Where to Find the Best Premium and Free OpenCart Themes
OpenCart is an open source shopping cart software used by hundreds of thousands of small, medium and corporate sized businesses worldwide. Builtwith recorded that in August 2015, OpenCart generated 6.42% of the global E-commerce volumes which makes it one of the fastest growing platforms.
Because of that market share, there are thousands of designers and developers that work on it, so new themes and extensions are constantly entering the market.
Themes are the digital clothes of your store. They account for the way your store looks in front of your customers. Getting a ready-made theme for your website is a way to save time and money from looking for, communicating and hiring a design studio or a freelancer to work on creating a special design.
This post will introduce you to 3 of the most popular spots around the web where you can get OpenCart themes, both free and premium. We will also try to simplify the process of choosing the new appearance of your store.
Before we get into the theme sources, we would like to share a few tips to know before you make the final decision for the new look of your site.
How to know which OpenCart themes are right for your store?
OpenCart Version Compatibility
OpenCart has its own version releases so you should always check if the theme you like will fit the version your store is running.
See and play with the Demo
The purpose of the theme demo is to show the best of the theme. At the same time the demo entices you to feel like this is your store. This is why many themes usually offer multiple versions such as light or dark color schemes or different layout arrangements.
In general demos include a representation of the design, layout, content architecture, and any added features the theme may have. You can also see if the theme is mobile and tablet compatible and see how it works and looks on mobile devices.
An important thing to remember about theme demos is that developers usually create a user account with limited permissions for editing the template settings. Meaning, you can browse the admin panel settings, but cannot change them. You are only able to see the design.
Theme Features
Many themes have features that go beyond modifying the appearance of your website. Developers include additional modules that enhance the value of their themes and put them ahead of the competition. Please be careful as sometimes these changes might mean incompatibility with any other modules you are planning to buy.
Documentation
Theme documentations include the installation, configuration and additional functionality instructions (if any).
Reviews, Rating, Downloads
The theme popularity is measured by the number of sales. This is why each marketplace displays data about the number of theme purchases.
Another metric you must check are reviews and comments. Reviews and comments can give you an idea of what other users like about the theme or if there are any complications to be aware of.
#1 ThemeForest
The marketplace:
ThemeForest is one of the leading marketplaces for creative projects. There, you will find over 460 OpenCart themes. One of the reasons we recommend ThemeForest is because they are part of Envato Marketplace who check the quality of each theme that gets uploaded.
Quality aside, ThemeForest is a marketplace where different creatives from around the world sell their products so the competition for quality is quite high. At the same time you are able to get a taste of each of the authors' design style.
What you get:
Once you open a theme, you will find the images of the design and an option for a live preview. You can check all the theme details type (Responsive or Parallax), features, browser and OpenCart compatibility.
On the right hand side, you can see the name of the author and a link to their ThemeForest page. There you are able to view a short bio as well as their other work. ThemeForest have author insignia such as (sales, engagement with the community, purchases, member, etc) which act almost as a community status. The more an author has, the better.
Another key point to look for is the kind of support the author offers. You will see what the author supports and what not, their average response time (in days), and the communication channels they have (ticket support system, email, social) etc.
#2 TemplateMonster
The marketplace:
TemplateMonster is the biggest global marketplace for website themes with a total of 26,268 digital products and over 650 OpenCart templates. They are the developers behind every theme in the marketplace and the support is carried out by their team 24/7.
What you get:
In contrast to ThemeForest, the TemplateMonster marketplace works with in-house developers who create all of the themes. Information-wise everything in the marketplace is very well organized and extremely accessible thanks to the search and the filters.
Another important thing about TemplateMonster is not just the large number of OpenCart themes they have - it’s in their diversity. The marketplace offers multiple templates for practically any type of business you might be running - art, education, electronics, fashion, medical, entertainment, and cars, to name just a few.
Purchasing a theme is not the end of the relationship with TemplateMonster. They also offer offer additional services such as installation, hosting, speed optimization and an SEO audit of your website.
As an official partner of TemplateMonster, iSenseLabs also provides a variety of OpenCart themes developed by their team.
#3 OpenCart
The marketplace:
The OpenCart extension store offers more than 1,700 themes for both the most recent and older versions of the platform. Naturally, it is the place where you can find the most digital goodies and themes that are being developed for the free shopping cart.
What you get:
Almost everyone can join in the OpenCart store and submit a theme. With more than 3,000 people being present on the site at any given moment, the OpenCart community acts as a police and reports any bad product which almost instantly gets removed by the admins.
The competition here is also quite outspread so essentially the themes can rival the ones in the other two marketplaces.
As the OpenCart marketplace is free to join and use, sometimes theme authors would post the same theme on ThemeForest and OpenCart.com. Don’t get confused if you see that. When it comes to authors, the OpenCart store provides easy access to author’s products, rating and comments.
The themes come with screenshots, images that show how the design looks. SImilar to the marketplaces above, authors also include a link to the live demo of their template. As for the description below, it depicts all of the theme features and the extra functionality it adds to your OpenCart store.
At the bottom, there is the Downloads field, which indicates the compatible versions, theme Documentation and comments from other users (if present).
Summary
If you are already familiar enough with OpenCart, you probably know that these are not the only sources for themes and other digital goodies. However, ThemeForest, TemplateMonster and the OpenCart extension store are where most users make their purchases. Good luck with picking your new design and have fun with OpenCart!
