eCommerce Gem is free, not premium, and that is the first thing to be clear about. It costs nothing on WordPress.org, where ProDesigns lists it at version 2.1.7 with 700-plus active installations and a last-updated date of 26 January 2022. Four years without an update is the reason we would not put a shop that takes money on it today.
If you want the look, take it as a design reference and build on a maintained theme. If you are running it already, the section at the end explains what to check.
What eCommerce Gem Is For
It is a multipurpose WooCommerce theme built for small online shops. The demo is aimed at jewellery and clothing, and the colour schemes and layout options are flexible enough to suit books, bags, cosmetics, mobile accessories or construction supplies. ProDesigns also pitches it at business, corporate, portfolio and agency sites, which is a fair description of how generic the underlying layout is.
The pitch is a familiar one, and it holds up: a ready-made theme means you are editing a shop rather than building one from scratch, and for a first store that is exactly the right trade. Design is the face of the site, and a visitor decides whether to keep looking long before they decide whether to buy.
eCommerce Gem Features & Benefits
1. It costs nothing
Building a store from scratch means paying for the bugs as well as the pages. eCommerce Gem removes the upfront cost entirely, and the ready-made layout is simple enough that a non-technical owner can manage it without help. Product search, carousels, sliders and call-to-action sections are all built in.
2. Shorter build time
The theme is built on ordinary HTML, CSS and JavaScript and designed to work with WordPress and WooCommerce, so there is no proprietary builder to learn and nothing unusual to configure. Settings and design can be adapted to your business, and the sensible order of work is to get the product catalogue right first and the styling second.
3. Easy to run
A theme should be manageable by whoever is actually going to update it, which in a small shop is usually the owner. eCommerce Gem works with the popular WordPress plugins and does not fight the WooCommerce templates, so day-to-day admin stays in familiar screens.
The Problem: Four Years Without an Update
Version 2.1.7 landed on 26 January 2022. WordPress has moved several major versions since, PHP has moved on, and WooCommerce releases substantial updates several times a year. A theme that has not been touched in that time is carrying two risks: functions deprecated in newer PHP versions, and WooCommerce template overrides that drift out of step with the plugin.
On a brochure site you could live with that. On a shop that processes payments and holds customer addresses, you should not. An unmaintained theme is the one part of the stack nobody is patching.
What to Use Instead
Two free themes do this job and are actively developed.
Kadence has a strong WooCommerce integration and a free starter template library that covers most shop layouts.
Blocksy is the better choice if you want fine control over the product and checkout pages without paying for a builder. Both have a paid tier, and neither needs it to run a small store.
If you want to compare more broadly first,
our WooCommerce themes roundup covers the paid options too, and
the block themes comparison is the right place to look if you would rather build in the site editor than in a page builder.
If You Already Run eCommerce Gem
Nothing stops working the moment a theme goes quiet, so there is no need to rush. Take a full backup, then check three things: whether your host is on PHP 8 and whether the site throws deprecation notices; whether the theme contains WooCommerce template overrides in a
woocommerce folder, because those are what break on a WooCommerce update; and whether any part of the design you rely on is in the theme rather than in a plugin.
Then move to a maintained theme at a time you choose. Migrating a small catalogue is a morning’s work when it is planned and a very bad week when it is not.
eCommerce Gem on WordPress.org
