Turbo Theme Shopify
Whilst we’ve been official partners a little while, Blend Commerce will now ONLY ever use themes by Out of the Sandbox for our Shopify store setups. In this blog, we look at the reasons why, and explain some of the key benefits using the Turbo theme for Shopify merchants.
Why is the Turbo theme by Out of the Sandbox so good?
In terms of our requests for Shopify store setups, it’s probably not surprising that around 90% of all clients request Out of the Sandbox themes when a theme is requested. From the perspective of our clients, the main reasons for choosing Out of the Sandbox themes is:
- The themes look incredible. Many clients are always impressed with the overall appearance of Shopify stores created on Out of the Sandbox themes. The presence of the hero image based homepage of Turbo and the parallax effect on the Parallax theme always give a sense of quality to our clients, and crucially, their customers.
- Themes are fast, particularly Turbo. Turbo takes advantage of a system called ‘lazy loading’. In essence, this means that when a page on a Shopify store with the Turbo theme is being viewed, the content most likely to be viewed first is loaded, with content at the bottom of the page ‘lazily’ loading in the background. According to section.io, a 1% loss in revenue can occur for every 100ms delay in page load time. Whilst that’s just an average, you can probably understand why our entrepreneurial clients love Turbo.
- Themes are regularly updated. By providing free, and regular updates, our clients love the fact that their site keeps up to date and ahead of the game with respect to their competition. For example, a recent update to Turbo featured ‘Live Search’, allowing predictive and intuitive search for store visitors to connect with the products they want. Not only would similar functionality cost up to $120 a year (using Shopify apps) this also provided clients with a feature often associated with a premium e-commerce experience.
Why does Blend Commerce build with Turbo?
As we hope you’ll agree (fingers crossed) the store’s we’ve built using Out of the Sandbox themes not only look great, but as you’ll see from our testimonials, have generated some excellent results in terms of conversions. After all, that’s we are here to do for our clients, and Out of the Sandbox helps us to create the value that our clients want. In addition to this:
- Out of the Sandbox support is second to none. When working with clients, we inevitably will run into snags and issues in the build phase of our stores, where apps, plugins and custom development may not initially combine together in the way we are looking for. Having worked closely with Out of the Sandbox for over 2 years now, we’ve got to know the team well and have always received timely and insightful support when needed. If your working with a Shopify Expert like Blend Commerce, or building yourself, top notch support can never be undervalued.
- Themes are packed with options. Being armed with a ton of theme options is great for our design and development team, and due to this, we’ve been able to develop an even greater array of options with our own customisations of the theme. Whilst this may sound odd, Turbo does actually mean we lose money in the long run. Why? Put simply, due to the amount of features included in Turbo as standard, when our clients grow, they often find they don’t need us as much as they expect to make the changes they need for their store.
- Documentation and code base is watertight. Without being rude, we’ve had some ‘interesting’ experiences when working with themes that aren’t by Out of the Sandbox. From themes without documentation to some very code heavy, and hence slow themes, before any apps or plugins were installed.
With all of our team (including our marketing team) being big fans of Out of the Sandbox, we feel we’ve been able to really hone our skills over the past two years and generate some incredible results for our clients. Whilst we’re not saying that you can’t be successful with other themes, Out of the Sandbox themes that give us a broad set of tools to delight our clients.
If you’d like to talk to us about the possibility of using an Out of the Sandbox theme on your Shopify store, why not book a call with us today?
BOOK YOUR FREE 30 MINUTE CONSULTATION NOW
Published: April 12 2018
