Modify A Theme Or Use A Custom Theme?

Hello Friends, we are new to this forum and CS cart. We have an exisiting website and we are starting a brand new marketplace with multivendor. We have 100+ vendors from existing business relationships who have already agreed to list in our marketplace.

we have two questions we hope that the community and developers can help with:

We have seen the themes available for multivendor in the marketplace and from the ones available unitheme by Alex branding looks like the best option for us.

However, we need to make some modifications to customize the theme, install ad-ons (approx 40) and also make some changes to the admin panel as there are various issues especially with the vendor side of the system we need to improve for our vendors.

Would you

A. Modify unitheme or

B. Go for a full custom development theme

thanks in advance for your opinions and we look forward to future interactions to help other users.

Hello Friends, we are new to this forum and CS cart. We have an exisiting website and we are starting a brand new marketplace with multivendor. We have 100+ vendors from existing business relationships who have already agreed to list in our marketplace.

we have two questions we hope that the community and developers can help with:

We have seen the themes available for multivendor in the marketplace and from the ones available unitheme by Alex branding looks like the best option for us.

However, we need to make some modifications to customize the theme, install ad-ons (approx 40) and also make some changes to the admin panel as there are various issues especially with the vendor side of the system we need to improve for our vendors.

Would you

A. Modify unitheme or

B. Go for a full custom development theme

thanks in advance for your opinions and we look forward to future interactions to help other users.

Hey,

There are a number of factors to take into consideration:
1. A theme usually is a modified version of the responsive theme. Most of the times merely the CSS is changed.

2. How many modifications do you want to make? If the amount of modifications basically comes down to changing half of the store than it would be smarter to just create a custom theme of course.

3. If there is a huge amount of backend modifications then you might as well just hire a developer for a month (160 hours) for 5k or so. This would also allow you to do everything in your own way and to create a custom theme in the meanwhile (I usually take ~50 hours to create a theme from the ground up, however, this greatly depends on the amount of modifications necessary of course).

If you need any assistance please let me know (info@poppedweb.com).

Kind regards,

Other considerations are whether you want to be able to upgrade at reasonable expense in the future. Themes NOT based on the responsive usually have much higher maintenance costs long term. But most merchants here are focused on short-term cost/issues. Additionally, while themes can offer a pleasant end-user experience, they do not generate sales. Having a theme that does not get in the customer's way and spending your money on marketing will reap much higher returns.

Pre-sales marketing gets them to your site so they can quickly purchase (and you have ability to upsell). While post-sales marketing brings them back for more and they will require less "selling" than new customers. Holding on to a customer and getting repeat sales is the best return on investment you can make.