Want to create a trendy and hip online store? Let me explain to you how you can and save you a ton of time and money at the same time. First off we want to use the Open Source Ecommerce platform Magento. Doing this gives you all the features you need for a shopping cart, and at no cost to you obviously because it’s open source.

Let’s Look at the Benefits of Magento

There are so many features of the Magento ecommerce platform it’s hard to count. Right out of the box your open source cart can easily be connected to a Paypal or Authorize.net merchant account to handle your orders. You have access to dozens of community extensions to extend the functionality of your shopping cart. It’s Open Source so you can change the code to your needs all you want. And last but not least you have access to all the ecommerce options in your administration backend that most “big dawg” ecommerce sites have.

Using the Sigyn Pro Magento Theme

To give us that “Trendy & Hip” look that we are after we can use the Sigyn Pro Magento Theme from SilverThemes. Demo here. As you can see this theme sports a really cool dark grunge style background. Perfect for the trendy style online stores. It’s only $150 for the theme and another $49 for what’s called the SimpleBoard widget which is that cool splash image on the homepage.

As you can see with the screenshot above, this look and feel could sport many different types of online stores. These could include:

• clothing/fashion store
• music or video store (media)
• cosmetics
• web design products
• and many more…

Some of the Features of This Theme

Let’s take a look at some of the cool things about this theme.

Slick dropdown navigation

Easily accessible search bar at the top left so your customers can search for products

Sidebars on both left and right sides for the different Magento side blocks

Easy to browse catalog pages for each category

Nice solid presentation of product on the individual product pages. One of my favorite things about Magento

My Recommendation To You

If you have the skills, time, and or cash to create a trendy & hip online store with Magento on your own than this would of course be my first recommendation. If this is not the case which very well could be for many of you, then I would recommend going this route. You pay only $150 for the Sigyn theme and another $49 for the SimpleBoard widget. Add that to your free open source Magento shopping cart and you are all finished with your online store after spending only $199.

I would then spend your extra time loading in all your products and getting yourself accustomed to the Magento admin interface. It takes a little bit to get used too. But once you understand it you will be able to harness all the features that Magento offers.