A Very Stylish Retina Responsive WooCommerce Theme: The Retailer Review

The Retailer is billed as eCommerce theme for WordPress from Get Bowtied, the team who also produced the stylish Mr. Tailor WooCommerce theme which we reviewed recently.

However, despite its close integration with the WooCommerce online store builder plugin for WordPress, The Retailer can be considered a true multipurpose theme, thanks to its flexibility and great selection of prebuilt homepage layouts.

So whether you are in the market for a WordPress theme for building an online store, or a catalogue, portfolio, agency website, or corporate site, The Retailer could be just what you are looking for. To find out if this is the theme for you, read on for our full review.

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Theme Features

The Retailer is a feature rich theme that has all the built in tools and settings you would expect from a modern WordPress theme available from the ThemeForest marketplace, plus some great additional features. Some of the highlights include:

Shop or Catalogue Modes

If you aren’t quite ready to launch a fully functioning online shop for our brand, then The Retailer can easily be switched to catalogue mode, allowing you to simply list your products in an attractive way.

This makes the theme perfect for creating an online presence for an offline shop, or showcasing your portfolio and other items, which aren’t available to purchase directly via the website, if at all.

However, if you are ready to start selling online, by installing the free WooCommerce plugin, you can add shopping cart and checkout features to your site and start accepting orders right away.

Range of Uses and Homepage Layouts

While the focus is on creating a retail website with WordPress, this theme comes with a number of homepage layouts that make it an ideal choice for other uses include creating an agency website, a corporate site, a portfolio, or just an attractive blog.

Rotating Product Images

Whether you are using this theme to display your portfolio or products, one really nice feature is the flipping or rotating images. When the user moves their mouse over an image, an animation creates the effect of the image turning over to display a second perspective of the item.

This makes it very easy for visitors to get a second look at an item without having to click through to another page.

Drag and Drop Page Builder

The developers have chosen to integrate the ever popular Visual Composer page builder plugin into this theme. This not only saves you $30 but also gives you access to one of the most popular page builder tools for WordPress, giving you the ability to create advanced layouts for your posts, pages, and the homepage of your site, all through drag and drop back and front end editors.

Multimedia Slider

Another bonus is the inclusion of the of the premium Slider Revolution plugin which makes it very easy to create dazzling slideshows featuring your best content, products, and images with plenty of animated effects to choose from.

Again, you won’t need to pay the $16 cost of this slider plugin in order to use it on your site as it’s incorporated into this eCommerce theme.

Powerful Theme Options Control Panel

Through the theme options control panel can make wide ranging changes to the appearance of your site, including setting the width of the layout, choosing a primary and secondary font, uploading logos, and changing the theme colours.

Fully Responsive Retina Ready Design

The Retailer theme has been optimized to make use of the latest generation of high resolution retina ready screens, while also being responsive to be fully compatible with small screen mobile and tablet devices.

Importable Dummy Data

Setting up your new site is made simple thanks to the inclusion of importable dummy content which creates and sets up all the required pages for your store, which just leaves you the job of editing them to suit your needs.

Installation and Setup

The developers of The Retailer give you a ready-made child theme to use alongside the parent theme. By uploading both versions to your site, and activating the child theme, you can make any changes to the theme, safe in the knowledge that when an update is released, you can install it without worrying about your changes being overwritten.

Required and Recommended Plugins

As mentioned in the features section, The Retailer includes some premium plugins, and also makes use of a few other recommended plugins in order to function to its full capacity.

After you’ve activated the theme on your site you will be prompted to install and activate these plugins. Thankfully this only takes a few clicks and doesn’t take much effort at all.

The required and recommended plugins for this theme include:

• Visual Composer (included required premium plugin)
• Revolution Slider (included recommended premium plugin)
• Envato WordPress Toolkit (included recommended free plugin)
• WP Retina 2x (included recommended free plugin)

The total cost of the included premium plugins comes to $46, which isn’t far off from the price of the theme.

Dummy Content Import

After activating the required and recommended plugins you have the option of installing the dummy content. This is a good idea if you are working on a new WordPress installation and want some sample pages to work with.

Even if you are applying this theme to an existing site with its own content, it can be beneficial to import the dummy content to help you see how the different features of the theme can look on your site.

The content can be imported from the Tool > Import section of the WordPress admin dashboard, where you can upload the Importable-Dummy-Content.xml file.

Menu Options

After you’ve imported the dummy content you can setup the site navigation menus. As this theme includes three menu locations, you can create three different menus for easy access to your content.

One of these locations includes a fixed header menu which is always on display, even as your visitors scroll down the page.

Customize via the Theme Options Panel

The theme options control panel gives you an easy way to customize many aspects of the site, all through a visual interface. The options are broken down into a number of sections and it’s a good idea to walkthrough all of them to see what you can do, and which settings you’d like to customize.

Through the settings you can enable the shop functionality to switch your site from a simple online catalogue, to a fully functioning WooCommerce powered online shop.

The social media section of the control panel makes it easy to add the URLs of your profiles on the most popular networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Skype, to name but a few.

If you want to add any custom code to your theme, such as CSS or JavaScript, there is a handy section on the control panel for doing so, saving you the trouble of editing the theme files directly.

The theme options panel also includes a useful backup and restore tool. This section also includes the ability to transfer the theme options to another website using The Retailer, allowing you to quickly deploy your chosen customizations elsewhere.

The Prebuilt Pages

If you’ve imported the demo dummy content, which you should, then you will get access to some prebuilt pages for your site. These include pages such as two different about pages, an FAQ page, two choices of contact pages, and a team page, plus a few others.

The Retailer also includes an impressive 10 homepage layout designs for setting up the front page of your site in just the way you want it. These homepage designs include the following layouts:

• Four eCommerce variations
• Landing page
• Corporate/agency
• Personal/portfolio
• Full slider
• Parallax
• Product selection

The Retailer also comes with all the pages necessary for managing an online store, including product pages, a shopping cart, checkout, wish list, and order tracking pages.

As these pages have been built with the included Visual Composer tool, you can easily go in and edit them, all through a visual drag and drop interface in order to ensure they meet your needs.

Support and Documentation

The online documentation for this theme is well laid out and easy to follow. As well as screenshots, the documentation includes videos which walk you through each of the steps involved in setting up and using this theme on your website.

The developers of The Retailer theme offer lifetime support on their products and a lifetime of on-going updates, ensuring you won’t be left to your own devices in the future after building your online business around this theme.

Pricing

The price of The Retailer theme is $55 which is the going rate for a feature rich theme such as this at the ThemeForest marketplace The inclusion of the useful premium Visual Composer and Slider revolution plugins, which together come to $46, makes this theme exceptionally good value.

When you consider the number of different types of projects this theme is suited to, you will certainly be able to get a lot of use from The Retailer, whether you are building online stores or not.

Conclusion

The Retailer is a great looking theme with lots of nice little touches that will ensure your visitors have a memorable experience while on your website. These include the animation effects on the images, the full width sliders, and the parallax scrolling effects.

While the focus of this theme is definitely on creating an online store, the impressive selection of homepage layouts and the fact that you can switch off the eCommerce features at a touch of button, means this theme would be just as well suited to a range of other uses, including building an agency website, creating on online portfolio, and promoting a wide range of services where visual appeal is important.

Setting up the theme is easy and the demo content and online documentation means you can get started straightaway. Despite the multipurpose nature of the theme and the wealth of features on offer, the user experience never feel bloated or overdone when browsing a site built with The Retailer theme.

For a truly flexible multipurpose theme with well implemented support for WooCommerce, The Retailer is a great choice.

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