Do you want more than WooCommerce and are looking for an alternative? Do you want to switch your eCommerce plugin from WooCommerce?
Although WooCommerce is the most popular and most used WordPress eCommerce plugin in the WordPress space, it is not the only eCommerce plugin in WordPress. Other WooCommerce alternatives that can also convert WordPress from just a CMS into an eCommerce solution exist.
In this article, we will familiarise you with some of the best WooCommerce alternatives that your WordPress agency can also use for e-commerce developments.
Table of Contents
eCommerce Development and Choosing the Right Plugin
E-commerce development entails developing online stores for the sole purpose of buying and selling digital or physical products on the Internet. There have been and will always be multiple WordPress plugins offering the same features or functionality for WordPress development. There are crappy ones, and there are amazing ones. Therefore, you have to choose the plugin that is best suited for the job, and the same applies even to e-commerce development.
Working with an experienced Ecommerce Website Design Company can also help in choosing the right tools.
Customer satisfaction is paramount. When customers are satisfied with your products or services, they are happy to pay you. They can also help your business thrive by becoming loyal returning customers and by referring more businesses to you. However, when you disappoint them, they may reject your work and refuse to pay you, turn to your competitors, and give a bad review of your service.
So when developing ecommerce websites, you have to make an effort to choose the right plugin to provide your customers with the best foundation for them to sell their products and services seamlessly. You need to select the right plugins that will help you to create a visually appealing design that aligns with your customers’ branding and plugins that will help you integrate and customize the ecommerce website with features that will enable the website to meet your customers’ spec.
When you choose the right plugins for ecommerce development, you will be able to enhance the ecommerce website performance and user experience, boost product marketing and sales, and streamline business operations, including inventory management, order processing, and customer support.
Common Reasons to Consider WooCommerce Alternatives
WooCommerce has proven beyond doubt to be the best e-commerce development plugin for WordPress. It is a flexible and versatile plugin with powerful customization and a host of complimentary free and premium extensions and WooCommerce plugins to build e-commerce websites as robust as e-commerce giants such as Amazon, Etsy, etc.
So, the rationale behind seeking WooCommerce alternatives is worth evaluating. Here are some common reasons why you may need to consider WooCommerce alternatives:
1. Business Needs
Businesses that decide to launch online stores have different needs or goals for doing so. As a WordPress developer, you must understand your customers’ needs and then choose the right eCommerce plugin for the job. Even though WooCommerce is a flexible and versatile plugin for e-commerce development, it might be challenging for some. There are Woocommerce alternatives that better serve your customers’ purpose.
2. Feature Limitations
The default WooCommerce design and templates could be more visually pleasing and may need to be more sufficient for the aesthetic appeal befitting of a professional e-commerce website. This means you have to put in extra work to customize the design to your customer’s business needs.
Furthermore, WooCommerce can only provide some of the features that an e-commerce website demands. It requires additional plugins or premium extensions to add vital key features such as processing transactions online, sending customized order receipts, etc. This means more work as you will have to install and customize more plugins on your e-commerce website, and you may also incur additional costs for premium features.
For businesses delving into print-on-demand solutions rather than conventional eCommerce plugins, evaluating the printful and printify differences provides valuable insight into tailored fulfillment services that suit diverse needs.
When you consider these, you should explore WooCommerce alternatives to weigh your options.
3. Performance Issues
eCommerce websites are bound to grow in size and traffic. The large volume of products, customers, and transactions will impact the site’s performance.
In addition, you may have to install other WooCommerce-supporting plugins for extra features. This will increase the number of plugins on your site and the number of resources and calls to your database, negatively affecting your site’s performance.
WooCommerce and its supporting plugins already use a lot of resources. An increasing growth in size and traffic will impose a higher demand on hosting resources, thereby causing high loading time and poor user experience.
A lighter e-commerce plugin will use fewer resources, and an increasing site’s growth will have a lower impact on the site’s performance.
4. Cost Considerations
Setting up WooCommerce for e-commerce development typically involves extensive customization that requires time and skill, and you would want to be paid what you deserve. However, some of your customers might be on a tight budget and may need help to afford your charges. Seeking WooCommerce alternatives that are easier and faster to set up might be a better option than rejecting potential customers.
In addition, although WooCommerce is free, you can incur more costs and quickly go beyond budget because some essential features will require paid extensions, plugins, or themes. Seeking alternative WooCommerce plugins might be the turnaround you need.
5. User-friendliness and Customer Knowledge
After building the e-commerce store, you are likely to handle the management and running of the store for the customer. Will the customer be able to operate the e-commerce website in your absence? Woocommerce can be overwhelming for customers who have minimal to no technical expertise.
You have to consider your customers’ technical know-how and pick an e-commerce plugin that they can easily understand and play around with. The interface has to be user-friendly and support the kind of data that is best suitable for your customer business needs. This can make you seek WooCommerce alternatives that are simple to navigate.
6. Simplicity
Only some customers would want a full-fledged eCommerce website. Some will enjoy a simple online store just to handle their business. For example, an ebook seller might wish to have features other than variation swatches or complex checkout requiring billing and customer information to be collected separately. An alternative plugin specifically for digital products with a simplified checkout process might be the best option.
7. Scalability Concerns
WordPress customization is highly complex. Scaling WooCommerce or transferring the e-commerce store into a different framework can become a challenging and tedious task requiring significant skill and cost to adjust its customizations and optimization. It requires a deep understanding of WordPress, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and MySQL, and how they are interwoven in the framework to scale WooCommerce stores.
8. Support and Maintenance
WooCommerce and its complementary plugins, themes, and extensions are subject to regular updates.
Unfortunately, these updates, when deployed, can sometimes cause plugin conflicts and affect the website’s functionality, and resolving these conflicts can be a burden for those with technical know-how. Therefore, these e-commerce website owners will have to opt for paid ongoing maintenance and support from experts, which might only be feasible for some businesses.
Choosing a WooCommerce alternative with little to no need for complex complementary plugins and extensions becomes a cost-effective solution.
9. Integration
WooCommerce supports integration with tons of third-party services and tools, such as CRM, ERP, and enterprise-level platforms and systems. However, there are still some plugins, tools, and platforms that have yet to be integrated with WooCommerce.
Suppose you are building an e-commerce website that requires integration with third-party tools or plugins yet to be supported by WooCommerce. In that case, you have only one option other than seeking a WooCommerce alternative, which does.
How to Compare WooCommerce and Its Alternatives Online
To know the right plugin best suited to your customer’s needs, you have to compare the WooCommerce plugins hands-on, testing their strengths, functionalities, performance, and the extent of their capabilities if they align with your customer’s needs.
To compare WooCommerce alternatives, you can set up a remote sandbox environment with InstaWP.
Creating WordPress sandboxes or staging sites with InstaWP will save you a great deal in cost and provide you with a better perspective of how these ecommerce plugins work in a real-world scenario. The advantage of using InstaWP includes instant WordPress setup, zero hosting fees and hassles, and enough room for side-by-side comparison.
After testing and choosing the suitable WooCommerce alternative for your customers, InstaWP also simplifies the migration process for e-commerce developers. This allows them to effortlessly migrate the final product from the InstaWP staging environment to any live hosting and launch their customers’ eCommerce store faster.
Top WooCommerce Alternatives
Now that we have identified and justified the rationale for considering WooCommerce alternatives, let’s look at the best WooCommerce alternatives for e-commerce development.
1. Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)
Easy Digital Downloads is the most popular WooCommerce alternative for WordPress. As the name implies, the Easy Digital Downloads WordPress eCommerce plugin is created explicitly for selling digital and downloadable products, including eBooks, software, music, audiobooks, images, videos, and even WordPress templates, plugins code snippets, etc. EDD supports unlimited products and orders, order management, product reviews, and integrations with extensions, CRMs, and other plugins.
The Pro version supports content restrictions, software licensing, selling subscriptions, frontend submission, commissions, etc.
Key Features
- Support virtual products
- Quick and easy setup
- EDD-supported plugins and themes
- Unlimited products and discount codes
- Product variations and product bundles
- Full shopping cart
- Multiple payment gateways, including Stripe and PayPal
- Customer management
- Software licenses management
- Notifications and purchase receipt
- Sales reporting
2. WP EasyCart Shopping & eCommerce Store
WP EasyCart Shopping & eCommerce Store is a free WooCommerce alternative plugin for setting up an e-commerce store and shopping cart in WordPress. It can be used to sell retail physical products, subscriptions, digital downloadable products, gift cards, services, donations, etc.
With WP EasyCart, you can sell unlimited products, manage orders, set up shipping fees and taxes, and customize the store’s design. It supports multi-currency and comes with payment gateways, including Stripe, Square, and PayPal.
Key Features
- Support physical and digital products.
- Multi-currency and multiple payment options, including PayPal Express, Square, and Stripe.
- Basic shipping and tax setup.
- Unlimited products and order management.
- SEO and social sharing.
3. WP EasyCart Shopping & eCommerce Store
WP EasyCart Shopping & eCommerce Store is a free WooCommerce alternative plugin for setting up an e-commerce store and shopping cart in WordPress. It can be used to sell retail physical products, subscriptions, digital downloadable products, gift cards, services, donations, etc.
With WP EasyCart, you can sell unlimited products, manage orders, set up shipping fees and taxes, and customize the store’s design. It supports multi-currency and comes with payment gateways, including Stripe, Square, and PayPal.
Key Features
- Support physical and digital products
- Multi-currency and multiple payment options, including PayPal Express, Square, and Stripe
- Basic shipping and tax setup
- Unlimited products and order management
- SEO and social sharing
4. Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart
Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart is a great WooCommerce alternative for launching an online store in WordPress. It comes with unique features that are absent in WooCommerce. Ecwid is a multi-purpose eCommerce platform that supports selling on WordPress, Facebook, Amazon, POS, and various other channels.
Ecwid provides you with a fully customizable online store that is separate from the WordPress site and, therefore, has a separate dashboard for managing your online store. Your online store is fully hosted on Ecwid, and Ecwid takes care of its management and updates while providing you with unlimited storage, regular backups, seamless upgrades, and security updates. Ecwid also offers a free mobile app for Android and iOS devices to manage your store and sell without needing to use your laptop.
Ecwid has both free and paid plans, but the free plan is limited to 10 products with a basic eCommerce setup. If your clients need to sell more than ten products, they will have to be willing to opt for premium packages, or you will have to go for another WooCommerce alternative.
It is perfect for customers who have zero technical knowledge and little budget for regular site management.
Key Features
- Mobile store management app with support for POS station
- Free eCommerce management and updates
- Ability to sell on various social media and marketplaces
- Automatically synchronised eCommerce data with WordPress and other online storefronts
- Support multiple payment gateways
5. eCommerce Product Catalog Plugin for WordPress
The eCommerce Product Catalog plugin for WordPress is another WooCommerce alternative for launching simple product catalogues or online stores with or without payment support. You can add unlimited products with custom parameters and display products anywhere in the e-commerce store, with or without product prices or details.
It is the perfect e-commerce plugin for developing simple online stores that require customers to select products or services and request a quote.
Key Features
- Easy to use and best for users with zero coding skills
- Unlimited products
- Product design and custom colours
- Ability to set up preferred or custom currency
- Request a quote support
- Product attributes and custom fields
- Ability to turn off the e-commerce functionality to display products without a price
- Product shipping
- Templates for product listing and product page
6. HivePress Business Directory & Classified Ads Plugin
Classified ads are a part of e-commerce that we often overlook. However, while you may not be able to receive payments directly on classified ads, they can still be used for the selling of physical products and services.
HivePress Business Directory & Classified Ads plugin is the best WooCommerce alternative when it comes to real estate, classified ads, and marketplaces. You can list and sell brand new and used products on the classified ads marketplace with their title, description, images, and custom fields like prices, phone, etc. You can also give buyers the option to contact or meet up for the sales. Just like any e-commerce store, HivePress supports featured product listings and search filters.
Classified ads eCommerce storefronts are best suited for localized businesses, businesses that wish to sell real estate, properties, and land, and businesses that solely operate on pay-on-delivery or bank transfer payment models. It is also suitable for companies that prefer their customers to chat, send private messages, or call to order their products without needing a shopping cart.
HivePress is also an excellent choice for setting up marketplaces that allow third-party vendors to sell physical products, sell 2nd-hand goods, and sell/lease land or housing.
Key Features
- eCommerce without a shopping cart
- Unlimited products listing
- Selling of goods and services
- Multi-vendor support and user registration
- Custom listing fields
- Ratings and reviews
- Listing moderation
- Geolocation and radius search
- Email notifications and private messaging
- Easy-to-use page templates for listings
- Monetization via paid and featured listing
Conclusion
Selling on WordPress without WooCommerce is possible. There are WooCommerce alternatives that you can use in your e-commerce development business to launch online stores tailored to your customer’s specific needs. You can use InstaWP’s staging environment to create instant WordPress sandboxes to test, explore, and experiment with these WooCommerce alternatives and deliver pretty cool e-commerce websites for your customers.
