5 Best WordPress eCommerce Plugins You Need to Skyrocket Your Online Business

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Ever wished your WordPress website could be more than just a pretty face online? Imagine it as a bustling online store, attracting customers and ringing up sales. Well, guess what? With the magic of the right WordPress eCommerce plugins, that dream can become a reality.

Choosing the right eCommerce plugin is akin to selecting the engine for your online car. It’s the foundation upon which your online store is built. Here at InstaWP, we understand the crucial role these plugins play in propelling your eCommerce journey.

We’ve got a plethora of resources dedicated to helping you navigate the exciting world of online sales. (Want to delve deeper? Check out our guides on topics like Choosing the Right Paypal Plugins for Your WordPress Store, Essential Email Marketing Plugins, and Mailchimp Plugins to build and nurture relationships with your customers).

Best WordPress e-commerce Plugins

Here are the best WordPress e-commerce plugins that can help you build an impressive online store.

WooCommerce

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WooCommerce is a robust, open-source eCommerce platform tailor-made for WordPress sites. It is an ideal solution for businesses looking to establish an online presence, traditional brick-and-mortar stores venturing into online retail, or developers creating sites for their clients. WooCommerce offers a seamless blend of content and commerce, allowing full ownership of your store’s content and data.

Features and Benefits

  • Create Beautiful, Enticing Storefronts: WooCommerce allows you to design aesthetic storefronts that align with your brand and industry. This enhances the user experience and boosts your brand’s online image.
  • Increase Revenue: With an optimized shopping cart experience, WooCommerce helps you increase conversions and boost your online revenue.
  • Customize Product Pages: With WooCommerce, you can easily customize your product pages using modular product blocks. This offers flexibility in showcasing your products and enhances the shopping experience for your customers.
  • Showcase a Variety of Goods: WooCommerce supports the display of both physical and digital goods, product variations, custom configurations, instant downloads, and affiliate items. This diversity allows you to cater to a wider range of customer needs.
  • Sell Subscriptions, Bookings, or Memberships: You can also sell subscriptions, bookings, or memberships using extensions vetted by developers.
  • SEO Advantage: Leverage WordPress’ SEO advantage to improve your website’s visibility and reach a larger audience.

Pricing Structure

WooCommerce’s core platform is free, but additional costs may apply for extensions, themes, and specialized services.

Easy Digital Downloads

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Easy Digital Downloads is a WordPress eCommerce plugin designed specifically for selling digital products. It provides an effortless way to sell digital goods without compromising on features or functionality. It resolves the challenge of setting up and managing an online digital store, making it a breeze to sell digital products like ebooks, software, music, and more.

Features and Benefits

  • Unlimited products and transactions: Easy Digital Downloads allows you to list and sell an unlimited number of digital products with no hidden listing fees. This feature offers you the freedom to expand your eCommerce store without worrying about additional costs.
  • Various payment options: Easy Digital Downloads supports various payment options like credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. This makes it easy for customers around the world to pay using their preferred payment methods.
  • Responsive checkout form: The plugin provides a responsive and customizable checkout form, ensuring a seamless and efficient checkout process for your customers. This can lead to higher conversion rates.
  • Digital product management: You can create single products, product variations, and product bundles with no added costs. This gives you the flexibility to offer a wide range of products to your customers.
  • Discount codes: Easy Digital Downloads offers a built-in discount code management system, allowing you to run sales and promotions with ease. This can help attract more customers and increase sales.
  • eCommerce reports: The plugin provides detailed eCommerce reports, giving you valuable insights into the growth of your eCommerce business. This can help you make informed decisions to improve your store’s performance.

Pricing Structure

Easy Digital Downloads offers both a free version and a Pro version. The Pro version comes with additional features.

Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart

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The Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart is a dynamic and feature-rich WordPress plugin that transforms your website into a fully-functioning online store. This plugin is designed to cater to the needs of over 1 million sellers across 175 countries, supporting 45 languages. With Ecwid, you can efficiently manage your online store, process payments through various gateways, and even expand your business to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Features and Benefits

  • Automatic Shipping and Taxes: The plugin integrates with major carriers like USPS, UPS, FedEx, Canada Post, Australia Post, among others, to automatically calculate shipping rates. It also automates tax calculations for the U.S., Canada, and EU VAT. Moreover, it integrates with TaxJar for automatic sales tax reporting and filing in the U.S.
  • Sell on Facebook and Instagram: Ecwid enables you to integrate your online store with Facebook and Instagram, thus reaching out to a wider customer base. It synchronizes your products, customers, orders, and inventory between your WordPress and Facebook storefronts.
  • eCommerce Mobile Apps: The plugin provides free mobile applications for iOS and Android that let you manage your store and make sales on the go.
  • Unlimited Storage, Automatic Backups, and Seamless Upgrades: With Ecwid, your online store data is fully hosted on secure servers, ensuring unlimited storage, regular backups, seamless upgrades, and security updates.

Pricing Structure

Ecwid provides a free plan for those just starting. As your business grows, you can upgrade to one of their premium plans.

Shopping Cart & eCommerce Store

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WP EasyCart is a robust, free WordPress eCommerce plugin that seamlessly integrates into new or existing websites. This easy-to-use shopping cart allows you to sell a wide variety of products ranging from retail items, subscriptions, digital downloads, gift cards, donations to services, and more. Offering compatibility with payment options like Stripe, Square, and PayPal, WP EasyCart facilitates smooth transactions in your online store. Additionally, it comes with premium extensions for selling on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Features and Benefits

  • Multiple Payment Options: WP EasyCart supports over 30 payment solutions, providing a wide range of options for your customers to make payments. This not only enhances user experience but also helps to increase conversion rates.
  • Different Cart Editions: WP EasyCart comes in three different shopping cart editions – Free, Professional, and Premium. This allows you to choose the one that best fits your business needs.
  • Easy Social Media Integration: With the Facebook and Instagram premium extension, you can easily extend your eCommerce store to these social media platforms, reaching out to a broader audience.
  • Multilingual and Multi-currency Features: WP EasyCart allows you to cater to a global audience with its multi-currency and multilingual features.
  • Comprehensive Order Management: From printing sales receipts and packaging slips to adding shipping notes, emailing customers, and viewing order information, WP EasyCart makes managing orders a breeze.
  • SEO and Social Sharing: Each product, menu, and category you create comes with SEO editing. Plus, the social sharing feature allows visitors to instantly link and share your products, boosting your online presence.

Pricing Structure

The Free eCommerce Edition offers unlimited products and orders, with payment options including PayPal Express, Square, and Stripe. The Professional eCommerce Edition comes with several additional features at a fee, including live shipping calculators, coupons, promotions, order editing, digital wallet payments, subscription products, and more. On the other hand, the Premium eCommerce Edition offers everything in the Professional Edition plus apps for Desktop, Tablet, iPhone, and Android, along with 10+ premium extensions. For detailed pricing information, visit the WP EasyCart pricing page.

BigCommerce For WordPress

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BigCommerce for WordPress is a robust eCommerce plugin that integrates the power of WordPress content management with the extensive eCommerce capabilities of BigCommerce. This plugin is designed to scale your online business, offload backend resources while keeping WordPress on the front-end, and handle catalog management, payment processes, fulfillment logistics, and more.

Features and Benefits

  • Scalable eCommerce: BigCommerce for WordPress enables businesses to manage large volumes of traffic, orders, and analytics without affecting the speed or uptime of your site, thereby improving SEO, conversion rates, and brand reputation.
  • Extensive Payment Gateways: BigCommerce offers over 65 payment gateway integrations serving over 100 countries and 250 local payment methods. Plus, the plugin provides special credit and debit card processing rates with PayPal.
  • Highly Scalable Product Catalog: The plugin supports large, complex catalogs with up to 600 SKUs per product and 250 product values for a single option.
  • Multi-Channel Selling & Management: With BigCommerce, you can sell across multiple marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, Square, and more, all from one control panel.

Pricing Structure

BigCommerce for WordPress offers different pricing tiers depending on the scale of your business.

What are WordPress eCommerce Plugins

WordPress eCommerce plugins are extensions or add-ons for WordPress websites that enable the integration of eCommerce functionality, allowing users to create online stores, sell products or services, manage inventory, process payments, and handle other related tasks.

These plugins are for:

  1. Small Businesses: Small businesses looking to start selling products or services online can benefit from WordPress eCommerce plugins. They offer a cost-effective way to set up an online store without the need for extensive technical knowledge or custom development.
  2. Entrepreneurs: Individuals or entrepreneurs who want to launch an online store to sell products can use WordPress eCommerce plugins to quickly set up their store and start selling.
  3. Bloggers: Bloggers who want to monetize their websites by selling merchandise, digital products, or services can use eCommerce plugins to seamlessly integrate a store with their existing WordPress site.
  4. Artists and Creatives: Artists, designers, photographers, and other creatives can use eCommerce plugins to showcase and sell their work online.
  5. Nonprofits: Nonprofit organizations can use eCommerce plugins to sell merchandise, accept donations, or raise funds for their causes.
  6. Existing WordPress Site Owners: Businesses or individuals who already have a WordPress website and want to add eCommerce functionality can easily do so by installing an eCommerce plugin, without the need to migrate to a different platform.

Final Word

The choice of an eCommerce plugin for your WordPress site depends greatly on your specific needs, type of products, and budget. WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart, Shopping Cart & eCommerce Store, and BigCommerce For WordPress all offer unique features that can enhance your online store’s functionality.

Whether you prioritize ease of setup, a variety of payment options, SEO advantage, or scalability, these plugins provide different solutions for different businesses. It’s recommended to carefully review their features and pricing structures to make an informed decision. Don’t hesitate to try them out, read more detailed reviews, or engage with this blog through comments and sharing.

Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress eCommerce Plugins

  1. What are WordPress eCommerce plugins?

    WordPress eCommerce plugins are extensions or add-ons for WordPress websites that enable the integration of eCommerce functionality. They empower users to create online stores, sell products or services, manage inventory, and process payments directly within their WordPress site.
  2. Which WordPress eCommerce plugin should I choose?

    The best WordPress eCommerce plugin depends on your specific needs and requirements. Popular options include WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Shopify for WordPress, and WP eCommerce. Consider factors such as your product type, budget, desired features, and ease of use when selecting a plugin.
  3. Are WordPress eCommerce plugins easy to install and use?

    Yes, most WordPress eCommerce plugins are designed to be user-friendly and easy to install. They typically offer intuitive interfaces and setup wizards to guide you through the process of setting up your online store, adding products, configuring payment gateways, and managing orders.
  4. Can I customize the appearance of my online store with WordPress eCommerce plugins?

    Yes, WordPress eCommerce plugins often provide extensive customization options, allowing you to tailor the look and feel of your online store to match your brand. You can choose from various themes, customize colors and fonts, and even add custom CSS or JavaScript code to achieve the desired design.
  5. Do WordPress eCommerce plugins support different payment gateways?

    Yes, most WordPress eCommerce plugins support a wide range of payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.Net, Square, and others. This enables you to offer multiple payment options to your customers and securely process transactions directly on your website.
  6. Can I sell physical and digital products with WordPress eCommerce plugins?

    Yes, many WordPress eCommerce plugins support the sale of both physical and digital products. You can easily add product listings, set pricing and inventory levels, and deliver digital downloads to customers upon purchase.
  7. Are WordPress eCommerce plugins secure?

    Yes, reputable WordPress eCommerce plugins prioritize security and regularly release updates to patch vulnerabilities and improve security measures. Additionally, you can enhance security by using SSL certificates, choosing reputable hosting providers, and following best practices for website security.
  8. Do WordPress eCommerce plugins offer support and documentation?

    Yes, most WordPress eCommerce plugins provide extensive documentation, tutorials, and community forums to help you get started and troubleshoot any issues you may encounter. Additionally, premium plugins often offer dedicated support channels for users who need assistance.
  9. Can I integrate additional features and extensions with WordPress eCommerce plugins?

    Yes, many WordPress eCommerce plugins offer extensions and integrations to enhance functionality and add new features to your online store. These may include marketing tools, shipping calculators, subscription services, product reviews, and more.
  10. Is it possible to migrate from one WordPress eCommerce plugin to another?

    Yes, while it may require some effort, it is possible to migrate from one WordPress eCommerce plugin to another if you find that your current plugin no longer meets your needs. However, it’s essential to plan the migration carefully and ensure that you properly export and import your products, orders, and customer data to avoid any disruptions to your business.

Vikas Singhal

Founder, InstaWP

Vikas is an Engineer turned entrepreneur. He loves the WordPress ecosystem and wants to help WP developers work faster by improving their workflows. InstaWP, the WordPress developer’s all-in-one toolset, is his brainchild.
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