Just thought we would update you guys as we thought the showcase stores posted here were very helpful during the development of our website.

We launched our new redesigned website Yum Asia on Tuesday, using Opencart v1.5.3.1 and Shoppica v2.1.2. Our old website was just a basic CSS html design using ECWID as our shopping cart. As our business was growing we needed an ecommerce system which would simplify how a customer navigated through our products and information. Without the ecommerce system it was becoming cumbersome to maintain the website, and even making small adjustments, to the website was getting tiresome. We chose Opencart as our ecommerce solution because it seemed the most user friendly and fluid. We have included screenshots of our old website and our new one.

Our modifications to Shoppica2
It has taken around a month to redesign and get all the features we wanted enabled, we have made quite a few custom modifications like taking some text out of the header or adding links to the footer. We added a recipe blog link button and a custom Delivery tab to the top navigation menu and adjusted the Add This social buttons on the product pages. We also increased the character count on the snippet shown on the category page, added French and German language options which was surprisingly easy, just a little time consuming translating all the information in the individual modules using Google Translate! This language feature seems to be worthwhile as it does seem to have increased our hits from Germany and France to the website.

Extensions we used
We have purchased two additional extensions – the first is a shipping extension which is product based. This enabled us to set different shipping rate for each product and different countries we sell to. We purchased this from Johnathan from Clear Thinking – we would recommend his products. The second was for our payment solution which is Qphoria’s Paypal Pro Hosted extension from Opencart Guru which enables the hosted option of Website Payments Pro with Paypal which isn’t automatically supported with Opencart. This extension is only available for Paypal Pro users in UK and France but there are other similar extensions for Paypal Hosted for other countries. With this option you don’t need SSL installed on your server and don’t need to be PCI compliant as Paypal hosts everything. The advantage of Paypal Pro over Paypal Standard is that you can have much lower transaction fees and a more customised/skinned check out experience.

We’d like to take the time to say the things we would like to be seen added to shoppica

1. Intro Slider
More options and transition effects for the intro slider (such as Ken Burns effect). Shoppica 2 has just two options of ‘Fade’ or ‘Slide’ which is quite limiting. In our opinion, how the front page looks is such an important and essential part of your company image and selling products that a few more options and effects would really have an impact on the look of a website. Yes, an extension could be used but this then wouldn’t be responsive like Shoppica 2 is currently and a large proportion of customers browsing on mobile devices wouldn’t see the slider.

2. Out of Stock options
Ability for the add to cart button to automatically disappear when a product is out of stock would be useful – we have tried to modify on the php and tpl files according to forum posts detailing how to do it, but it takes away features we actually want (like Availability status and we don’t want our stock numbers to show). Also, maybe a way to automatically add an ‘Out of Stock’ bubble or banner to the main product thumbnails.

3. Desktop or responsive selection
We really like the responsive aspect of Shoppica 2 – this is one of the reasons we chose Shoppica 2, however we have learnt that although customers like this feature sometimes a proportion of customers like to see the page as they would on their computer. So perhaps a button in the footer to switch between mobile and desktop layout would be a useful feature?

We would like to thank the Themeburn team for such a great theme – we can see a lot of work has gone into it and the support given on these forums has been top notch.

If anyone has any suggestions for our site or questions, feel free to let us know.

• This reply was modified 4313 days ago by  yumasia.