If you have spent even one evening searching for a WooCommerce theme, you already know the problem. Every theme page says the same thing: “best theme,” “fastest theme,” “everything you need.” After a while, the words stop meaning anything.
I build WordPress stores for a living, and last week a client asked me a simple question: “Why should I buy this new Levitate theme for $49 when WoodMart, XStore, The Retailer, Basel and Martfury already have thousands of five-star reviews on ThemeForest?” That’s a fair question, and it deserves a real answer, not a sales pitch. So I actually installed the demos, read through the feature lists, checked the plugin requirements, and compared what each theme gives you out of the box. Here is what I found.
First, let’s be clear about what each theme actually is
Before comparing anything, you need to understand that these six themes are not really solving the same problem.
WoodMart, XStore, The Retailer, Basel, and Martfury are what’s called “multipurpose” themes. That word sounds impressive, but in plain language it means the theme is built to work for almost any kind of store — furniture, electronics, food, fashion, jewelry, anything. To make that possible, the theme gives you a big toolbox of settings and leaves the actual page-building to you, usually with a page builder like Elementor or WPBakery.
Levitate, on the other hand, is built only for one thing: a fashion ecommerce store. It’s not trying to be a theme for furniture stores or electronics shops on the side. Every section, every product tab, every popup is designed around clothes, shoes, and accessories.
This difference matters more than it sounds. A multipurpose theme is like buying a big empty toolbox — the tools are good quality, but you still have to figure out how to fit them together for your store. A niche theme like Levitate is more like buying a toolbox that’s already arranged for the exact job you’re doing.
Page builder dependency — the part nobody talks about enough
This is where I want to slow down, because it’s the single biggest practical difference between Levitate and the other five.
WoodMart, XStore, The Retailer, Basel, and Martfury all lean on a page builder — mostly Elementor, and in some cases WPBakery or Gutenberg blocks. That’s not a bad thing by itself. Elementor is powerful. But it comes with real costs that most beginners don’t think about until they’re already stuck:
- Page builders add extra CSS and JavaScript to every single page, which slows your site down.
- You often need Elementor Pro for the good stuff, which is another yearly payment on top of the theme.
- If you ever switch themes later, your content gets stuck inside builder shortcodes and becomes messy to move.
- More moving parts means more chances of a plugin conflict breaking your layout after a WordPress update.
Levitate takes a different route. It doesn’t use Elementor or WPBakery at all. Everything is controlled from the native WordPress Customizer, with more than 400 settings across 33 sections. That means fewer files loading on each page, fewer plugin conflicts to debug at 1 AM, and a genuinely simpler experience if you’re not a developer. You still get real design control — fonts, colors, layout, homepage sections — just without the extra weight of a builder plugin sitting on top of everything.
If you’re a solo store owner without a dev team, this alone can save you hours of frustration.
Speed and performance
Speed is not a small detail for an online store — it’s directly tied to how many people actually buy from you. Every extra second your homepage takes to load pushes a percentage of visitors away, and that number gets worse on mobile.
Levitate’s demo store scores 99 out of 100 on Google PageSpeed for desktop, 100 on Best Practices, and 95 on Accessibility. That’s an unusually clean score for a theme this feature-rich, and it comes from not depending on a heavy builder plugin.
WoodMart is also known for being reasonably fast, and its developers specifically mention that it only loads the CSS and JavaScript a page actually needs, cutting page size by roughly two to three times compared to loading everything upfront. XStore, however, doesn’t have the same reputation — one independent reviewer who tested it with GTmetrix found it scored a below-average grade, especially on the larger, more feature-heavy demo sites. Basel, The Retailer, and Martfury sit somewhere in the middle — decent once you optimize them with caching and image compression, but none of them ship with performance scores anywhere close to what Levitate shows out of the box.
What’s actually built in vs what you have to buy separately
This is the part that decides your real cost, and it’s usually hidden in the fine print.
Multipurpose themes usually give you the design layer and expect you to add plugins for the serious ecommerce features. Want a wishlist? Install a plugin. Want a currency switcher for international customers? Install a plugin. Want “frequently bought together” bundles or an exit-intent popup to stop cart abandonment? More plugins, more yearly renewal fees.
To be fair, WoodMart has genuinely closed a lot of that gap. It now bundles a fairly long list of ecommerce tools directly into the theme — things like frequently bought together, dynamic discounts, free gifts, countdown timers, abandoned cart recovery, a wishlist, product comparison, and a popup builder. That’s more than 25 features that would otherwise have to be bought, installed, updated, and maintained as separate plugins, and it’s a big part of why WoodMart has become the top-selling WooCommerce theme on the marketplace. XStore does something similar and even bundles extra paid plugins like Slider Revolution and WPBakery worth a good chunk of money on their own.
Levitate takes the same “everything included” philosophy but focuses it entirely on what a fashion store needs: a sticky cart drawer that shows shoppers their free shipping progress as they shop, a cookie-based wishlist with no plugin required, live AJAX search, quick view, exit-intent popups, timed coupon banners, volume discount tiers, bought-together bundles, and — the one feature that really stands out — a built-in multi-currency switcher covering more than 160 currencies with live exchange rates and country flags. That last one usually costs $49 to $99 a year as a standalone plugin. Add up everything Levitate replaces, and you’re looking at roughly $300 to $400 a year in plugin costs that are simply not needed anymore. And unlike the other themes, Levitate is currently priced at $49 one-time (down from $199), so you’re not paying $59 to $69 upfront and still shopping for extra plugins afterward.
Fashion-specific details that generic themes miss
This is where being “built only for fashion” actually shows up in small but meaningful ways.
Levitate includes things you wouldn’t expect from a general store theme — an ingredients tab for beauty and cosmetic-adjacent fashion products, filters for skin type and skin concern (useful if your fashion store also carries beauty items), a mobile bottom navigation bar that behaves like a proper shopping app, and product cards designed specifically to show sale badges, new arrival tags, and hover images the way fashion buyers expect to browse.
WoodMart, XStore, Basel, The Retailer, and Martfury are all capable of decent fashion stores too — plenty of real businesses use them for exactly that. But because they’re built to serve every kind of store, none of them include these fashion-specific touches natively. You’d be adding plugins or custom code to get the same result that Levitate gives you by default.
Price and long-term cost
Here’s a straightforward side-by-side of what you’d actually pay:
| Theme | Approx. Price | Page Builder Needed | Sales / Track Record |
|---|---|---|---|
| Levitate | $49 (one-time, currently discounted from $199) | No — native Customizer | Newer theme, built for fashion niche |
| WoodMart | $59 | Elementor / WPBakery / Gutenberg | 110,000+ sales, best-seller on ThemeForest |
| XStore | $59 | Elementor / WPBakery | 85,000+ customers |
| The Retailer | $59 | Elementor / WPBakery / Gutenberg | 16,000+ sales |
| Martfury | $59 | Elementor / WPBakery | 15,000+ sales |
| Basel | Around $59 | WPBakery | Long-running, large customer base |
On paper, $49 versus $59 doesn’t look like a huge gap. But the real difference shows up after the purchase. With the multipurpose themes, you’re likely adding a wishlist plugin, a currency plugin, a popup plugin, and a bundle plugin over the next twelve months — and most of those renew every year. With Levitate, those are already part of the $49 you paid once. Over two or three years, that gap adds up to real money, not just convenience.
Where WoodMart, XStore, Basel, The Retailer and Martfury genuinely win
I’m not going to pretend Levitate wins everywhere, because that wouldn’t be honest, and you’d figure it out anyway the moment you start building.
Track record. WoodMart has over a hundred thousand sales and a rating close to 4.9 out of 5 from thousands of verified buyers. That’s a massive amount of real-world testing across every kind of store you can imagine. Levitate is a newer theme, so it simply hasn’t had years to build that same volume of reviews yet.
Flexibility beyond fashion. If you’re not 100% sure your store will stay in fashion — maybe you’ll expand into furniture, electronics, or a multi-vendor marketplace later — a multipurpose theme like WoodMart, XStore, or Martfury gives you the room to pivot without switching themes entirely. Martfury in particular is built with marketplace features like Dokan and WC Vendors support, which Levitate doesn’t attempt to compete with, because that’s simply not its job.
Marketplace features. If your actual goal is a multi-vendor marketplace — think a mini Amazon or Etsy — Martfury is purpose-built for that with direct Dokan, WC Vendors, WCFM, and MultiVendorX integration. Levitate is a single-store fashion theme and doesn’t try to do this.
Design builder freedom. If you already know Elementor well and enjoy visually building every single page from scratch, WoodMart and XStore give you dedicated builders for the header, shop page, single product page, cart, checkout, and account page. That’s a level of granular control Levitate’s Customizer-based approach doesn’t attempt to match, by design — Levitate trades some of that flexibility for simplicity and speed.
Ease of setup — what happens in your first hour
I always tell clients to imagine their first hour after buying a theme, because that hour tells you a lot about the months that follow.
With WoodMart, XStore, The Retailer, and Martfury, the first hour usually goes like this: install the theme, then install the required core plugin, then run the setup wizard, then wait while it installs Elementor (or WPBakery) plus a handful of companion plugins, then pick one of the many demos, then import it, then wait again while images and content load in. It’s not difficult, but it is a process with several steps, and if any one plugin fails to activate, you’re troubleshooting before you’ve even written your first product description. XStore in particular has been flagged by reviewers for this exact issue — the theme doesn’t fully work until its core plugin is installed and activated separately, which can trip up first-time users.
Levitate’s first hour is shorter because there’s one less layer to deal with. Since it doesn’t depend on Elementor or WPBakery, there’s no page builder installation step and no separate core plugin to activate before things work. You install the theme, run the one-click demo import, and you’re customizing inside the native WordPress Customizer — the same place you’d already go to change your site’s colors and menus. For someone who has never built a WooCommerce store before, that’s one less new tool to learn on day one.
This doesn’t mean the multipurpose themes are hard to use — thousands of non-developers run stores on WoodMart and XStore every day. It just means there are more pieces in the box, and more pieces means more that can occasionally go wrong or need updating.
Support and documentation
This is an area where the older, more established themes have a real edge, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
WoodMart’s support team is rated close to 4.9 out of 5 stars by buyers, and with over a hundred thousand sales behind it, almost any problem you run into has probably already been asked and answered on their support forum. The same goes for XStore, which has been on the market for over a decade and has a large, searchable knowledge base. The Retailer, Basel, and Martfury are all long-running products too, so a quick search usually turns up someone who has already solved whatever issue you’re facing.
Levitate includes 12 months of support and detailed documentation, plus lifetime free updates, which matches the industry standard for ThemeForest-style themes. But because it’s a newer product, it simply doesn’t have the same volume of community discussion, tutorials, and third-party guides built up around it yet. If you’re the type of person who likes to Google your exact problem and find five people who already solved it, that’s currently easier with WoodMart or XStore. If you’re comfortable reaching out directly to a support team and getting a personal answer, this gap matters much less.
A quick word on demos and design variety
One thing multipurpose themes genuinely do better is sheer demo count. WoodMart ships with over a hundred pre-built demo sites, and XStore offers more than 140. That’s an enormous head start if you want to browse dozens of layouts and pick whichever one feels closest to your brand, regardless of what kind of store you’re running.
Levitate doesn’t try to compete on quantity here, and honestly, it shouldn’t. Since it’s built only for fashion stores, it doesn’t need fifty demos for furniture, electronics, and food — it needs a handful of really well-thought-out fashion layouts, which is what it focuses on. If you want to browse fifty different niches before deciding what your store should look like, a multipurpose theme gives you more room to explore. If you already know you’re building a fashion store and just want a strong, focused starting point, that huge demo count stops being an advantage and starts being noise you have to scroll past.
Mobile shopping experience
Since most fashion shopping today happens on a phone, this deserves its own mention rather than getting buried in a features list.
Levitate includes a mobile bottom navigation bar by default — the kind of app-style menu you see on many popular fashion apps, sitting fixed at the bottom of the screen for quick access to the menu, search, wishlist, and cart. None of the other five themes include this natively; it’s the kind of thing you’d normally need a separate plugin or custom development to add on top of WoodMart, XStore, Basel, The Retailer, or Martfury.
That single detail sounds small, but if you’ve ever watched real shopping behavior on mobile, you know how much friction it removes. Customers browsing with one thumb don’t want to scroll back up to a hidden hamburger menu — they want their tools right where their thumb already is.
So which one should you actually pick?
Here’s the honest, non-salesy answer.
If you are opening a dedicated fashion, apparel, or clothing store, and you want something that works well immediately without stacking five plugins on top of it, without hiring a developer, and without worrying about Elementor slowing your site down — Levitate is built exactly for that job, and at $49 one-time it’s hard to argue against trying it, especially backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.
If you’re building a general store that could sell anything — electronics one month, home decor the next — or if you want the safety net of a theme with over a hundred thousand sales behind it and a huge library of ready demos, WoodMart is probably the safer long-term pick.
If your real goal is a multi-vendor marketplace, skip all of the fashion-focused options and go straight to Martfury.
If you’re comfortable with Elementor and want maximum design freedom across every page type, XStore or Basel will serve you well.
There’s no single “best” theme here — that’s the honest truth, even though nobody selling a theme wants to say it out loud. There’s only the best fit for the specific store you’re building. My own rule of thumb after building stores on most of these: if the word “fashion” is in your business plan, Levitate does the job with fewer moving parts and a lower long-term bill. If your store’s identity is still open-ended, a proven multipurpose theme like WoodMart gives you room to grow in any direction.
Either way, install the demo before you buy — every one of these themes offers a live preview, and five minutes of clicking around will tell you more than any comparison article, including this one.