WordPress has started its journey as a blogging platform, but now it’s being used as a robust solution for building eCommerce sites. The powerful plug-in architecture of WordPress makes it possible for anyone to transform an ordinary site into a fully-fledged digital shop. So in case you’d rather build it with good old WordPress instead of using dedicated shopping cart software, read on!
What to Look in a WordPress eCommerce Plugin for Your Site?
There are plenty of WordPress eCommerce plugins in the market. But not all of them have the essential set of features you would need to start your eCommerce site.
Some eCommerce plugins are good for selling digital goods like eBooks, photos, music, etc. While others are better suited for selling physical goods that need shipping and inventory management. There are also eCommerce plugins that are good at both of them.
You need to choose a plugin depending on what you will be selling and what kind of features you would need to efficiently run your online store.
Next, you need to consider which payment gateways you will utilize to accept payments. Make sure that the plugin you choose supports those payment gateways by default or through addons.
Your eCommerce plugin will not come with a theme. You would need to see that the plugin you choose has themes that work with the plugin.
If you’re also planning to build an eCommerce site with WordPress, you may get confused which eCommerce plug-in fits your needs best. To help you choose best among the rest, I’ve researched and made a list of 7 best WordPress eCommerce plug-ins. All these plug-ins are absolutely free to use and perfect for creating any kind of profitable WordPress e-store.
1. Woo Commerce
WooCommerce, built by talented folks at WooThemes, is probably the most popular and widely used free eCommerce plug-in for WordPress Packed full of top-of-the-line features, this powerful and highly extendable plug-in empowers you to turn your WordPress site into a multi-million dollar eCommerce store. One of the best things about WooCommerce is its golden collection of free and paid themes and extensions, using which you can tailor your online shop to meet your specific needs. There is plugin which also used for dropshipping Alidropship plugin review with coupon code. Dropshipping is a supply chain management model in which online retailers partner with wholesale suppliers to directly fulfil online orders. Instead of keeping their own product inventory, ecommerce retailers transfer customer orders and shipping information to the dropship wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer (and generally deal with returns).
2. Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads is a lightweight, feature-rich and simple to setup eCommerce solution for selling digital downloads via WordPress at no cost. Rather than including a lot of useless features like other plug-ins, Easy Digital Downloads has kept selling digital goods simple and streamlined by providing only most useful features. It ships with a powerful reporting system that enables you to see all of your earnings and sales through interactive graphs and easy to analyze data tables. You may also want to read my full Easy Digital Downloads review.
3. WP ecommerce
WP e-Commerce is another simple to use yet powerful WordPress eCommerce plug-in that has been around for last several years. Written by Justin Sainton, Dan Milward and Gary Cao, WP eCommerce allows you to customize HTML and CSS, so you could have full control over the look and feel of your eStore. Whether you sell physical inventory, digital downloads, memberships or subscriptions, this amazing plug-in has made selling an absolute breeze.
4. Ecwid
Ecwid makes strides in the market by catering to companies that don’t want to start a brand new site. The primary feature is that you can take your old site and quickly integrate the Ecwid system within a few minutes. You can also mirror the system onto various other sites if you plan on selling elsewhere online. Manage all of these sites from one place instead of switching between multiple dashboards. Another nice feature is the syncing between multiple devices. Sell on-the-go with your smart phone. This means that you can go to a tradeshow to make a few sales and all of these sales are reflected on the backend of your website.
5. Jigoshop
Jigoshop is a reliable, secure and robust WordPress eCommerce plug-in from Jigowatt, a UK based web design agency. Best suited for SMEs, Jigoshop features an intuitive dashboard through which you’ll have the ability to setup and manage your web store in minutes. You can choose from 30+ fully fledged and highly customizable themes that are suitable for building any kind of online store. Plus there are over one hundreds of powerful extensions offered to take your eStore to the next level. Check out my full Jigoshop review as well.
6. Market Press3
MarketPress, prudently written by experienced WordPress developers at WPMU DEV, is a well designed, easily customizable and feature-rich eCommerce plug-in. The main motive behind the development of this fabulous plug-in is delivering users a simple, beautiful and enjoyable shopping cart experience without any add-on or extension. Thus, MarketPress is a WPMU DEV’s effort of putting together the powers of different plug-ins into one single standalone eCommerce solution.
7. iThemes Exchange
iThemes Exchange is a simple, intuitive and extremely extendable WordPress eCommerce plug-in developed by i-Themes. Having a user-friendly interface, it makes product creation process relatively easier. Unlike other plug-ins that create their own database tables for customers, Exchange takes advantage of built-in WordPress user system for adding customer information to its own page. So that you could easily manage customers by viewing available downloads and products purchased, editing transactions and adding notes to customer information.
8. Cart66 Lite
Cart66 Lite, formerly known as PHPurchase, is a lightweight, secure and highly efficient e-commerce solution for creating any kind of “PCI compliant” WordPress store. It makes use of Mijireh Checkout to securely collect and transmit credit card information to your favorite payment gateway. What’s interesting, it also perfectly integrates with Amazon S3 to let you sell digital products without any hassle. Unlike other eCommerce plug-ins, Cart66 Lite is easy to use yet powerful.
Business is the backbone of many economies and it is becoming very popular all over the world. Technology has taken it a step further and we now have eCommerce; websites built solely for the purpose of buying and selling of goods. For these websites to be effective and allow the owners reach their set targets they will need to make use of the best eCommerce WordPress plugins. Here we look at some of them. (more…)