What sets Market Theme apart from the rest is how well it allows a new user to create a professional looking online store with ease. However, it trades some features for ease of use.
Market Theme is a great solution for someone who wants to get setup and running with a serious online store in as little time and headache as possible.
Market Theme is also one of the most affordable shopping cart solutions at only $55 for the standard license.
Installation
While installing Market Theme is easy, once you download and unzip the software, you’ll see a few different folders, which may be confusing. You’ll have to read the readme.html to know what to upload to your WordPress site. Fortunately, readme.html is very well written and it is comprehensive.
Technical Support & Documentation
The readme.html that ships with Market Theme will help you get started quickly. But it goes beyond “getting started”. It covers a range of topics from installation to detailed explanations of options and settings.
On top of that, Market Theme is actually pretty intuitive and easy to use. Nonetheless, if you needed more help, you can visit the support forum. What I like about Market Theme’s support forum is that it feels intimate and cozy, like a bunch of friends helping each other out — though, it’s mainly the admin who doesn’t let any question go unanswered.
How It Integrates with WordPress
Market Theme utilizes the default WordPress post type for creating products. And it uses WordPress categories for organizing those products.
Technically, products in Market Theme are regular posts with additional data tacked onto them. To display products, Market Theme uses a WordPress Page that you set as the storefront.
Since both products and regular posts are stored as default post type and utilize the same taxonomies, it could get a little messy if you are creating lots of blog posts and storing lots of products on the same site. However, Market Theme does take some care in separating the different data types.
Themes and Styles
The idea of Market Theme is to give you an elegant and professional looking, yet personalized online store with as little coding as possible on your part. That’s why it provides you with plenty of style options.
It ships with 20+ different stylesheets, each one giving your store a different feel to match the theme of your products. You can customize the color of your store’s background, the appearance of the shopping cart icon, the width of your site, and more.
You can also, of course, create your own CSS file to color your store however you like.
Ability to Specify Product Variations
Market Theme support for product variations is not as flexible as it should be. It only support two types of product variations. The default labels for the two types are: size and color. It is possible, however, to change those labels to anything else, like capacity, mega-pixels, whatever.
Shipping and Tax Management
Shipping in Market Theme also isn’t as flexible as some of the other shopping cart solutions. You can only offer 3 options for shipping: standard, priority, and international. You can set a fee for each one of those types. You can also offer shipping discounts for additional units of the same product, which is cool. But that’s about all you can do with shipping in Market Theme.
As for taxes, Market Theme doesn’t manage or store customer shipping information or tax details. It let’s your payment processor handle them. For example, if you have a Premier or Business account with PayPal, you can set it to charge taxes if the customer shipping address points to a certain state. So, you’ll have to check with PayPal to see if their tax management capabilities suit your needs.
Accepted Payment Methods
Market Theme allows you to accept payments with PayPal Standard, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net, or manually.
Selling Digital Downloads
Market Theme, by itself, doesn’t have the ability to facilitate the selling of downloadable products. You would have to use a e-junkie along with Market Theme to offer digital goods on your Market Theme-powered site. There’s a how-to on Market Theme’s forum explaining how to do that.
Offering Discount Coupon Codes
It is not possible to offer discount coupon codes for products sold through Market Theme.
Affiliates Management
Market Theme doesn’t have any affiliates management capabilities.
Multi-Language Support
Market Theme has excellent support for non-English languages and translation. You can simply choose a language for your store in the settings page or make your own translation. The available languages on the settings page are: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Who’s Using It
The stores using Market Theme are varied and interesting. GreenGiftsGuide.com store is one good example of a merchant who’s using Market Theme successfully. I also like AquasanaForLife.com, though it’s an affiliate site — not exactly a shopping cart.
You can find many more examples of sites using Market Theme by checking out the showcase/gallery on the forum. Or by Googling.
Money Matters
There are two different licenses for Market Theme: standard ($55) and developer ($150).
Standard is for when you wanna create your own stores with the software and developer is for when you wanna make websites for clients using the software. Both licenses entitle you to lifetime upgrades and support.
And you can buy Market Theme risk free because it’s backed by a solid, 100%, 60-day refund policy.
