WordPress shopping cart plugins are, well…plugins. They’re responsible for providing the functionality of the shopping cart — not the appearance. However, many shopping cart plugins have tailored themes specifically for the plugin to ensure compatibility.
On this page, you’ll find how much support each plugin has for styling and how many themes each plugin has. The best two in this category are WP e-Commerce, because it already has many pre-built themes available, and MarketPress, because of the convenient way it handles theme customization. DukaPress is also a noteworthy mention in this category.
You can click on the name of the product below to view its full review.
WooCommerce
Coming from the WooThemes stable there are a number of themes that you can buy to create a store of your liking. WooThemes is a premium WordPress themes provider and offers a variety of excellent themes for WordPress and WooCommerce. You can buy from WooThemes itself or from 3rd party sites like ThemeForest, each at an average cost of $40.
If you need to design a theme yourself, then your existing knowledge of the WordPress API will be more than enough to build one, as WooCoomerce makes extensive use of WordPress hooks and actions. Some helpful documentation is provided which will help you in your endeavor.
Cart66
It is possible to use CSS to style any HTML that Cart66 outputs. You can put your CSS in your WordPress theme or simply specify a CSS file within Cart66 so that your shopping cart CSS is preserved even when you change themes. There aren’t many themes available for Cart66, but enough to get you started. Most of them are from ThemeForest costing on average $40, but they are worth the price. You can also find more themes on Cart66.com.
GetShopped (WP e-Commerce)
GetShopped provides some wonderful themes for your ecommerce site. Some are free while others are paid. If you are unable to find one to suit your needs, you can create one using the documentation provided by GetShopped.
Some companies that sell GetShopped themes are given below:
http://storefrontthemes.com/
http://tokokoo.com/
http://splashingpixels.com/
You can also seamlessly integrate the Genesis framework with GetShopped using the documentation provided.
Shopp
There’s a lack of pre-built themes for Shopp. The only theme I could find that was built for Shopp is Flexx by iThemes.
Shopp works pretty well with any standards-compliant WordPress theme. But you’ll most likely want to customize the appearance of your online store, in which case you’ll have to rely on Shopp’s own templating system. It’s a new skill to learn, but the process is well documented.
Jigoshop
One nice positive feature of Jigoshop is the amount of themes it offers. Although not as extensive as WordPress or WP e-Commerce, as it is still a new entrant in the ecommerce plugin arena. Jigoshop provides the developer/designer an extensive set of APIs and hooks to easily build a custom theme. You can find some interesting Jigoshop themes here.
eShop
The developers for eShop have made a few different themes to go with their plugin. I don't like the design and layout of most of the provided themes. Fortunately, it is possible to style the appearance of eShop's HTML by going to "Appearance → eShop" and editing the CSS there.
ShopperPress
You can customize the appearance of your ShopperPress-powered store by downloading one of the child themes. There are more than 20 of them -- catering to: summer fashion, wine, cars, clothes, furniture, herbals, pets, t-shirts, software, romantic items, photos, mobile phones, kitchens, hockey, lights, golf, flower, wedding, ebooks, digital goods, cameras, babies, and others.
You can see screenshots of all of these themes here.
The layout and widgets and other aspects of appearance of each theme can further be customized from the display settings page of ShopperPress.
Market Theme
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.
MarketPress
Currently, there are no existing themes for MarketPress. However, MarketPress is completely ready for theming. The beauty of MarketPress theming system is that it is very similar to WordPress. If you (or a designer you hire) are familiar with WordPress, you'll be able to theme and customize MarketPress easily. The theming instructions of MarketPress are bundled with the plugin's directory at:
wp-content/plugins/marketpress/marketpress-includes/thtmes/Themeing_MarketPress.txt
Tribulant Shopping Cart
This is where Tribulant Shopping Cart is lacking. The plugin has no existing themes and there are not instructions or documentations on how to theme your Tribulant-powered store.
YAK
There are no themes available for YAK. You will have to create your own. While there is no documentation on instructions on how to create a YAK theme, you can take a look at the included ui.css to learn what elements YAK allows you to style.
DukaPress
The creators of DukaPress have not neglected the "themes" aspect of their shopping cart. There are some good looking themes available for the plugin. You can take a look at this page for some examples. And you can also search DukaPress.org for more.
The HTML of DukaPress includes CSS classes that allow you to style it. If you'd rather have a more user-friendly way of styling the frontend, you can purchase DukaPress Styles, which is a premium add-on for $19.
Templatic Ecommerce
Templatic offers several ecommerce themes. Currently, this is what they offer: Store Front, Emporium, e-Commerce, WP Store, Kids Store, eShop, and Store.
Each one of these has several color schemes that you can choose from.
Zingiri Web Shop
Zingiri Web Shop makes use of many CSS selectors (e.g. for each page, for each widget) to help you customize the look and feel of your web shop. The zing.css stylesheet in the Zingiri Web Shop plugin folder provides some default styles. Whenever possible the web shop will inherit styles from the current theme you are using. However in some cases, e.g. alternating table rows, you have to provide some default styles.
wpStoreCart
There are no pre-built themes for wpStoreCart. However, all of the HTML that wpStoreCart outputs is strapped with CSS classes. The classes are documented, so you can make your own theme for the cart.
WP Online Store
WP Online Store works with any WordPress theme. Just apply some CSS to the relevant selectors to match the store look to your theme. WP Online Stores is designed with appropriate selectors which will make it easy for designers to apply new CSS. Special themes targeted towards WP Online Store are currently not much, you will have to hunt a lot to find one to suit your needs.
TheCartPress
By default you can use TheCartPress ecommerce with any WordPress theme but you will need to do some extra work to correctly display the store. TheCartPress takes advantage of WordPress 3.0 custom post-types and WordPress Template Hierarchy to manage and create themes. You can also get various ready-made themes, paid or free, from their theme directory.
