WordPress has always been an excellent platform for creating fully-fledged websites. You can start off your first online project with WordPress as it lets you build anything from a straightforward content-based site to a feature-rich online store, without much technical assistance.
When it comes to building a fully-functional eCommerce site or online store, WordPress is sought out to be one of the best options. It offers beautifully coded and well-designed themes to let you create an online store where you can sell your products and services to a large number of web customers. Despite rich features and user-friendly interface, WordPress doesn’t offer any inbuilt eCommerce functionalities. For that, you need to use reliable eCommerce plugins to enhance your stores functionality.
There are lots of eCommerce plugins that can help you extend the functionality of your online store according to your needs in a matter of few minutes. You can add multiple functions to your ecommerce site such as payment gateways, shopping cart, product showcase pages and a lot more just by installing the best ecommerce plugin.
In this post, we will light upon the seven most compelling eCommerce plugins that can help you build a robust e-store in minutes.
Let’s start!
1. WooCommerce
With over 13,000,000 downloads, WooCommerce has become one of the most popular eCommerce solutions on the web. More than 30% of online stores are currently using this powerful plugin. You can also download it from the WordPress plugin repository at free of cost. It is built to integrate smoothly with WordPress, so that you can transform your simple WP site to a fully-fledged online store.
With the WooCommerce plugin, you can create and manage every aspect of an online store directly from your admin panel. It supports thousands of free and premium WordPress extensions to give you complete control over your site. Plus, it comes with the core set of advanced features and customization settings that can help you run a feature-rich eCommerce store like a breeze.
Let’s explore its unique features:
Mobile-Friendly
PayPal Payment Integration
Excellent custom support
Compatible with WordPress themes
Social sharing icons
Google Analytics integration
Comprehensive documentation
Sell real products to digital products, and a lot more.
Essentially, WooCommerce is an ideal choice for those who want to set up a highly- functionally online store at an affordable price.
2. MarketPress
Provide your web customers a decent shopping experience with this powerful eCommerce plugin. MarketPress is also a free eCommerce plugin for WordPress that lets you create fully-functional online stores in minutes. It supports widely-used payment gateways, and comes with custom shipping options to let you manage distribution and shopping costs with ease.
This plugin allows you to sell anything from the real products to the digital ones, without the requirement of any additional extensions and add-ons. Even, you can embed unlimited variations to any product and display them in beautiful and stylish galleries.
It is also available in pro version where you will get a host of compelling features including:
Supports 15 popular payment methods including PayPal, Stripe and Authorize.net.
Product personalization
Calculated shipping modules (Fedex, UPS, in-store pickup etc)
Google Analytics eCommerce tracking
Extend the functionality with add-ons (including Coupons and PDF invoicing), etc.
Note: Buy the premium version of MarketPress from wpmudev.
3. iThemes Exchange: Simple WP eCommerce
iThemes Exchange is a simple yet effective eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It empowers you to build a beautiful online shop, without any coding. Sell physical as well as digital products online quickly and easily with this plugin. You can easily create and customize the design of your e-store according to your needs. It offers a variety of features that are divided into add-ons that you can use as per your requirements.
Here is the list of Robust add-ons:
Cart add-ons: This add-on allows your customers to buy multiple products with a single transaction.
Shipping add-ons: Enables you to add flat rate or free shipping options to your products with ease. You can also override global flat rate shipping settings to embed multiple shipping prices to particular products.
Download Add-ons: This add-on makes it easy to sell digital products. You can set download expirations, track product inventories, apply products availability dates quite easily.
Coupons Add-on: Easy to generate coupon codes for your products.
Furthermore, iThemes Exchange plugin integrates PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net payment gateways within your online store, without a hitch.
4. Easy Digital Downloads
It is one of the simplest e-Commerce plugin for WordPress. You can use this plugin to sell digital products (such as ebooks, software, videos, etc) online to the potential web customers.
Easy Digital Downloads doesn’t include too many features, but still it is a pretty good option for setting up an online store. It offers several stunning features that allow your customers to add and download multiple digital products from a single screen. In simple words, this plugin has the ability to keep your customers happy and satisfied.
It also comes with a reporting system that lets you see all your sales and inventories via intuitive graphs and tables.
5. Cart66
Extend the functionality of your online store with Cart66. It is an amazing eCommerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It allows you to sell both the physical products and digital products in an easy and well-organized way. It includes an inbuilt recurring billing engine that works seamlessly with more than 50 payment gateways. Follow up with your web customers by sending them product specific emails after the sale.
This helps in setting up a soothing communication system between you and your customers. It also offers variety of unique features such as:
Product variations
Live shipping (allows customers to track their products)
Fully customizable
Coupons and promotions
MailChimp, Google Analytics, Facebook integration
Easy to pay invoices online
Order notifications, and much more.
To an addition, Cart66 also take care of all the SSL certificates, data encryption, security scans and much more in order to strengthen the security of your e-store.
6. WP eCommerce
WP eCommerce is an incredible eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It enables you to create an online store where you can sell your products and services online without a hassle.
Build beautiful and interactive online shop and convert your potential visitors into web customers. This plugin makes it easy to add secure shopping cart functionality into the website. Its user-friendly admin interface lets you upload products; manage orders and stocks with ease.
WP eCommerce plugin supports two free payment gateways including PayPal Standard and PayPal Pro. It comes with inbuilt shipping tools and also integrated with recognized couriers companies to make the shipping process easy for you.
Features
Comes with table rate shipping functionality
Supports multiple payment gateways such as Google Wallet, Authorize.net, BluePay, SagePay, Paystation, etc.
SSL certificates
Easy to manage product catalogs
Developer friendly (comes with hundreds of hooks to let developers modify the functionality of WP eCommerce plugin as per their needs)
Integrate with WordPress multisite, and much more.
Integrate this WP eCommerce plugin with your WordPress and run a beautiful and dynamic online store, without any heavy lifting.
7. Table Rate Shipping for WooCommerce
Table Rate Shipping plugin lets you embed different rates to orders, depending on the various factors such as weight and price of a product, cart subtotal and, of course, shipping destinations.
Use this plugin and add a new and powerful shipping option within your online store. It is easy to setup plugin that requires least technical knowledge and coding skills. Just install and activate into your site and host a fully-functional e-Commerce website.
It offers a ton of advanced features such as:
Customization options
A variety of customer options including Standard/Express shipping, one/multiple shipping costs, etc.
Add handling fees and taxes with ease
Offers bundling and volumetric shipping options
Supports various payment gateways and a lot more.
Conclusion
That’s all. All the plugins mentioned in this blog post will help you create and run a highly-interactive and well-structured eCommerce site, without any heavy lifting. Hopefully, you will be able to pick out the most suitable plugin according to your needs and specifications with ease.