Miva Retro ReadyTheme Customization: Tailored To Your Needs!
Miva users know that Miva is the ecommerce world’s best-kept secret. With Miva now offering responsive ReadyThemes free with every license, it’s easier than ever to put a functional, beautiful skin on your Miva store. In fact, most of our clients agree: Miva ReadyThemes really nail it after just a little customization.
Bee Bald Man Care Products sells skin care products for the head. Their products offer incredible value for bald and non-bald men alike. But men aren’t the only ones who love Bee Bald; women use their products, too. Bee Bald has a developed a great brand. Clearly, they needed a great website to match.
When Bee Bald came to us for a redesign, we knew that the Miva Retro ReadyTheme was perfect—well, nearly perfect. Bee Bald founder Dennis Fisher wanted to make a few changes to the theme. He had some ideas on how to optimize this theme for his business, and we were happy to help. The fact is, a pre-loaded theme is rarely a perfect fit for a business owner’s vision. Every business is unique, and themes are designed to please a wide user base. Bee Bald needed something unique. We agreed that Dennis had some great ideas to take his online store to the next level.
So how did we take the Bee Bald store to the next level? Let’s dive right in.
Dennis liked the Retro ReadyTheme overall. “As a template, it was great,” he says. “But it’s not all things to all people.” Specifically, he wasn’t happy with the theme’s homepage layout. The stock layout was functional and looked great, but that functionality didn’t quite fit his product line. We adjusted the homepage product offering template, replacing the stock configuration with a product carousel. We also tweaked the colors and the copy to match Dennis’s specifications.
As you can see, the resulting Bee Bald homepage looks stunning. Dennis has developed an amazingly cohesive brand—one that really sells his product to his niche. Clearly, Dennis’s design decisions were one key part of building that awesome brand. Honestly, we think a lot of marketers could take a cue from Dennis.
It’s obvious that a great ecommerce design appeals to online shoppers. However, a great design coupled to a cohesive brand also makes a great impression on other businesses. In Dennis’s case, as he hammered out relationships with distributors the old-fashioned way, his website turned into a stellar asset. Dennis could throw someone a link with confidence, knowing his website design would showcase the excellent quality of his product line.
Responsive Web Design: Critical In Today’s Ecommerce Market
Ouch. Looks like non-responsive design. (Original photo courtesy of Jan Vašek; modified by 216digital.)
Dennis was getting a lot of mobile traffic on his old site, but mobile users weren’t converting. Dennis thought that mobile users were leaving the site because it wasn’t resizing to the small screens of phones. We agreed—and the same is true for all non-responsive sites today. If you’re not serving pages optimized for mobile devices you’re losing sales.
For ecommerce store owners, mobile website design isn’t an option. It’s a necessity.
The Retro ReadyTheme is fully mobile responsive out of the box. However, when you add custom extensions to a responsive theme, you have to ensure that the customizations look great on mobile, too. Dennis needed a store locator module for his site. We integrated a powerful store locator module into the new Bee Bald site—but we knew that that alone wasn’t enough. We made sure the store locator module was fully mobile responsive and integrated into the look and feel of the theme. That way, customers could find a Bee Bald store on the go—and they wouldn’t be distracted by a clunky store locator experience.
Bee Bald looks great on mobile.
We believe it’s the little things that count, so we also tightened up the overall look of Dennis’s Retro ReadyTheme installation. These incremental changes added up to a great overall brand impression—on mobile and on desktop.
The Cleveland Connection: A Local B2B Partnership
photo by: Rick Harris
An entrepreneur often wears all the hats. When Dennis started gearing up for the launch of Bee Bald, he was learning about the ecommerce world from scratch. Since the technical aspect of ecommerce was so new to him, he realized only shortly before launch that he needed to make changes to the proposal he’d submitted to his developer. The developer was local to the Cleveland, OH area, but they weren’t quite prepared to deal with the nuances of changing a Miva project on the fly. While Dennis’s relationship with his original developer had showed initial promise, he began to realize it wasn’t till-death-do-us-part. He needed a dedicated Miva developer.
Enter 216digital. Justin Sims, our lead web developer, took over Dennis’s project. When we asked Dennis to reflect on his experience with us, we could hear the genuine appreciation in his voice. “Justin did a terrific job,” Dennis said. “He was accessible and responsive. He helped streamline the process.” Now that’s an aspect of responsive web design that you don’t hear about every day—responding right away to a client’s needs and concerns.
In the process of working with us, Dennis learned a lot about Miva. We didn’t keep any secrets from him. Dennis can now perform many store updates himself, meaning we’re billing him less. A lot of companies wouldn’t do that. Why give away the secrets that build value into your services? We simply don’t see it that way. Dennis is our client, and it was our job to build the best ecommerce tool we could for him. Dennis was equipped to learn Miva, and we were happy to teach him.
The Bottom Line
At 216digital, we have a passion for all things Cleveland. Cleveland beers, Cleveland sports teams, we’re 216 all the way. (That’s the area code around here, by the way.) It was exciting to help a Cleveland-area entrepreneur achieve his business goals.
Of course, our clients come from all over. If you aren’t from the Cleveland area, we’ll show you the Cleveland work ethic as we create a stellar ecommerce site for you. So, when you’re ready to start that next project, remember 216digital. With 15 years of experience as a Miva certified partner, we can make your Miva ReadyTheme nail it!
Best Ecommerce Platforms for 2015 – Pt. 2 – Shopify
If you search Google for “ecommerce platforms,” you’ll find a lot about WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Bigcommerce. If you do a little digging, you might find Miva, a longstanding ecommerce platform that’s not as well-known. Each platform has its own selling points and drawbacks. For some businesses, hidden drawbacks to any given platform may eventually overshadow that platform’s selling points. In this in-depth series, we’re examining the benefits and drawbacks of 5 major ecommerce platforms. In Part 1, we talked about WooCommerce. In Part 2, we’ll look at Shopify. Let’s dive in!
Shopify:
Shopify is a major player in the ecommerce game. With 150,000 active stores, Shopify is responsible for an incredible amount of online commerce. Shopify offers a range of responsive themes, Paypal integration, blogging functionality, a CMS (content management system) and a fairly basic abandoned cart email integration. In that regard, Shopify is generally competitive among ecommerce platforms. However, Shopify has some serious drawbacks which entrepreneurs should consider before committing.
Watch out for those transaction fees!
The biggest problem with Shopify is its transaction fee schedule. This is tied to your choice of payment gateway. If you go with Shopify’s own gateway, Shopify Payments, you’ll be charged 1.8%-2.4% plus $0.30 on every transaction. The percentage charge depends on your plan tier. If you want to use Shopify Payments, you’re in luck. But if you want to integrate with a 3rd party payment gateway, you’ll pay two transaction fees every time you make a sale: one to your 3rd party, and one to Shopify itself. In this scenario, Shopify’s fee goes down to 0.5%-2.0%, depending on your plan tier. Keep in mind that you’re already paying Shopify for the software and hosting. If you’re considering Shopify, you should really crunch the numbers on your projected sales and margins and see how this all adds up.
Shopify’s discount functionality is also limited. The only discounts you can apply are percent off, dollars off, and free shipping. Clearly, these are the most common discount types; but what about scenarios where you need a different type of discount solution? Miva’s built-in discount functionality is far more robust. Without add-ons, Miva offers volume pricing, add-on products, basket discounts, buy product X and get product Y, product discounts, and two types of shipping discounts—entire order, or per-product.
Some developers have claimed that Shopify’s code is not lightweight. Shopify contains in-line javascript at the beginning of the page. Experts generally recommend using external javascript or putting it at the end of the page. Note that Miva in stock configuration has no in-line javascript at the beginning of the source code.
Shopify gives you two shipping methods out of the box. However, carrier-calculated shipping rates aren’t available in any plan below the $179/month tier. This puts smaller operations at a disadvantage. In Miva, shipping options are in no way tied to your website hosting setup.
Overall, Shopify provides a good value to startups and small online stores that don’t need unlimited functionality and have big enough margins to take the transaction fees. Shopify is feature-rich, and those features will work just fine for many smaller operations. However, the limitations we discussed could hamper a store that starts to take off. That’s a key question that entrepreneurs should ask themselves when considering an ecommerce platform: will this software still serve me well in 3 years? In 5 years? In 10 years? And in the case of Shopify, as business grows, how will those transaction fees add up over the years?
The Bottom Line
Shopify offers excellent functionality and features. However, its transaction fee schedule represents a serious drawback for businesses doing larger sales volumes. In this regard, Shopify is more suited to small operations that will stay small. For larger operations, or for fast-growing stores, Miva and Magento offer more freedom and flexibility and have no inherent transaction fees. Note, however, that they may be more expensive than Shopify to get off the ground.
Best Ecommerce Platforms for 2015 – Pt. 1 – WooCommerce
Google “eCommerce platforms,” and you’ll probably find a lot about WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Bigcommerce. Dig a little deeper, and you might find a longstanding platform called Miva. Each of these platforms has its strengths and weaknesses. For some businesses, the weaknesses of any given platform may heavily outweigh that platform’s strengths. In this in-depth series, we’ll take a look at the benefits and drawbacks of 5 major eCommerce platforms. We’ll also look at what kind of business each platform is most suited for. As one of the Top WooCommerce Developers, we’ll be kicking things off with our analysis of the WooCommerce platform.
WooCommerce: Great For Startups With Small Budgets
WooCommerce is an online shopping cart plugin for WordPress. As such, WooCommerce can only run on WordPress installations. WordPress is the web’s most popular blogging platform and content management system, and it’s only gotten better in the last few years. With the WooCommerce plugin installed, it’s a great option for anyone just starting out in online selling.
The WooCommerce plugin itself is free, making it even more optimized for startups with low budgets. However, the free plugin lacks some extensions. Certain shipping options, payment gateways, extension of product fields, and other functions require add-ons. Some of these plugins are free, but most require a purchase. For more complex online stores, WooCommerce isn’t free at all, due to the number of plugins that must be licensed.
Because WooCommerce was developed by WooThemes, it allegedly runs best on one of their WordPress themes. Most of those aren’t free. Because the plugin is open-source, WooCommerce users do not have access to phone or social media support. However, users who purchase a WordPress template from WooThemes do have access to the company’s support forums.
For simple operations, and for entrepreneurs with simple requirements and zero budget, WooCommerce can’t be beat. However, for larger stores and established operations, WooCommerce can’t provide the full functionality and flexibility of Miva or Magento. Magento requires extensive 3rd party development to reach the level of functionality that larger ecommerce firms will require. Miva requires less development to get a new store to market, but it may still require some, depending on the new store’s business model. Though development costs more than plugins, larger stores see the value in having storefronts, checkout procedures, and product features optimized to their exact market needs. Because WooCommerce is WordPress-based, WooCommerce users depend on existing plugins to modify site functionality. In Miva and Magento, the possibilities are almost endless.
The Bottom Line:
WooCommerce is great for simple operations and low-budget startups. However, it doesn’t have the extensibility of larger and more expensive platforms like Miva and Magento. As such, it may not be suitable for low-budget startups with complex storefront needs. But for bloggers who already use WordPress and want to start a basic online store on the same domain as their blog, WooCommerce is perfect.
