Shopkeeper Theme Review

Last updated on September 18, 2017

Shopkeeper is an eCommerce WordPress template, released in November 2014 by Get Bowtied, an Envato Power Elite author. Bundled with a premium page builder and many shop related features, this theme will introduce you to the e-stores market with ease.

Design

With Shopkeeper, you will be able to create an alluring, minimalist eShop with a responsive layout. This way, your visitors will have the same experience when going to your site from different screen-sized devices.

To see how the theme works, you can import the default demo content and have a quick preview of your future website.

Shopkeeper comes packed with five header styles and icon elements that can be easily integrated into the above the fold section. For a strong visual effect, you can add full width sliders to display an image or statement message. You can also choose the autoplay speed for the slider. Moreover, on the top menu, you can enable a wish list icon, a shopping cart, a search function, or a ‘My account’ element. As for the footer area, there is a single predefined design, where items like social icons, links, texts, and a background color can add value for your visitors.

Product oriented, this theme offers many options to highlight your merchandise and display it in an eye-catching way. There are 4 product page layouts to choose from, and you can control how many items will be showcased at once. Also, you can apply a lightbox effect to your items and let the visitors have an extensive preview on them. Every product can have its own quantity style and a review tab.

To guide the visitor’s attention to your products it’s important to use the right colors and typography, so the Shopkeeper authors give you the possibility to choose from Google, Custom & Typekit fonts. Also, you can combine beautiful colors to cover the texts, headings, background and the main website interface.

Shopkeeper gives you additional tools to make your online store even more attractive. You can post articles, reviews and ideas in a dedicated section – the blog. Use one of the three modern layouts to style the blog area, and also opt for a light or dark color customization.

The Shopkeeper theme is social friendly so that you can connect over 15 different profiles to your website.

Functionality

The template works with a Live Customizer that gives you access to all settings related to styling, typography, header, footer, blog, shop, product page and social media. One of the most relevant parts of this panel is the ‘shop,’ where you can enable the Catalog mode, Breadcrumbs, the quick view of an item, cart buttons, number of products or choose the sidebar style.
In the Live Customizer panel, you can find a section dedicated to the Product Page. There you can enable the ‘Product gallery zoom,’ ‘Related products,’ ‘Sharing options’ and the ‘Review tab.’ Since it is specially created for a good experience of building an online shop, the template comes with 14 e-commerce characteristic blocks so that you can sort products in a hierarchical and well-defined way. Besides, you can help your visitors reach more articles and products easily with different pagination options like Classic, Load More, and Infinite Loading.

This template comes bundled with the premium drag and drop Visual Composer plugin, that can be used both on the backend and frontend of your website. The pages and posts can be customized using the Visual Composer, as Shopkeeper gives you the possibility to choose from over 50 elements to design your shopping pages.

Shopkeeper, as a premium eStore template, is built for the WooCommerce plugin functionality and product features like shipping, coupons, or orders. Also, the ‘Mini Cart’ feature is especially useful since buyers can view the merchandise they added to their cart without having to switch to a different page.

The authors crafted a small plugin called GetBowtied Tools, that offers automatic theme updates, and makes the maintenance of the template easier.

If you would like to build a multi-language eShop, you can use the premium WPML plugin. Also, the theme works with the German Market plugin by Marketpress, free Germanized plugin by Vendidero, bbPress, BuddyPress, and others.

The theme developers provide a comprehensive documentation for all their Shopkeeper customers. With a search bar, various and explicit video tutorials, screenshots and elaborate explanations, even a WordPress beginner can manage this template. In addition, you will find useful information regarding on how to speed up your website.

Performance

We have tested the Shopkeeper’s default demo on different page speed tests, and the content loads with a medium page speed.

Downsides

The Shopkeeper has no translation panel built-in, but if you still want to translate some website strings, you can utilize the Polylang plugin along with .po and .mo files.