What’s the Deal with eCommerce Templates?

As the frantic frenzy of the Christmas shopping season begins to loom closer in the near future, businesses with eCommerce stores are continuing to work on preparations for this most important retail season of the year. However, while preparing for the entire holiday shopping season is certainly a high priority task, the absolute top priority is getting ready for this year’s Black Friday, and more importantly, Cyber Monday.

Among all the various hardware tests and other preparations businesses are conducting, is one point that many business owners are likely to forget about; that point is updating their website’s eCommerce template. But what’s so important about changing a website’s eCommerce template? And what is a template anyways?

Understanding What Website Templates Are

Well, as the name would suggest, an eCommerce, or web page template is a pre-designed and pre-built webpage that you can customize to your liking. Webopedia states that some of the most common customization options include fonts, formatting, graphics, and style. There are other options you can play with on a template, but some of those might depend on the type of template you are using, and where you got that template from. Additionally, eCommerce templates can come pre-designed with a particular theme or business niche in mind. So it’s totally possible to find a holiday themed template designed for a business selling shoes, for example.

While using a template for your website is a lot easier and a lot more convenient compared to building an entire page from scratch, there are also limitations to how much you can customize them.

Why Updating Your Site’s Template is Worth it

Perhaps you think updating your eCommerce website’s template is not really that useful; that it would be best to just stick with your current site design. While doing that is certainly an option open to you if you wish, not updating your template for the upcoming season isn’t doing your business any favors. There are some significant advantages to upgrading your website’s template to match the upcoming holiday shopping season, and more importantly, Cyber Monday.

Though it’s a bit more of a hassle to do so, changing your site to a Cyber Monday branded template for that day, and then changing the template to something more generically winter or Christmas related after that, can help boost your site visitors, and maybe even help land your business more sales. The reason behind this is branding. According to the Huffington Post, Cyber Monday has become a universally understood phrase that consumers automatically associate with big sales and discounts. As such, changing your website’s template to one with Cyber Monday branding all over will instantly make any consumers visiting your website immediately aware of the possibility of major savings. This can then lead those consumers to digging around through your offers and store pages looking for anything that might interest them. While it won’t happen all the time, this can lead to additional sales from consumers who find something they like and decide to buy, even if they weren’t actually planning on making a purchase on your site.

Another significant reason why updating your website’s template is worthwhile revolves around search engine results and SEO. According to Digital Operative, a holiday themed template and adjusting some of your page content to display things like “Cyber Monday Sale” can help improve your website’s SEO capabilities, which in turn can help boost your site’s search engine result ranking on Google or Yahoo searches. This means more consumers are likely to see your site, which means more will be likely to visit and shop around some.

Template Types and Where to Find Them

Technically, there are only two “types” of eCommerce template you can find: pre-built and custom built. They both do the same thing, and they can both help your business a lot during Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday season.

However, as you might expect, a custom built eCommerce template can give you absolute freedom in deciding how you want everything to look, but at the cost of either spending a lot of your time working on building it (and maybe learning how to program the template if you don’t already), or hiring a professional web designer/programmer to build it for you for a not necessarily insignificant price.

Though a custom built template allows you to control every single aspect of what the page looks like and how it functions, finding a pre-built template is far easier, and far less stressful. Plus, as eCommerce platforms states, pre-built templates come with additional bonuses like instant access to support techs and services, special features upon request, clean, up-to-date design and build, and they’re inexpensive.

Finding templates to browse through isn’t difficult at all either. There are numerous vendors like Shopify that offer a wide range of template types and designs for you to pick from. And, while some must be purchased, there are plenty of other templates that are free.

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