Kim:
Do you love the theme enough to lose sales? Contact the template designer!!!
This is perhaps one of the most fundamental issues relating to eCommerce, and in just a few words Kim has made a declaration that should be at the heart of all eCommerce undertakings.
A few years ago, we had two projects that illustrate the "folly" of being too fussy about cosmetics.
The first project came from a guy who was importing a large range of gadgets and trinkets from China for the "Corporate Gifts" industry. His first container-load of goods had arrived in the UK and he wanted a site to be ready at the point the container was released from customs. ie: within 3 to 4 days.
We decided to put the site onto a domain we had registered for another client some months before, as that client did not need or want it. We had hosting set up already, and the site was just displaying a holding page.
Our new client provided a full spreadsheet of product data and all the images (about 10,000), so we installed ZC and used Easy Populate to build the product database. (A 2-hour job).
Our designer just created a new header logo for a standard "classic" template clone, and within 2 days, our new client had a functioning ZC website.
The client meanwhile sent printed leaflets (through the mail) to all his current customers, advertising a range of special offers and making a big noise about the new website.
Within three days of the site going live, orders started to roll in.
Cosmetically, the site looked very plain, and to anyone who knows the ZC "classic" template, it would have been obvious that all we had done was create a new header logo and tile_back.gif images.
In the first month of operation, the site took in over 600 orders, and many thousands of pounds revenue.
Our SECOND example was a woman who wanted a site to sell cotton and linen goods (bed sheets, cushion covers, etc). About 60 products in total.
She spent MONTHS fussing over the cosmetics, insisting on silly changes ("Please use a lighter shade of blue on the background") and would not let us take the site off the dev server until she was happy with the look and feel.
It took almost a year before the site finally went live - and after which she had paid us a lot of money for all the design changes.
Thereafter, whe would put her site into maintenance mode when she requested a design change - which was quite often!
Client A saw that the most important concern was sales, and got on with doing the bare minimum to get the site to do just that.
Client B ceased trading about 6 months after her site went live.
