Smashing Magazine - we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

This is beautiful THANK YOU !

Big Disappointment! where is CubeCart….Also you missed some good templates of osCommerce, Magento & Cre Loaded…I started with oSCommerce which was really easy any most popular but then i shifted to CubeCart…. Now finally I’m working with new generation E-commerce solution Magento which is Simply Excellent. The only flaw with Magento is that it’s only built for Unix operating systems. Although there is some tweaks for windows installation which is not recommended by the developers. Still Magento is the Best E-commerce solution seen so far.

Good post Steven !! Thanks for sharing Free Stuff !!

DKumar M.

I’ve looked for free Magento cart templates but didn’t see some of the ones posted. Thanks!

I have a long background in e-commerce and have watched as EVERY e-commerce store that uses one of these templates FAIL every single time.

@Mike… i guess you missed the Zen Cart templates which is right under 4th heading. scroll again !!

@spydeeyk… You might want to search “Crafty Cart” on google for free wordpress theme. Also there is “WordPress e-Commerce plugin” coupled with Crafty Cart makes for one heck of an e-Commerce solution.

Smashing Magazine is known for it’s best quality, each and every post is full of resources and high quality. But posts like this really hits bad on the quality part.

I am not saying, this post isn’t helpful but the title “High Quality” is really misleading. You can’t rate any of these templates as “High Quality” ones, the quality surely lacks in most of them.

Just my 2 cents though.

Regards,
Deep

Beautiful designs!
Thanks, That’s really great!

Oh wow… these are Template Monster-quality.

In other words: worthless.

Usually I don’t reply here, because there’s normally little to ad. The posts are good so I digg them on digg and that’s it.

Today I saw in my rss reader that you were doing a post on ecommerce templates. Since I’ve designed 3 stores on Zen Cart I thought I’d check it out.

I was quite shocked to see you promoting Template Monster Templates. Template Monster tweaks the code. Not in a normal way, but in a non compliant with zen cart way. So if you install a template from template monster, most of your overides and additional modules don’t work any more. There are however very nice free templates available trough various sources on the internet. There’s even a site where you can testdrive them.

So I hope the author will digg a little deeper to look into the ecommerce systems a bit better.

Other than that, Smashing Magazine rocks!

Juliet van Ree

Prestashop is da best opensource ecommerce solution so far…

Personally I think most of these “Free High-Quality E-Commerce Templates” looks like crap! If youre ambitions is to boost sales I think spending $150-200 on a nice looking commercial template is a good investment! Just my opinion!:-)

this list is average. kinda dissapointed. Its just a big list of templates from templatemonster. erghhh.

would have been better to actually see a list of creative examples of real examples. Generic themeing really does suck.

What a perfect timing, as I intended to start from scratch my e-project… Many thanks, keep smashin’!

good job… nice site! thank you!

This will be a useful post for me – a friend wants to set up a small store of her own, and these examples will give me a great starting point. Thanks!

@Juliet,

“So I hope the author will digg a little deeper to look into the ecommerce systems a bit better.”

There were a few days of digging for this post. There aren’t very many decent free e-commerce templates out there and there aren’t very many good resources for finding them. I don’t claim to be an expert on all of these systems, but I do feel that this post is at least a helpful resource for people looking for theses templates, because they’re quite difficult to track down.

@ Steven Snell,

Thank you for your reply.

I realise that templates that are free and of good quality are hard to find. I ran into the same problem when looking for examples on how to build my webstores.

Maybe you can take a look at this site: http://www.zencarttemplates.info/

They have community build templates in them. Some of them are very nice, others may be less nice, and all are working well with the zen cart system (which is to me the most important thing!)

Have a look at OXID eShop Community Edition, it provides best SEO in eCommerce Software i have ever seen!
Here´s the download of the open source shopping cart software (you don´t have to fill out the formular, downloads starts directly when pushing “Download OXID eShop ZIP”).

Greetings
Lars

@#8 Jeff: I used to work for MonsterCommerce, an e-commerce shopping cart company that was purchased by Network Solutions and dismantled/rebranded. I did custom storefront designs for clients who purchased the shopping cart. I can count on two hands the number of stores I designed that are still in business. Those were the custom design clients. We also integrated templates for people. None of the template sites I did still exists.

If you own an e-commerce business and are serious about being around a long time, you need to believe in your business enough to do it right, get a custom design, get a custom storefront if you require it. Your storefront can be very basic but still be very successful if you have a unique product or service. Don’t think people can’t spot a TemplateMonster site from a mile away and be put off immediately.

Hey guys, thanks for linking to our free Magento theme:

Please note that we have updated our link to allow visitors to download the theme directly from our website here:
http://ecommerce-themes.com/magento-themes/electronics-store-13.html

For those looking for more Magento themes we continue to release at least one theme a week and plan to give away more free themes as well.

http://www.ecommerce-themes.com

Great resource list also at: http://www.kondomarketing.com

Are there any good templates or solutions for mobile phone ecommerce?

Where are Drupal Themes!

I just love those who like to complain about things given to them for free :p Presumably they mostly can’t or won’t read … “Please notice that these templates aren’t intended to be used 1:1, but should rather be used as a skeleton for your own shop and hence saves a lot of work, because otherwise you would have to start from scratch.”

Thanks to Smashing as always.

Nice that people are so excited to lower their value by receiving the same stuff they can charge for free, but in a templatized format of PHP garbage. I’m glad I’ve moved on from this over-hyped “design” career to something much better.

I have been using the wordpress e-commerce plugin for a few of my stores recently, and I have to say that I love it. In the past I have used Zen Cart, CubeCart, OsCommerce and Magento, and I feel like wp e-commerce is FAR easier to use and customize than the other carts. There is no complicated template system. You control everything (store and non-store) through one admin. And as long as you are familiar with CSS, you can pretty much get it to look anyway you want. While there have been a few bugs, the guys at Instinct have been incredibly responsive and helpful.

The only thing nice about them, is that they are free.

I wouldn’t go that far with the ones for osCommerce. I just worked on two of them and the coding isn’t that good. They’re way nicer than other templates indeed and free on top of it :) but, coding wise … not so much :)

thanks a lot anyway …

Interesting comments this post will save me some time on up and coming projects, there are so many carts out there I waste ages comparing them all based on this post and my investigations I think the best two in my opinion are wordpress and magneto.
Excellent place for resources and sure if you want to code an ecommerce website from scratch stay off templates but if you are like me and pushed for time with customers who don’t want to pay the full wack then there is nothing wrong with modifying a good template.

Woah there. Am I sensing some design snobery ;)

E-Commerce “design” is about making online sales and many of these themes are all about helping people (retailers etc…) make online sales – if you don’t believe me check out the SEOMoz site and read up on many of the 17 or so proven design techniques to help you make online sales. Heck if “google product search” follows these rules “and” if it works for them then it will work for you too… trust me :)

The themes in this article suit that particular need.

The next generation of e-Commerce design though could be a totally seperate article in its own right that I’d love to help write. I have been researching “product swarms” and 3D malls just to name a few…

In that sense this article is very helpful and will help many people sell online (people that are not necesarily designers) get a shop up and running in no time.

Heck judging by some of the comments here you would think that they reckon smashingmagazine was made purely for them… as opposed to any other readers that potentially don’t care whether their shop has latest grunge background ;)

Bunch of old templatemonsters templates…

This is just too good, thanks heaps for this, I have bookmarked you :)

It´s good… May be you make a post of web side agriculture

A great set, thank you. X-Cart templates would be nice to have as well.

I’ve used Miva Merchant, Osc, and Magento.. but there’s a new plugin for Wordpress that if you’re serious about a real ecommerce solution, you should definitely consider.

http://shopplugin.net/

it has a ton of features, easy 2 use, and supports Authorize.net and PayPal Professional…

I was one of the beta testers… I guarantee you that if you’re using wordpress you won’t be disappointed with this plugin….

Hi,

Thought I’d let you know theres a new Magento Themes website over at HelloThemes.com. There new but there Themes look great!

I can’t believe it’s free. You force me to bookmark this nice blog. Thanks a lot..

I think, only a few themes look pretty good, but considered, that they are for free, they are all pretty good ;) cheers

Nice Post

HI,
It’s a very fantastic.
i am very happy to this whole site.

Thank You

I want to use the template “Prestashop” for my webshop. Results you`ll see here http://www.sk83.de

hello every body,

i think the open source world is really open, let us just enjoy it…

HI IM NEW ON THIS, I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW THE STEPS FOR DOWNLOADING A TEMPLATE AND USE IT ON DREAMWEAVER, I DOWNLOAD BUT I DONT KNOW HOW TO UNZIP THEM OR WHAT SHOULD I DO??? THANKS

thanks…

its fantastiq theme..

thank’s for this template, fantastic!……….
Web Design Tutorial and Programming
i’ve bookmark this site…

thnak’s

yo im new at this sorry to ask but when i tr to upload template it needs home.html i make a home.html dreamweaver n put in the zip and it still says i dont have it any1 help?

Another useful list from SM, added this to my AJAX one you made last year.

Are you at any point in time going to publish a list of “SM lists”?

Never dissappointing and as the author says, offers inspiration – I always come away thinking “hmmm, I could use that for….”

very good post!! congratulations

There is another free e-commerce theme for wordpress using the wp e-commerce plugin.
It’s called “WP Store” and you can find it at:
http://wpfeed.com/2009/07/wpstore-free-wordpress-e-commerce-theme/

Shawn