In terms of business growth, ecommerce is the one important field that has maintained its upward growth in recent times. Precisely for this reason, entrepreneurs are mostly showing interest in starting and growing their business with an online store. It is a widely known fact that WordPress is ruling the market as a first choice for those who want to start their online journey as website owners. The case is not different for those wanting to flex their muscles in ecommerce world as well.
Once you decided to go with WordPress, next step is to give shape to your online store. This is easy by choosing an appropriate plugin to make your site a full fledged ecommerce website. It is one of the most important decisions to make because picking the wrong plugin can result in poor user experience resulting in let them go away without purchase. Whereas the right plugin has the potential to make your business flourish. Once the site is in shape, It is also necessary for you to opt for a suitable plan for the maintenance of the website, otherwise every effort goes in vain.
Top Ecommerce Plugins for WordPress
Fortunately, there is no dearth of such modern, sophisticated plugins with polished featured these days. Here we are listing 5 such fantastic plugins which will perfectly integrate with your WordPress site.
1. WooCommerce
The first on our list is the most popular WordPress plugin for ecommerce, WooCommerce. This free plugin allows you to sell anything on your site whether it is a digital or physical good. WooCommerce offers access to lots of free and premium WordPress extensions and endless flexibility. It powers 30% of all online stores, more than any other platform. There are also cool themes come with optimized and predefined shop, cart and product page templates for WooCommerce plugin. You can purchase one such a theme to quickly setup your online store without starting everything from scratch.
- WooCommerce has more than 5 million installation and allows you to create product pages, categories, tags, shop, cart and checkout page.
- You can accept payments through credit/debit cards, PayPal, Stripe, Square, etc.
- Easily customize the store from WordPress customizer.
- Plugin works seamlessly with WordPress as it is from Automattic, the company behind WordPress.
- You have plenty of Gutenberg blocks and widgets to showcase your products.
2. Easy Digital Downloads
As the name indicates, this plugin is custom made to sell only digital products using WordPress. Easy Digital Downloads comes with solid features to create a fully functional digital goods store.
- The plugin is easy to setup and offers various Gutenberg blocks and third-party extensions.
- You can accept payments through Stripe, PayPal, Apply Pay, Google Pay, etc.
- Lightweight plugin compared to WooCommerce.
- You will get neat reports for orders and sales tracking.
However, the free version comes with limited functionalities and you need to go for premium version for getting features like reviews and recommended products (which are free with WooCommerce).
3. Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart
Trusted by over 30K users, Ecwid enables your store data on cloud. Unlimited storage, automatic backups and seamless upgrades are most important stuffs you will get. In addition, you will get the followings with the plugin:
- Integration of social media allows you to sell your products directly on Facebook and Instagram.
- Plugin also offers iOS and Android app free of cost.
- Automatic shipping rate calculation by integrating with carriers like UPS, FedEx, etc.
4. eCommerce Product Catalog Plugin for WordPress
This is a lightweight plugin allows you to showcase products in catalog style on your site. The advantage eCommerce Product Catalog plugin is that you can easily integrate it with existing blog without affecting the page loading speed of blog posts.
- You can either create a enquiry catalog without payment gateway or create an online web store with integrated checkout page.
- The plugin uses PayPal or Paytrial gateway for payment processing.
- It is also possible to directly add your affiliate links in products by enabling “Affiliate Catalog” mode in the plugin settings.
Though the plugin is completely free, you have premium extensions to get additional features like product gallery, currency switcher, etc.
5. WordPress Simple Shopping Cart
This plugin has the ability to effortlessly integrating a shopping cart solution without complexity. It is a super simple plugin that offers few global settings and you can use shortcodes to show products and PayPal “Add to Cart” button.
- Possible to sell any type of products like eBooks, photographs or physical items.
- You can use shortcodes to customize the product parameters like price, variations and upload files.
- Showcase “Add to Cart” and cart below the products using shortcode.
The only point you need to think is that the plugin uses PayPal and there are no options to use other payment gateways.
Final Thoughts
Earlier, so many ecommerce plugins for WordPress were available in WordPress.org repository. However, most of them were removed or not updated and out of date. The examples include MarketPress from WPMU DEV, Cart66, WP eCommerce, Jigoshop and iThemes Exchange. The plugins we have listed in this article are updated continuously and come with unique individual features. They are all capable of adding wings to your business and turning your site into a fully functional ecommerce site. Now the choice is up to you to pick the right one among these taking into consideration your need and motto. After you start working with one of these plugin, do not forget to let us know how they are working for you, using the comments section below.
