Would you pay for a premium Jigoshop theme?

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With the impending release of Jigoshop Lite/Diet/Free (yet to decide on a name) we’ve begun designing and developing the first official WordPress theme designed to work alongside Jigoshop itself.

Initially we planned for the theme to be free but with so many substandard themes being sold as “premium” we thought we may be shooting ourselves in the foot.

We’ve seen several “eCommerce WordPress themes” built to work with other eCommerce plugins popping up recently and they seem to have sold quite well – there is clearly a market.

Jigotheme (you gotta love that name, right?) will be no ordinary theme after all. It will work in tandem Jigoshop and add some nifty features such as an intuitive dropdown mini cart in the header of all pages and full optimisation for mobile devices. We’re also developing it using the latest HTML5 / CSS3 code which is a feature in itself – customising Jigotheme will be a piece of cake.

We appreciate a premium theme may not be attractive to developers as they will most probably be building their own themes on top of Jigoshop. But for someone with limited time and/or development skills, an affordable premium theme could be a real asset.

Perhaps we release a free version of the theme excluding the mobile optimisation and other built in goodies which still works really well with the out-of-the-box Jigoshop features. And then offer the additional features as a paid upgrade for a nominal fee? Or would that be too much of a tease?

As always we’d appreciate the feedback of anyone interested in Jigoshop and how it evolves going forward.

Over to you!

5 Responses to Would you pay for a premium Jigoshop theme?

  1. Jason

    This is based on my grasp of everything so far, I might be totally out of sync with your current plans, but from what i’ve read…

    Personally I think you should reserve ‘premium’ themes purchasers of the full release of Jigoshop.

    I’d enable users to buy both Jigoshop + Jigotheme at once, and maybe save 15% off Jigotheme, or be able to buy it once they’re logged in as a paying Jigoshop owner (but this time at full price).

    Jigoshop free/diet/light i’m assuming is fully functional, but pretty much just the core product. I think in another blog entry you suggested it might just be a catalogue, lacking payment processors. The freedom will be there to have a fully functioning eCommerce solution, but it’ll require some development.

    Anyone who doesn’t have the required technical skills, or the time to develop a theme probably isn’t going to have the skills or the time to expand the free version into something to really take full advantage of Jigotheme?

    It’s also a nice incentive for free users to shell out on the full package – “Look, you can do this much now for free; but look how awesome it gets after you spend a bit of money!”

    • Jay

      Thanks for your thoughts Jason. I think we’ve settled with regards to the features of the free version. It will include at least PayPal standard as a payment gateway and perhaps moneybookers too. There will however be a few features missing like up-sells, table shipping rates etc.

      I love the idea of offering a bundle of Jigoshop + Jigotheme with a discount. We’ll have a think about how we can do that while still offering a light version of the theme too.

  2. Anything Graphic

    SImply put, yes :-) Again, I agree with Jason that a bundle package would be nice. The sneak preview of the Jigoshop theme was awesome!

    I’m so excited…

  3. Austin

    Hey I would pay for premium theme but is this theme design modifiable for the average wordpress user?