WordPress initially started out as a blogging platform, but today it’s being used as the primary solution for building many e-commerce sites. WordPress has a powerful plug-in architecture which makes it possible for anyone to transform a fledgling site into a sleek digital shop. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money on dedicated shopping cart software and you’d rather build your own with WordPress, then you are in the right place.
Once you’ve decided to build an e-commerce site with WordPress, you might be wondering which plugin is the best fit for you. Well, don’t fret. We have researched and put together a list of seven of the best WordPress e-commerce plug-ins to aid you to choose the right one. All the plug-ins mentioned here are free to use and suitable for creating any type of WordPress e-store.
1. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is by large the most popular and widely used e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It has more than 18% (approximately) share on the internet market in e-commerce and boasts notable clientele like Entrepreneur, Cosmopolitan, and Harley Davidson.
Its top features include integration with PayPal, multiple shopping, easy inventory management among others. On top of these, you can incorporate many other powerful extensions with WooCommerce that can help you to expand your simple site into a multimillion-dollar e-commerce store. Moreover, there are many free and paid themes that allow you to transform your online shop to meet your specific needs.
2. Easy Digital Downloads
If you are thinking of selling a digital product, Easy Digital Download is the right choice for you. It is simple to use and setup, lightweight, and has a broad range of features. Its powerful reporting system can be used to keep track of earnings and sales with an interactive graph and complex data table to analyze your performance.
Moreover, EDD code is written with WP coding standards in mind, making it one of the most developer friendly e-commerce solution available in the market. Additionally, its code is also easy to change and with many free themes and extensions, and is one of the best e-commerce plugins.
The only downside of Easy Digital Download is that you can’t sell any physical products. But, if you only deal with digital products, this is a huge advantage because it has managed to exclude the useless features keeping only what will be useful to you.
3. WP Ecommerce
With over more than 3 million downloads, WP Ecommerce is one of the most popular plugins, second to only WooCommerce. Whether it’s a physical inventory, digital download, subscriptions or membership, you can use WooCommerce to sell any sort of products.
Though simple, it is a very powerful plugin and allows you to customize HTML and CSS. One of its many unique features is its streamline checkout process that plays a great role in increasing the conversion rate of your store. In addition, its integration with many payment processors and shipper makes it one of the best plugins for a beginner.
Finally, it’s free, but you can unlock advanced features anytime with a premium upgrade.
4. MarketPress
MarketPress is an effort by developers to put together all the features and power of several different plugins into the one single standard plugin. As a result, MarketPress is well designed, feature rich, and easily customizable.
When you start with MarketPress, it comes with a beautiful theme. It is easy to configure as you can customize your store without altering a single line of the code. Moreover, creating new products or categories and managing orders is relatively easy in MarketPress.
Initially, MarketPress is free but you will have to spend some money to upgrade it to the premium version and unleash its full potential.
5. iTheme Exchange
iTheme exchange, the product of iThemes, is simple, intuitive and extremely extendable plugin. Thanks to its user-friendly interface, you can create your platform easily in comparison to other plugins.
One of the most unique features of iTheme exchange is that it has its own database table for the customers. This is helpful because information about the customer is automatically added to this page during the exchange of products. However, this plugin is still at an early stage and growing, which means it has got a smaller community compared to others.
If you want to use it just install, activate, add payment process, products and start selling goods and services.
6. Shopp
Shopp is highly professional and high-performance e-commerce plugin for WordPress. The catchphrase of Shopp is, “Publish with WordPress. Sell with Shopp.” It is simple, straightforward, and clever and gives you a preconception about what you will get without any difficulty.
One of the distinctive features of Shopp is its security cart, which doesn’t need any security add-ons. Its SEO friendly code, responsive design and compatibility with the themes of WordPress and Plugins make it one of the most desirable plugins available in the market today.
This plugin is free but you will have to pay for support and access to community forums. The starter package of Shopp is priced at seventy-five dollars.
7. Shopify Buy Button for WordPress
Not every WordPress site needs a full-blown ecommerce setup on the backend. Sometimes you may only have a few products you want to offer online. In other cases, you may be looking for a fast, simple, and user-friendly way to sell a product on your site.
The WordPress buy button from Shopify is a good choice in those scenarios. Sure, you could use it to build out a site selling a lot of products too, but, if you are looking for something quick and simple, this new offering from Shopify is something you are going to want to check out for sure.
Like many of the others listed above, they too offer a free WordPress plugin. The plugin includes secure checkout, shipping integration, and product sales tracking features. Style is not overlooked either, with the easy built in customization options.
If you are looking for a way to sell your products online, WordPress is a great place to build your site and the plugins covered here are all great choices for adding the needed functionality to your new site.
Featured photo credit: Pixabay via pixabay.com
