02 Dec
If you want to create an eCommerce store on your website in a natural way, then you must have to know about WordPress eCommerce plugins. But before proceeding further firstly let’s understand in short, what is meant by ecommerce? It is electronic commerce, i.e., buying and selling of goods over the internet. In simple words, it’s an online transaction (money transfer) between a supplier and a consumer.
These business transactions usually occur in four different forms, i.e., business to consumer (B2C), consumer to business (C2B), business to business (B2B) or consumer-to-consumer (C2C).
Over the last few years, the ecommerce industry has been growing at a rapid pace – thanks to the adoption of smartphones by the large scale of masses. Statista predicts that global retail ecommerce revenue will amount to $4.88 trillion by 2021. This means the industry will boom more in the coming years and more small payers will enter the domain.
Companies rely on ecommerce technology to run their business. technology like and there are a few popular ecommerce platforms that rule the world. WooCommerce platform in the major one occupying 32% of the ecommerce market, followed by Magento (18%), OpenCart (11%), and Shopify (8%).
WordPress doesn’t come with built-in ecommerce functionality, therefore, you need to install WordPress plugins. To add everything like product showcase pages, shopping cart or payment processing functionalities and so on. Although there are plenty of different WordPress ecommerce plugins available in the market how you can pick the best one that suits your business requirement.
Sometimes it becomes a quite complicated task for you to choose the right one. Now you don’t have to bother at all because here are five best ecommerce plugins for WordPress that are great options to go for your business needs.
Table of Contents
WooCommerce
It is one of the well known WordPress ecommerce plugins with 10 million+ downloads. The WooCommerce is beneficial for your business in several aspects.
Why WoCommerce
- There is a large collection of add-ons and themes available for WooCommerce hence you have tons of alternatives when selecting your website design and layout. That’s how it becomes simple for you to add new features to your ecommerce website.
- WooCommerce by default tools allows you to manage overall inventory or even allocate it to a store manager.
- With the help of WooCommerce, you can avail of a better experience to customers by adding affiliate or external products to your website.
- It includes both physical and digital goods, i.e., you can sell physical as well as digital items, for example, clothing, electronics, MP3s, software, eBooks and so on.
- You can get support for popular payment gateways, add many other payment options via extensions as well as calculate shipping or taxes.
- It provides excellent documentation not only there is a help desk, knowledge base, and user-friendly developers community.
- You can download it for free from the WordPress repository and meant to use for all level users, i.e. beginner to advanced.
Cart 66 Cloud
The Cart 66 Cloud plugin comes in both free and premium versions. However, most of the ecommerce stores required a premium to access more features. For the premium version, you need to pay 49$ month to avail of complete built-in functionalities.
Here the ‘Cloud ‘part of the name showcases to the fact that the plugin links your website to the Cart 66 Cloud. And by connecting to this you can get access to all of the SSL certificates, data encryption, security scans, or payment gateways making your online store PCI compliant.
Why Cart 66
Some key points are given as follows which will differentiate Cart 66 Cloud from other plugins.
- You still require your hosting. It’s trouble-free to configure and receive positive reviews most of the time.
- It is the perfect choice for regular people who don’t want to muddle with add-ons that is the only strong reason that most of the beginners consider Cart66 over WooCommerce.
- The email marketing via Cart 66 is stronger than few competitors because it includes tools for drip campaigns, list segmentation or timed follow-up emails all using your WordPress dashboard.
- It provides 100 plus default payment gateways without any need to install add-ons.
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)
The EDD plugin is especially design for managing and selling digital products on WordPress for example –soliloquyWP, WPForms. It’s a lightweight plugin that covers more necessary features that are required to sell digital products easily.
It has hundreds of themes and extensions library that’s how you can create a highly developed digital store, unique integrations for things like email marketing as well as awesome documentation.
You can use free (primary plugin)/premium version and have free tutorials, videos, support forums or even an IRC chatroom. And there is also a priority support choice for premium users.
The major feature comprises of the full shopping cart, discount codes, customer management as well as data reporting. It also includes gears for affiliate systems, refund tracking and so on.
WP eCommerce
It is the oldest WordPress eCommerce plugin developed in 2006 and regularly seen as a direct substitute to WooCommerce. The primary reason is that WP ecommerce is set up parallel to WooCommerce, with a dashboard interface as well as the pricing model. The core plugin part is available for free, and the premium version also is known as a gold cart extension price of $99 for a single site.
The WP eCommerce comes with a wide range of unique features like premium payment gateways, live search and grid view for product galleries. The main benefit of WP eCommerce is that table rate shipping, and cross-selling/up-selling functionality is integrated into the core. Not even this you can also find bulk discounts and able to enlarge your store a little bit with the add-ons.
Ecwid
It is a flexible ecommerce plugin being able to incorporate with the majority of site builders and content management systems including Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, etc. In Ecwid plugin, customization happens automatically in comparison to other WordPress plugins having a manual upgrade.
The other good thing is that it gives a free plan for up to 10 products plus free customization’s/ priority support in some plans. The Ecwid plugin hosts the stores that’s why it’s PCI-DCC Certified and completely secure for making ecommerce transactions.
However, for most of the other plugins, you required to attain PCI compliance from your hosting provider. By installing the Ecwid plugin on your site, you can able to transfer the entire saved data to a different site and synced so that selling occurs on multiple fronts.
