Introducing Jessica: A WordPress Store Theme With Lots of Options

We’re happy to announce the release of Jessica, a brand new WordPress store theme that was built for the Genesis Framework. Our theme is pretty, but don’t let her beauty mislead you. She is a very powerful theme that is full of great eCommerce options.

Jessica is not only beautiful, it’s coded in HTML5 and supports schema. The theme comes with options to showcase coupons and freight specials, capture subscribers, and display sizing tables. It is mobile friendly so it will automatically adapt for tablets and smartphones. And best all, the home page is widget based so you have flexible options for content and placement.

What Makes Jessica Different Than Other Store Themes for WordPress?

The theme was designed by a professional graphic designer, which is not the norm in land of WordPress themes. Our resident graphic designer, Carla, designed Jessica and she is the same designer than works on our high-end, custom built WordPress deployments. This means theme buyers will obtain the same high quality design of a custom theme, but at a fraction of the cost.

Jessica is also built on the Genesis Framework. Genesis gives us benchmark coding that is optimized for speed, security, SEO, and all around best practices. Genesis has built in features like columns, author boxes, nested comments, and featured images. We add in things like call to action boxes to make it even better.

Another important differentiator is that Jessica was designed to work with three of the most popular and feature rich store plugins available for WordPress. We wanted to allow buyers to pick the best eCommerce plugin for their needs and not be forced into using the plugin we liked most. We’re big fans of all three plugins, so we designed and coded for all three plugins.

Jessica Lets You Pick the Best eCommerce Plugin for Your Online Store

If you’re selecting a WordPress eCommerce solution, know that Jessica gives you lots of options. You get to select the best store plugin for you: WooCommerce, iThemes Exchange, or WP eCommerce. That’s a ton of eCommerce goodness.

These three store plugins support multiple purchase types so you can use WordPress to sell digital downloads, physical inventory, subscriptions or memberships. You get to chose from tons of functional add ons that include payment gateways, sales taxation, and cool features like product variations, discounts, coupons, shipping calculations, and third party integrations to popular software from UPS, FedEx, QuickBooks, Freshbooks, aWeber or MailChimp.

Now that I’ve highlighted Jessica’s features, let’s review the three eCommerce plugins you can use.

WooCommerce is the most widely used store plugin for WordPress. It offers the largest number of built in features and then augments this functionality with hundreds of premium extensions. The downside of all this functionality is it can be a bit confusing at first. But this is just the set up process. Once the plugin is installed and configured, it is very easy to use. Our clients have been quick to pick up product entry and order management and have really enjoyed working with WooCommerce.

If you need a highly functional WordPress store that can scale into a large eCommerce website, then WooCommerce is a great solution for you.

Star Rating on WordPress.org: 4.1 our of 5
Last Update: 09-18-2014
Downloads: 4,555,831
Premium Extensions Available: 313

iThemes Exchange offers a nice, easy to use plugin for WordPress eCommerce. It is still very functional, but it is much easier for the average user to get in and get going. Configuration is much simpler than WooCommerce, which makes it a nice alternative if you are new to WordPress or need a light weight store plugin. The downside is it doesn’t offer as many extensions as the other store plugins like WooCommerce. This reduced feature list makes it an ideal solution for a large portion of the WordPress user based, because it focuses on ease of use.

Exchange was developed by Cory Miller and his team at iThemes. Not only is Cory one of the nicest people in the WordPress community, he is a smart business owner who creates solid products.

Exchange comes with oodles of great documentation, as well as a product roadmap so can see the path the coding is headed for in the future. I think that is very cool and a great representation of Cory and iThemes the company.

Star Rating on WordPress.org: 4.8 our of 5
Last Update: 08-26-2014
Downloads: 40,946
Premium Extensions Available :29

WP eCommerce has been helping WordPress users sell online since 2006. It was the very first eCommerce plugin I used for a client and that client is still using it today even though we installed in years ago. The plugin is a older one, but the development team is working hard at keeping it current by adding new features and functions.

The plugin has lots of great documentation available and it is supported by awesome developers like Justin Sainton. Justin is wicked smart and was right there to help me when I had questions on WP eCommerce.

Star Rating on WordPress.org: 2.8 our of 5
Last Update: 09-04-2014
Downloads: 2,900,165
Premium Extensions Available: 20+

So many great eCommerce plugins might make your decision difficult, but remember this is a wonderful problem to have. Our WordPress community has advanced quite a bit in recent years and these three plugins are a good example of that evolution.

Grab a Copy of this Flexible WordPress Store Theme

If our Jessica theme sounds like a great option for your WordPress store, take a moment and take a closer look. You can learn more about Jessica by visiting the online demo or product page. The theme demo will have links in the header so you can switch between all three plugins and see how each will look for your potential customers.

As you view the demo, don’t forget that this WordPress store theme offers three options and you need to review each one to see which is best for your new online store.

Visit the Jessica demo site ->
Purchase the Jessica theme ->

If you’ve purchased our Developer Pro Pack, Jessica is already waiting in your account and is ready for download.

Note: If you’re an existing Web Savvy fan and you know I name themes after people I love, you might be wondering who the real Jessica is and why our new theme is named after her. Jessica is my husband’s cousin and a woman who is close to my heart. She’s a multitasking wife and mother of four who manages to hold down a full-time job helping other children in her local school district.  She’s active in Girl Scouts and the 4H while still finding time to raise pigs, make homemade cookies, and drive her grandmother to church on Sunday. I am not exaggerating with those statements I promise. I honestly don’t know how she does it all. She is one of the nicest women I know and certainly one of the best moms I’ve even met.