paying development retainers, you're stocking products that aren't selling and your marketing budget's idle because you don't have anything to promote. At this point, there is no theoretical opportunity cost. It's actual cash that's leaking out from the company prior to any sale.
A blogger template that is all set and prepared reduces that time frame to days or weeks. Platforms such as Piki Templates, Edgy Templates or BTO Themes, Wire Templates, Templateiki have a fully-grown theme ecosystem that has already invested thousands of hours of design and development into a $200-$400 theme. The basic structure (responsive grid system, cart, product pages, filter and navigation structure) is already coded, tested and established to function for browser and device. It's not just an eye candy template that you are buying! You are buying time, and lots of time!
It's not just about speed! By going first, you're in the feedback loop that custom-build clients will not be getting in for another couple of months. You get insight into what products are of interest to people. You can observe when customers are placing orders in the checkout process. You discover if your presumed Customer Acquisition Cost is feasible or not. It's not information that you can simulate in a spreadsheet — it is based on real traffic on a real store. A template to get you to that data three months before you can build a custom one is priceless.
First and foremost, it is not about whether or not to never build custom. It's a complaint that it is too bad we don't have custom first. The smartest way is to build and test a good template to prove out the demand and generate some initial cash flow, and then invest in the revenues from that initial cash flow in a more customized build at a later stage, one that's built based on real-world behavioral data instead of guesswork pre-launch.
When searching for the best template, there are several factors to consider.
There are not all template are the same. The right one can mean the difference between and a checkout which actively harms your conversion rate, poor loading performance and technical debt. Before settling on any theme, make sure you have considered it in reference to these criteria:
Lightweight and clean code base: No matter how good your hosting might be, using a lot of unused scripts, redundant CSS and third party plugin dependency will slow down your store. Each template you're considering should be tested for speed via Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix prior to buying. As long as you don't push yourself too hard optimising your site, a well-designed theme should register at over 80 on mobile. There is a direct relationship between page load time and search rankings and conversion rates – every additional second of load time creates a measurable impact on conversion rates and is a factor in search rankings.
Mobile-friendly vs mobile-first: It's not the same thing, being mobile friendly meant that a theme was created for desktop and then translated into mobile, mobile-first means a theme was built specifically for mobile. Always test on a device, NOT a browser simulator. The product image gallery, position of the add-to-cart button, the navigation menu, and the filter system should all be as natural on a phone screen as possible, and not like a crammed-up desktop user interface.
Even if the checkout page is pretty standard as on Piki Templates, the template can have a huge impact on the checkout UX and experience. Look out for themes that will reduce the friction on the path to purchase, such as clear calls-to-action, trust signals (security badges, return policy snippets, social proof), and cart drawer/slide-out that allows customers to stay on the product page and not be transported away from the buying context.
The ability to display a product page in different ways: The product page is where purchases are made. A solid template provides you with the flexibility of arranging product variants clearly, showing important customer reviews, embedding rich media (videos, zooms, 360 degree views) and providing important buying information (sizing, materials, shipping times and so on) without having to spend time coding and developing a custom template to make it look coherent.
Well-documented and logical customization structure: This template will need to be customized now and in the future. Designs designed with a clean section-based architecture (Piki Templates Online Store 2.0 system is a decent standard to conform to) enable non-developers to accomplish significant changes to the layout in the admin interface. This cuts your reliance on a developer for each minor update, and decreases your operating costs in the long-term.
Active documentation and support from a developer or agency, and a community of users, make for solid developer and user support: When you encounter a problem – and you will – there will be a way to find answers. It's a burden to have orphaned themes that haven't been used at all in the past couple of months. Look-up the theme's update history, review recent support tickets (assuming they are public and find out if the theme developer is keeping the theme current with the latest features.
Designing with conversion in mind is a series of assumptions that are embodied in a good template. For sticky header, ensure they are available to shoppers when scrolling through the website and they are able to access the cart; for wishlist or save-for-later, it can help customers keep track of their desired products and reorder them later; for cross-sell and upsell section support, you can help customers buy and feel the value of your service; for clear typographic hierarchy, you can guide customers from product name to price to call to action without any visual distractions along the way.
Accessibility and compliance readiness: Not only is it right to build a template that complies with the WCAG, but it is becoming more of a legal and commercial requirement. These (color contrast ratios, keyboard navigation and alt-text ready image structure) should be a part of the theme and not need to be retrofitted afterward.
In the previous article, we discussed how to create a framework for your business.In the last article, we talked about setting up a framework for your business.
The biggest drawback to templates is that all of the stores come to look alike. This is a valid worry, and as such, one of the biggest reasons why it's not going to work is because of brand execution and not so much the template. A theme is a framework which is a set of walls and rooms. The contents of them are all up to you.
Typography is one of the top factors that ecommerce operators don't take advantage of when it comes to branding. Most of the templates use system fonts or fonts that are safe to pair together. By replacing them with a unique font pairing, one that feels more like your brand – utilitarian and direct, or more like an editorial and aspirational – then your store will stand out from the dozens of stores using the same base theme. Both Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts provide a wide range of fonts, with a good typeface free — apart from the time invested in choosing it wisely.
Photography is a far greater heavier lifter than any other element of brand. A “popular” template with a “true” high production image (same lighting, color scheme, actors, etc. – a world of its own, and in line with the brand) would feel completely custom. On the other hand, even if you spend a lot of money developing your generic store you will come across as a generic store. Spend money on the photographs before the custom code. This return on investment is reflected in brand perceptions and conversions right away.
The one thing which is an afterthought for most of the brands and should be an after-thought, is the copywriting. The brand's voice is in the product description, the introduction on category pages, the headlines on homepage, the microcopy within buttons and form fields, and more. A template provides a framework – original, good writing puts its own personality into the container. Again if your copy resembles with all the others in your category, then no amount of unique design will do the trick for you.
On a shared template architecture, color palette management is even more important than on a custom build – because the structure of the bones are known. A cohesive, unique look with color usage throughout backgrounds, buttons, hovering, product badges and promotional banners helps to establish a signature look that trumps the template's recognition. The aim is to not use lots of colors, but use your colors in a consistent manner, so as to make the actual template identity disappear.
These decisions have added impact when it comes to collective outcomes. Two stores, using the same template, and choosing different type, different photography, different color palette and different copywriting will feel and look like two totally different brands. The template becomes a part of infrastructure. The brand becomes what the user knows and what he feels.
Just Day One is launched!
A template doesn't mean that you're limited to being creative. It's a launch pad - the quickest and most cost effective way to get a store to your real customers working and ready to make money so that you can start to build your business. All of the tweaks you make after you've launched your site will be based on behavioral data – where people click, where they don't click, where products move in and out of the store, where buyers come from and where browsers come from. All that data is far more valuable than any in a vacuum design decision made before launch. It's not usually the company that is the most intricately designed store on day one that's the most successful in ecommerce. They were the ones to get a head start, learn quickly and apply it to create a better product over time. A great template, with a true sense of the brand, gets you in that loop ASAP – which is where you want to be.
