Essential template features for your eCommerce site

Knowing how to tailor the design of a website to your customer’s brand, tone of voice, values, and expertise takes collaboration between the business, writers, developers, and designers. Hosted platforms ease this process by doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to development. 

But customisation is still key and easy to do with the help of templates. But we know not all templates are made equal. In today’s growing eCommerce market, some are more effective for your clients than others. So here’s a rundown of the latest, most effective features a great template should have.

How to choose a template

Choosing a template depends on what type of website you’re building, the costs, and the quality of the design. It should be the right fit for the business, able to represent the values, creativity, or product range of the company. A different template may be useful for companies selling singles, variations like small, medium, and large, or kits, for example. One may need added drop-down menus for customers to select their products in the right colour or size, or one may need a better image-focused layout for each product page. 

For example, a design studio might benefit from an image-led template with a colourful, creative design. This helps showcase their industry, that they value creativity and vibrancy, and with high-quality images, that they’re good at what they do. The customer will be able to see this in a single glance. An accountant, on the other hand, may opt for a more subtle, information-led design with company colours. They may prioritise clarity, organisation, and professionalism over creativity in the template’s design. 

However, it doesn’t matter what type of business it is when it comes to functionality. 

Responsive design and functionality

In 2019, for the first time, smartphones overtook shopping centres as one of the most popular ways to shop, with shoppers spending £25 billion per year on their phones. This is up from £10 million in 2018. With this in mind, any template you use should be just as effective and attractive on a phone as it is on a computer screen if you want to maximise customer sales for the business. 

Every template should also prioritise ease of use for the customer. This means ensuring buttons, text, and images are of high quality and easy to read, locate, and use. Poor colour schemes, strange fonts, and templates are all culprits of causing site abandonment yet easily fixable by choosing a more professional template. 

Useful features

The features needed often change from business to business, but there are several useful features to consider when choosing the perfect template. These include:

• Customer logins – Does your template support customer logins so you can tailor the customer experience? Customer logins also mean you can control who views pricing, RRPs, or strike-through pricing or who has access to certain products.
• Featured product images – Showcase new arrivals, popular, or promotional items on the site to interest returning customers in particular. For example, the latest iPhone stands prominently at the top of Apple’s home page, drawing in interest from tech enthusiasts.
• Optional features –  Mega menus, Instagram shop or feed connectivity, wishlists, compare tools, related-product suggestions, special price countdowns, and quick views are some of the most popular optional template features.

If you know the brand and business well, it should be easy to tailor the right templates to the business needs and values. The last thing to consider is whether you can easily integrate the chosen template designs onto your eCommerce platform. Without this malleable basis for customisation, eCommerce sites could suffer. 

Shopit has a wide variety of templates available to ensure websites are built with sleek designs and maximum functionality. Or, if you have something else in mind, why not go for a bespoke creation? Shopit offers an excellent customisation service, so don’t hesitate to contact our team for more information.