Responsive WordPress Themes Are On The Top

To Be On The Top

Do you know what is AllTop.com? Here’s a quick glance by visiting their About page:

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic.

You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web.

Q. How do you decide which sites and blogs are in a topic?

A. We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us.

If you are already a regular visitor, then maybe you have knew that we’re on top! Well, let us rephrase that: Tokokoo is featured on WordPress.AllTop.com main page.

Surely, we wouldn’t have made this if it wasn’t you who land on our site from Google search results, or write some reviews about our themes in your blog, and last but not least, connect with us through @tokokoo. Once again, thank you Tokokoo Mania!

Music WordPress Ecommerce Themes Went Responsive, Too

We have previously announced that all of Tokokoo WP ecommerce themes are transformed into responsive WordPress themes. One by one. It was begun by AppCloud, Bangkoo, and Kelontong who had been through the makeover first to be responsive WordPress themes.

And now, we are proudly announcing that Tokokoo Dangdoot and Disco had been through the same makeover, too. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dangdoot and Disco the music responsive WordPress themes.

Dangdoot

We designed DangDoot to make it suitable mostly for major/indie music recording companies, music band profiles, musicians, music products affiliates, music event organizers or online music stores. Its textured and vibrant background adds up the strength values. Show off your prime collections at the slideshow column, your collections by genre underneath it, and your thoughts or most recent news at blog column.

Disco

Disco is designed with music in mind. If you own major/indie recording companies or if you are a music producer, director or event organizer, the premium WP ecommerce themes will serve you well as an online publication. If you are a musician, singer, DJ, or graphic designer fond of designing music artwork, you can stretch it to an online portfolio. If you are a music products affiliate or a retailer in the industry, it would be perfect for your online business, too.

Have You Met Our Balita Theme at Smashing Magazine?

If you are a fan of Smashing Magazine (like we are!), maybe you have heard that Tokokoo just published a free WordPress ecommerce theme there called: Balita.

According to our time zone in Indonesia (GMT +7), Balita was published on around 05:00 pm Wednesday, October 19th, 2011. Not very long afterwards, our server went down because there were too many people accessing Balita WordPress ecommerce themes demo site.

And guess what, it lasted for twelve hours. Damn, we forgot anticipating the Smashing Magazine effect!

What a shame it was (for us). We immediately contacted WPWebHost as the provider to upgrade our server memory, thanks God they were quick. Pretty late, but doing thing late is better than not doing anything at all, right?

Thursday morning around 08:00 am, the demo site was accessible again. Finally! The good news is up until now, there is no other going-down thing happened.

And The Award Goes To…

Are we happy? Totally! This excitement means that our hard work for nearly a month is paid off. @deon, @satryaWp, @onnayokheng, @fgaeg, @Aris_FM… thank you for being such a great team behind the Balita release, guys! Another thankies go to you, dearest Tokokoo Mania. It is such a dream comes true to publish Tokokoo theme in Smashing Magazine. For your information, one example of theme provider who went the same path is DapurPixel.

“Who are you again?”

By the way, do you get what we mentioned in this article as the Smashing Magazine effect? No? Well, the Balita release post in their blog has been tweeted +- 600 times in just 2,5 days (and counting). And that, my friend, is just a tiny example.

By the way #2, not everyone visiting our website knows where Tokokoo comes from. Just like this guy and this guy on Twitter (no need to open those links unless you can speak Bahasa Indonesia :p). If you have no idea, too, Tokokoo comes from Indonesia. Our office is located in the heart Bandung, a city which is famous for its other name –Paris van Java.

Meet Balita Free WordPress Ecommerce Themes

Quoting from the original post in Smashing Magazine, here are a brief description for Balita

“In this post we release yet another freebie: the Balita WordPress theme, a theme dedicated to shops that sell products for children. The theme was designed by Tokokoo and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is absolutely free to use for both private and commercial projects.

Not many theme providers have produced e-commerce themes for baby and toddler products. For you who have been working in this particular market niche for some time or are about to start, this Balita e-commerce theme is a great opportunity for you. Using such bright and cheerful pantone colors that suit this clothes department (baby/toddler products), this Balita e-commerce theme will surely attract more and more customers to your online store.

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions.”

Curious? Interested? Well, just hit one or both of the buttons below.

Download Balita Here! View Balita Demo Site

7 Most Common Ecommerce Problems

Written by Shinta Yanirma on October 3, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick - No Comments

Ecommerce Isn’t Everything

Ecommerce is not an efficacious remedy for your business. Yes, it is important and can help to expand your geographical customer reach, blah blah blah. But you can’t just set up an online stores, pour your products and services into it, and wait for good things fall down from the sky. Just like another form of business, ecommerce has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The most common ecommerce problems are usually the unrecognized ones. They seem to be just the little disruption at first, yet they are crucial. Never ignore them, because they may mightily influence your sales amount for the upcoming period.

So, have you set your online stores free from these most common ecommerce problems? You know, just in case.

A Responsive WordPress Ecommerce Theme: Olahraga

Written by Shinta Yanirma on September 22, 2011 in WordPress Ecommerce Themes - No Comments

We from the Tokokoo team are proud to announce the release of Tokokoo latest responsive WordPress ecommerce theme, Olahraga!

And we can’t be more proud to say that this theme is the first WordPress ecommerce theme with GetShopped WPEC plugin that enables responsive layout for both desktop and mobile view.

By testing Olahraga demo site, I think you will be able to tell that a lot of hard work has gone into the theme. Keep reading to find out why this post will get you interested.

The Cold-Handed Designer

First of all, we’d like to introduce you to the cold-handed designer who is behind the making of Olahraga Design. He is Firman Firdaus. He is currently working for the National Geographic Magazine – Indonesia, and had won 1st place for various design competition. Visit his website or reach him via @daustralala.

What Is “Olahraga”

As I have told you in Olahraga teaser post, olahraga is the word for sport in Bahasa Indonesia. A very Tokokoo habit, isn’t it?

Behind The Screen Story

We acknowledge that sport has wide variety of forms and rules. That’s why we design Olahraga. We realize that WordPress ecommerce themes for selling sport equipments should have specific characteristics to balance the wide variety of sports, too.

Olahraga responsive WordPress ecommerce theme features a whole new way of designing sites suitable for online stores that sell sport equipment. The five-star technique is called Responsive Design. For your information, Responsive Design has been called the future of web design by some of the top geeks in this field. So, we decided to bring responsive design to Tokokoo WordPress ecommerce themes for the first time!

What’s On Olahraga WP Ecommerce Theme

Besides the responsive design, this theme has many features which you will adore such as,

Responsive layout
The idea is to serve the same content to every visitor regardless of what device they view the site from. Using a flexible layout, fluid images, and css media queries, this is achieved without changing any markup.

Facebook fan page integration
We started to put this feature on Bookoo WP ecommerce theme. Seems like you kinda love it, so we decide to put another one in Olahraga. Hope you’ll like it.

Facebook Store Page

Six eye catchy color versions
Don’t want to use the default theme skin? Olahraga provides five other choices of bold colors for you: black, blue, green, purple, and grey.

Theme Panel
This includes: Custom Logo/Branding, RSS and Newsletter Settings, Website Analytics, Customizable Background, Social Media Share, SEO Settings.

WordPress Ecommerce Premium
We have a vision and that vision is to make e-Commerce as interesting and as profitable for you as possible.

Interested Using This Theme For Another Purpose?
“This is the theme I’ve been looking for! But my online store ain’t selling sport equipment…”

Then, we have good news for you. This theme carries unlimited possibilities to present your business or brand for sure! Because of its extensive package of features, it is suitable for online store with any kind of products.

Visit Demo Site Buy This Theme

The Perfect WordPress Ecommerce Themes For Online Music Industry: Disco & Dangdoot

Written by Shinta Yanirma on September 20, 2011 in WordPress Ecommerce Themes - 2 Comments

Are you an musician / singer / DJ? Got an indie band?

If yes, it must be very important for you to gain more popularity. No, popularity is a good thing, indeed. I mean, who will hear your (band) songs if no one ever heard a word about you? Back in high school, I’ve seen plenty of bands formed by my friends. Today, I can count how many left of them by my fingers. Their answers are generally the same: it was very hard to stand out from the crowd and build a community.

So, what have you done so far to become popular?

By the way, if you,

own major/indie recording companies,
are a music producer,
director or event organizer,
music products affiliate,
area retailer in the industry, or,
are accepting orders to build website for music-related purpose

…you will find this post useful, too.

Now, back to the get-known business. Make a Facebook page and Twitter account for your band/business is quite a start, but actually you can do something more by having a website that serves you as an online portfolio & music store (and online fans forum!). Don’t worry about the coding stuff, we can help you with our WordPress ecommerce themes: Disco and Dangdoot.

Dangdoot Demo Disco Demo

Disco and Dangdoot: The Specially-Designed-For-Music Themes

These WordPress ecommerce themes taste differently but share similar features, some of them are:

Disco WordPress ecommerce theme

Featured product. Differentiate your hottest songs or albums by using this feature so they are easier to sell.
All products (e.g. CD, performance DVD) can be grouped based on their music genre/category.
Persuade your website visitors to buy your CD with the How To Shop section. Change the text and icon to make it sounds like “you”.
Put your newest album or newest song on special area in homepage.
Blog regularly about the latest news from your band and the backstage stories. See how your fans will react. Your blog will be automatically integrated to website.

Dangdoot WordPress ecommerce theme

There is also some custom widget. They are free to use for any purpose, e.g. special discount for CD, show off the most-discussed album, etc.
A promo ad banner to boost sales.
You can use unique background for each product/album description page, e.g. using the album cover as the background. What a feature.
Unlimited multiple MP3 upload for each product/album page.
Share buttons to Facebook, Twitter, and various social bookmarking websites to make more people hear about you. Also the rating and review feature to let your fans participate in.
Multiple product images to show each band personnel’s photograph.

Disco and Dangdoot provide the essentials that every band, musician, DJ, or everyone in the music industry needs in a website, and it provides it in style. Best of all, at only $75, Disco and Dangdoot are awesome themes at an awesome price. Go check it out today, feel the difference.

Web Copy For Your Ecommerce Site: Tips & Tricks

Written by Shinta Yanirma on September 19, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick - No Comments

In the ecommerce world, communication is the core requirement to do effective marketing effort. But, what kind of activities best describe the words “marketing effort”? Is marketing effort limited to campaign, advertisement, and special promo? IMHO, those examples of marketing effort are the conventional ones. Paraphrasing Jason Fried’s statement in his book “Rework”, today, marketing should not be a separated department from other functions. Accounting is a department, but marketing is not. Marketing should be in the company’s blood. It can be done in any company activity, by everyone; regardless of what job title he/she has.

Why We Shouldn’t Put Web Copy In Second Place

In the ecommerce world, web copy is one of several ways we communicate to external parties, espescially, customers and visitors (potential customers). This is why web copy is important and should be written in some way. You built an ecommerce site for some purposes, some of them may be:

sell products or services,
widen your customer geographical reach,
………. *insert something else here*.

Whatever your purpose is, you clearly don’t want visitors to just land in your site, wander a few seconds, then navigate away, do you?

The good news is you can prevent this unwanted thing happens. With great web copy, you can even persuade visitors to do what you want them to do (buy your product? be your client?), and build an audience that keep coming back over and over again.

Now, what characteristics should your ecommerce site have to be the closest representation of your company and establish good communication with customers? Keep reading.

Instant, Easy Tips To Be Practiced

For you who already have an ecommerce site, these tips are useful to reevaluate your current web copy. For you who are planning to have one, then these tips are useful to guide you prepare web copy, or to be a benchmark for selecting a freelance writer to do the job for you.

It should be the closest substitute of real talk. Imagine you are talking to your potential customers as you write some words. Imagine how bored you will be when someone is talking to you and all they talk about is themselves. You don’t want to make your site visitors get bored, do you? So use simple and to the point words as in real talk, and remember to use “you” in calling your site visitors.
Interesting user interface layout. Web copy isn’t your school old textbooks. Besides, eyes get tired faster when facing electronics device compared to reading books. This also one of the reasons why visitors barely read the entire content of a page. So, be creative.
Beautifully written web copy is useless unless search engines can find your ecommerce site, it is proven by some research said that +-80% visitors come off after find a site in search engines. So, what to do to be indexed by search engines, espescially Google? Choose the suitable keywords (and repeat it quite often in your posts), insert hyperlinks (it’s better when you link to existing posts on your site), and post regularly are the main successful techniques.
Persuade visitors to do what you want them to do. Firstly, decide the activity flow you want visitors to take. For example, do you want visitors to land on homepage then continue to read your blog, move to product page, and end up buying something? Insert link in each page to persuade them do so. After you’ve done with activity flow, now learn about persuasive post. If you write a post to persuade visitors buying a product, never pass these important concepts: (a) focus on describing what customers will get, not what your product technically offers, (b) tell them what problems they might currently have, and how your product will help solve it.

Hope these little tips help. Do you want to share some other helpful tips? Feel free to leave them on the comment box.

images credit: World of Gopher

Online Stores: Don’t Just Dream, Build One (Part II)

Written by Shinta Yanirma on September 16, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick - No Comments

…before you continue, please first read the “Online Stores: Don’t Just Dream, Build One (Part I)”.

Shopify

Their features include a personal app store, SSL security, unlimited server bandwidth, a custom mobile template and a whole lot more. Shopify is preferable if you have some standard knowledge of HTML and are looking for a fully-accountable staff to back up your new launch

#5 Online Payment Method

PayPal

Everyone must’ve ever heard about PayPal. It is absolutely the leader in online payment service business. Lots of infamous ecommerce websites (e.g. eBay, Amazon, etc) have been using it for years.

Google Checkout

Have many issues with PayPal? Then, you may interested in runner-up service providers who work just as well as PayPal but haven’t attracted enough attention, like Google Checkout. It offers very secure and speedy transaction process. Besides, it is definitely integrated with all Google accounts.

Both PayPal and Google Checkout support solutions for invoicing, though.

#6 It’s All About Traffic!

Google Analytics

All that softwares, ebooks, and blogposts related to the Search Engine Optimization technique actually end in the same point: to generate more traffic and earn more revenue. But how do we know if our online store traffic is increasing or decreasing? Thanks to many analytics service providers out there. I recommend Google Analytics, because it is free yet still come in incredible features like letting you know your most trafficked pages and biggest referring websites. Just like Google Checkout, it is also integrated with all Google accounts

#7 Pick A WordPress Ecommerce Theme

Now that you’ve set up some online store functionalities, it is the time to worry about the appearance. For you that use WordPress free hosting service, feel free to visit Tokokoo Themes Gallery. We have 10+ free and premium WordPress ecommerce themes with unique industry segmentation for each theme, e.g. music, book publishing, furniture, retail, electronics, and apparel industry. But if you look a little closer into Tokokoo Features, you’ll find that our themes are applicable for all industry in general.

Let’s Start!

START - Image by jakeandlindsay

You have the guts, theory, plans, and also a website to start. So, what are you waiting for? Spare some hours and get your online stores known.

Credits: Image by mxtruck

Online Stores: Don’t Just Dream, Build One (Part I)

Written by Shinta Yanirma on September 14, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick - 3 Comments

So, you have been wanting to have some ecommerce business for quite a long time. But you barely have any idea where to start because those ecommerce things seem very complex and confusing. Keep reading. This post will guide you through some easy steps to build your own online stores.

The very first thing you have to do is focus. Instead doing a bunch of work, all at once, try to make a to-do list with continuous little targets to hit. Every time you hit one, you’ll feel better since you’ll feel like a part of your plan is already accomplished thus give more energy to accomplish the next ones.

#1 Build Your Business Idea

Whether it is offline or online stores, it is just a shell. But, you must have a fundamental concept since this will be the ground for your business.

What kind of products will I sell? Are there any competitors in this segment? What is the matching brand name for this business? How should the website’s user interface ideally look? Try to answer these important questions as the start point.

#2 Register A Domain

Now that you have decided your company name and logo, do a little research of what domain service you’d like to use. After you find one, purchase the matching domain name ahead of time to secure your company name and logo.

#3 Pick Web Hosting Service

You can choose between free web hosting service (like WordPress, who now moves from blogging platform to online stores platform and powers more than 25 million sites as of today) or paid web hosting service (like Hostgator and Bluehost that offer average cost of $100-$150/year for unlimited storage and bandwidth).

#4 Hosted Ecommerce Solutions

Here are some answers for your search of hosted ecommerce solutions. If you are not interested in messing around with FTP and programming thingie, then they would be viable options. The tradeoff is, you will lose a lot of customizations opportunity for the gain of added security and personal staff support.

GetShopped

GetShopped is integrated with Google Checkout, PayPal, Payment Express, and many other trusted payment processors. They provide many useful features like to send newsletter to customers, blog online, and market products in Facebook.

To be continued…

Image credit: Gerard Stolk presque 64

Be The First To Know About Bookoo WP Ecommerce Theme Release!

Written by Shinta Yanirma on August 27, 2011 in WordPress Ecommerce Themes - 2 Comments

After blogged about WordPress ecommerce themes: Bookoo sneak peek post, we have received many questions about the release due date. This blog post is our answer because today is the day. Fasten your belt since we are now going to take you through a journey into Bookoo special features.

For you who have not read the sneak peek post, Bookoo (the correct words are ‘Buku’) means book. B-ookoo. Bo-okoo. Boo-koo. Book-oo! It’s because we made this WordPress ecommerce themes with main focus for book publishing industry. Well, maybe you have been familiar with our manners to put such explicit name on our themes.

wp ecommerce themes

So, what is special about this theme?

In the sneak peek post, all we mentioned are, (1) It has an Amazon look-alike appearance, and (2) The optimized search feature is including author-based and category-based search option. Sure, there is plenty more.

In a page, these are features that TokoBookoo WordPress eCommerce Theme would love to serve you with,

The Very Book Store Features

Bookoo theme is compatible with Goldcart from Getshopped WPEC plugin.
To support the book-selling purpose, we provide widget that enables your online store visitors read PDF via Google Docs and download some preview PDF as a sample before they buy books.
There is testimonials widget to encourage visitors buy books from your place.
There is a Store Page that contains your offline store locations. Not enough? Well, we integrate this feature with Google Maps. So, potential buyers could choose whether to buy books online or come to your offline stores.
Facebook Apps Integration. Who doesn’t into Facebook nowadays? This feature enables you to market your products through one of the biggest social networking in the world. Reach the highest sales potential with this Facebook integration feature.

The rest of the awesome features follow the standards for all Tokokoo themes. Download Bookoo WordPress eCommerce Theme by clicking here

Have You Checked Our KBase?

Written by Shinta Yanirma on August 25, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick, Updates, WP Ecommerce Tutorials - No Comments

Experiencing some problems in installing and or customizing our WP ecommerce themes?

Yes? Dear Tokokoo mania, this blog post is dedicated for you.

For all Tokokoo theme users, you are very welcomed to visit Tokokoo KBase (Knowledge Base). We have uploaded many posts relate to WordPress, ecommerce, WP ecommerce themes, plugin setting, upgrade, maintenance… anything that may answer your problems and questions. Recently, we also uploaded some videos from Getshopped related to the WordPress E-Commerce plugin.

Do not hesitate to surf the eight categories we got there:

You might find some posts there helpful.

“Then, what is the use of Support Tickets? Is it no longer available?”

As we promise to give you reliable support for a lifetime, it is still there. We even maximize its use to improve Tokokoo themes for now and the future. The function of Tokokoo KBase is to answer questions that we get, like, plenty times. We think you can handle them faster if you use our knowledge base. You will save more time then if you have to wait for our respond –even if we are here, like, 24/7 for you.

So, yes, Tokokoo KBase is a complement of Support Tickets, not the substitute of it.

All posts tagged ecommerce