Why You Need a High Converting Shopify Theme

Posted by Jeremy on March 27th, 2019

Starting an eCommerce store can be a great way to get set up and started online. Unlike a brick and mortar business, you do not need to the levels of investment that you once would.

As such, an eCommerce store has limited barriers to entry, and if you are looking to get started online, this is a venture that should be worthy of your consideration. Dropshipping is just one opportunity you could explore.

There are a diverse range of online services that enable you to not only build and host your store, but accept payments, understand your customers and offer incentives and special offers. 

One of which is Shopify; which is an award-winning and industry leading eCommerce platform which is the home of over 600,000 online stores

Whilst getting set up is easy, making your store profitable is actually the difficult bit. Just one area, in where a lot of store owners run into problems is that they fail to take into account the importance and significance of their theme.

So whether you’ve got a store that is currently not making the sales it should, or if you’re looking to get started on Shopify with their 14 Day Free Trial, you’re be glad you found this article. Here are the 6 reasons why you need to invest in a premium and optimized theme.

Performance

Every good website, whether a blog or a store, has great performance. There are a lot of elements that make up a websites performance, but two of the most significant include up-time and page speed loading times.

For the latter, they can make a huge impact on the results from your store. Did you know that just a 1 second delay can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. A store making 0,000 per day, could potentially lose .5 million in lost sales a year. (source Neil Patel)

Ultimately, if your store is not working or loading as fast as it should you are reducing the number of sales that you could make.

With distraction a plenty in today’s digital world, you cannot afford to give your store visitors the opportunity to leave your site without making a purchase.

Design and Customization

If you are attracted to a theme purely on how it looks, you’re placing your stores success at risk. A lot of the free themes do have a minimalist, crisp look and feel. And while this can be great for helping your store look professional, and for your brand image in general, there can be a lot of underlying issues.

For the most part, a lot of free or cheaper themes are very limited in their design and customization. You are relatively restricted in terms of how you can lay out your homepage, product pages, buy now buttons etc. You have to follow the layout options that come included with the theme.

Unfortunately, this can have severe consequences. A lot of themes for example, place their buy now button below the fold. This means a lot of the functionality is only accesses when your store visitors scrolls down the page.

A simple redesign, or a theme that enables you to place the buy now button above the fold can have pretty impressive results.

It’s all about user friendless and giving your visitor the easiest customer route and journey from product browsing to product purchasing.

Regarding customization, by investing in a premium theme that allows you to fully customize every last element of your store with a drag and drop builder, will save you a lot of time, money and frustration. They’ll be no need to touch complicated HTML code.

Functionality

Perhaps the stand out reason for upgrading your store theme, is for functionality. If you are using a free theme, particularly on a platform like Shopify, you store is not set up to persuade or pressure your visitors into purchasing.

You need to give your customers a reason to buy, and the best way to do that is to present Scarcity, Social Proof and Authority. These are critical elements of persuasion and if you can install functionality on your store with this in mind, then you are going to boost your conversions.

Several of the Best Shopify Themes have been designed with this in mind. The themes that will make more sales are the ones that have applications pre-built into the coding, that work for your store immediately following installation.

Just some of the functionality that you can install on your store include: Countdown Timers, Upsells, Discount Popups and more!

Also Ensure That

Your Theme is Search Engine Friendly, Mobiel Optimized and there is a comprehensive support team and infrastructure in place! 

Final Words

There are many reasons why your store theme is essential to your success, these are perhaps the crucial ones.

The eCommerce business model is one that is proving successful for a lot of young and inexperienced entrepreneurs. Finding the right theme is a natural part of this process and can yield impressive results with the right choices made. Good luck!