Are you looking to build an amazing online store with WordPress eCommerce Plugins? You have your SaaS (software as a service) platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, along with the powerful WordPress eCommerce plugins. Both provide advantages, but there’s nothing quite like being able to turn your current WordPress site into a fully functional amazing online store.
Choosing the right eCommerce plugin is vital for your eCommerce business because a better platform means more opportunity for growth. Often users end up losing money because they didn’t do proper research when choosing the right eCommerce platform to start their store.
In this article, we will discuss about the best WordPress eCommerce plugins. We will also explain their pros and cons to help you to find which eCommerce plugin is right for your business.
What to Look for in a WordPress eCommerce Plugin for Your Online Store?
There are plenty of WordPress eCommerce plugins available in the market. But not all of them have the right set of features to meet your requirement.
For example, some WordPress eCommerce plugins are made for selling digital goods like eBooks, photos, music, etc. Whereas, others are suited for selling physical products that require shipping.
If you want to run a drop-shipping business, then you’ll need an eCommerce solution that provides perfect support for drop-shipping.
Basically, you need to consider what you are going to sell and what kind of features you would need to efficiently run your online store.
Apart from the above, following are some of the most important factors you need to focus on when choosing an eCommerce platform.
- Payment solutions – Your eCommerce plugin should support your preferred payment gateways by default or by using an extension.
- Design and customization – Your store’s design is the first interaction with your customer. Make sure that there are plenty of templates and easy customization options are available
- Apps and integrations – Check out the availability of integrations for third-party apps like email marketing services, CRM software, accounting software, etc. You’ll need those tools to manage and grow your eCommerce business more efficiently.
- Support options – Make sure that there are 24×7 support options available. Good support can save you time and a lot of money in the long run.
Why Start A WordPress eCommerce Store?
WordPress has many benefits for eCommerce business.
Best For Content And Commerce Mix
More and more brands are moving to content because quality content is the most successive way to get customers. On WordPress, you will get the best of both worlds of content and commerce.
Other eCommerce platforms mostly have the eCommerce side doing marvelously but the content side having one or two hold-up.
With WordPress, you will get great content management and eCommerce. When it comes to CMS, WordPress rules leading other CMS at about 60% of the market share. When it comes to eCommerce, it also tops. More online stores are on a WordPress plugin than any other platform are.
It’s ideal for double-dipping an affiliate online store and a product site in one place. You don’t have to separate both parts of your eCommerce business if you’re into private/white labeling and affiliate marketing.
Highest Rating For SEO
If SEO is a priority for you, start your eCommerce business with WordPress. It is the best for SEO also. WordPress is the best for SEO tools and average organic traffic.
The native WordPress out of the box has some SEO tools and there are many plugins available to accelerate that.
Cost Effective
Depending on your budget, you could be spending less than you would on other platforms in the long run.
All the plugins below will give you the ability to add a shopping cart element to your WordPress eCommerce site. If you want more advanced functionalities, you can combine other compatible plugins with them to transform your eCommerce website.
What Do You Need to Run an eCommerce Online Store?
eCommerce online stores are resource intensive, so the first thing you will need is the best WordPress web hosting provider that you can afford.
If you’ve budget, then you can start with Bluehost. The eCommerce plan comes with SSL Certificate which you need to collect payments securely and safely.
If budget is not a big issue, and you want the best performance, then you can use and managed WordPress hosting provider.
Next, you have to choose a domain name for your website.
A Shortlist of the Best WordPress eCommerce Plugins
We would assume that most serious businesses plan on testing and comparing eCommerce plugins until they find the right ones. We have a full evaluation of each of the best WordPress eCommerce plugins below. That said, if you’re in a hurry, or would like to start testing out the eCommerce plugins yourself, here’s a quick list of your best choice.
Review of the Best WordPress eCommerce Plugins for eCommerce sites
When taking a look at the WordPress eCommerce plugins, we wanted to figure out which eCommerce plugins covered the features as outlined above. After that, it was essential to figure out which features of these plugins stand out compared to the others. You’ll find that some of the eCommerce plugins have more features in general, while others are better for simple and clean stores.
After the individual analysis of each WordPress eCommerce plugin, we’ll give you a full recommendation on which plugins you should choose on based on your specific situation.
1. WooCommerce – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin for website
WooCommerce is the king of WordPress eCommerce plugins. Released in 2011, it is now holding more than 28% eCommerce stores.
There are many premium features available to customize your store and also lots of design flexibility.
There are lots of add-on and themes available for WooCommerce. They also have a passionate dedicated developer community behind it. Recently several hosting companies have started creating specialized WooCommerce hosting plans.
Pros of WooCommerce
Here are some of the pros of WooCommerce eCommerce as your WordPress eCommerce plugin:
Plugins and Themes – There are hundreds of plugins and themes available for WooCommerce, which makes it easy for you to add new features to your eCommerce site. Large collection of themes means you have lots of options when choosing your site’s design and layout. It support all best WordPress eCommerce themes.
Supports Both Digital and Physical Goods – With WooCommerce, you can sell both physical and digital products (such as eBooks, music, software, and more).
Sell Affiliate or External Products – With WooCommerce, you can add affiliate or external products to your site. Affiliate marketers can create a product sites and provide users a better experience.
Complete Inventory Management – WooCommerce equipped with tools to easily manage your inventory or even assign it to a store manager.
Payment and Shipping Options – WooCommerce has built-in popular payment gateways, and you can add many other payment options using plugins. It can also calculate shipping rates and taxes.
Support and Documentation – There is excellent online documentation available for WooCommerce. Apart from online documentation, there is knowledge base, help desk, and community forums available.
Cons of WooCommerce
Too Many Options – WooCommerce is very easy to use, but the number of options available on the settings page can be quite overawing for a new user.
Finding Addons – There are lots of addons available for WooCommerce, sometimes a user may not find the right one for features that they need.
Theme Support – WooCommerce support any WordPress theme, but it is not always as easy to setup or good looking with all themes. You may need a WooCommerce ready theme to take full advantage of its features without too much hassle.
Scalability – As your store grows, you will need to move to a managed hosting provider to scale your WooCommerce store.
WooCommerce is the perfect solution for any kind of eCommerce website. It has a large developers community and users, a lot of add-on and themes, excellent support for multilingual websites, and best free and paid support options.
2. Dokan – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin
Dokan plugin is the most popular marketplace solution for WordPress. It lets entrepreneur to create and manage their own online marketplace that caters to multiple vendors from around the world. Dokan has a separate dashboard for admins and vendors which is the best feature of this solution.
According to a statistics Dokan is becoming the tough competitor to the autonomous marketplaces like Magento, BigCommerce, Shopify etc.
With Dokan, users give online vendors a space on the internet where they can set up and run their own store, manage all aspects of their operations, and grow their business. It is the ideal plugin to built the multi-vendor marketplace like Amazon or eBay.
It comes with an intuitive front end that even vendors with limited to no e-commerce experience can create their own store and sell immediately. Vendors can leverage the power of professionally crafted storefront, ensuring their customers have the best marketplace experience whenever they visit.
Dokan is compatible with over a hundred WooCommerce themes, making it easy for online vendors to set up their store without having to start from scratch.
Till now, Dokan has created more than 10,000+ online marketplaces world-wide and has downloaded more than 173,000 times.
Download Dokan from here.
Pros of Dokan
POWERFUL USER-FRIENDLY DASHBOARD
Dokan has the full WooCommerce options to frontend. Sellers can manage almost everything without touching WordPress backend. From editing their profile information to manage products, orders and all other features, vendors can do it directly from the frontend dashboard.
VENDOR-ADMIN FACILITY
With Dokan vendors can:
- Upload products according to their requirement.
- Dokan has quick editing option.
- Vendors can run their own offers. They can also add blogs and reviews.
- But admins has got the ultimate power.
ADVANCED PRODUCT OPTIONS
With Dokan seller can customize advanced product options such as product variations, stock, discounted price, scheduling of discount, SKU, limit quantity per order, allow/disallow back orders, image gallery etc..
VIEW ORDERS/UPDATE ORDER STATUS
In Dokan, sellers can view all orders, filter orders by date or order status. They can update order status (such as processing, pending, shipped etc..)
PERCENTAGE BASED CUSTOM COMMISSION SYSTEM
As admin you can set custom commission per sale, based on percentage system. You can add a specific commission for a specific seller.
CUSTOM COUPONS FOR SELLERS
Dokan makes things easier by incorporating the coupon system for WooCommerce into frontend and sellers can feel free to create their own custom coupons.
SELLER VERIFICATION ADD-ON
In Dokan, there is seller verification add-on. Seller verification add-on adds the verification option to your website. If you want to make your website more reliable, you can add a verification system. Verification add-on adds photo ID upload, phone verification and social media sites account verification like Twitter, Facebook.
FUND WITHDRAWAL OPTIONS
Dokan has PayPal and Skrill as withdrawal options. There are also PayPal adaptive and Stripe options but as paid options.
CUSTOM STORE OPTIONS
Sellers can add custom banner to their web store pages, contact form, social media links, Google map etc..
VACATION MODE FOR SELLERS
Vacation mode for sellers is one of the most important features for a marketplace. If seller wants to pause their store for some times, they can put their store on hold for a certain period of time. Vacation mode will avoid unwanted orders and their unfortunate cancellation after order placement. This mode helps sellers avoid negative customers feedback.
SELLERS CAN EDIT CUSTOMER REVIEWS
As a site admin you can enable customer review options. After enabling this option sellers can manage their customer reviews.
SUPPORT SYSTEM
Support system is available in Dokan as add-on. If site admin enable this add-on, sellers will have a support button on their web store page. Customers can generate support tickets which in turn should be be handled by sellers.
TAX OPTIONS
Dokan sellers now have options to customize tax on their own.
Cons of Dokan
1.Missing invoice functionality. It should be possible for marketplace owners to automatically issue an invoice to sellers as soon as order is defined as completed.
2. There are no options to enable/disable vendor features based on membership levels. You can only distinguish one subscription level from another by how many products you add.
3. Bug updates sometime takes longer then expected to resolve. Especially on simple features request or bug update request.
3. Easy Digital Downloads – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin
Easy Digital Downloads offers a simple, intuitive plugin for managing and selling digital products on WordPress. WooCommerce has this support, but this has more features focused on digital sales, and the interface is much cleaner. So, if you’re only selling digital products like eBooks, PDF files, or audio clips, you should seriously consider it over any of the other WordPress eCommerce plugins. One of the reasons for it’s success is because the core plugin is free. You need to install it on your website and immediately have a digital sales platform, with features for discount codes, file access control, and activity tracking.
Pros of Easy Digital Downloads
Designed To Sell Digital Goods – Easy Digital Downloads is built from the ground to sell digital downloads. Unlike other eCommerce plugins that can be used to sell all kind of products, EDD provides a far better experience for selling digital goods.
Easy To Use – It is very easy to use, from the start you would instantly figure out how to add products and display them. This is really useful for the beginners.
Plugins – There are lots of plugins available for Easy Digital Downloads including add-on for payment gateways, marketing platforms and services.
Themes – It works with almost any WordPress theme, however if you have not chosen a theme yet, then it has themes built specifically for the plugin.
Awesome Support – The plugin is well documented, and you have free support forums, videos, tutorials, and even an IRC chatroom. There is also a priority support available for premium users.
Cons of Using Easy Digital Downloads
Digital Downloads Only – As the name suggests, this makes it easier to create eCommerce sites for digital goods. But if you want to sell non-digital products along with digital downloads then it will become quite complicated.
Selling External Products – If you want to add an external product or an affiliate product to your online store, then you will have to install a third-party add on for it.
4. Ecwid – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugins
Ecwid WordPress plugin boasts excellent ratings and a setup that looks like WooCommerce but is actually quite different. One of the main differences is that it can be used on any website you’d like. If you have a Drupal site, you can use Ecwid to launch an amazing online store. The same goes for Tumblr, Facebook, WordPress, and more.
Alternatively, WooCommerce is only a WordPress eCommerce plugin. It’s a good one, but you’re limited to that one content management system(CMS). Not only that, but the core plugin is completely free and you’re getting more built-in features as opposed to a library of add-on.
Pros of Ecwid
- Built-in real-time shipping rates.
- Multi-channel selling available
- Free plan for simple stores
- Support Google Shopping
- Social media tools
- Abandoned cart saver
Cons of Ecwid
- Phone support is only available on top-tier plans
- Free plan has some limitations
- Limited number of plugins
5. Cart66 – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin
Cart66 cloud has built its plugin on being a smart platform for all types of people. It tries to minimize the number of apps you need to get the plugin to fulfill your need. As a result, you will get a lots of built-in features.
You can sell physical and digital products, accept donations, and sell memberships as well. It also has a recurring billing feature to sell subscriptions. For those who want to sell online courses, you’ll enjoy the content restriction of selling feature. With that, you allow access to higher modules in your course to customers as long as they have paid more.
It has inventory management, tax calculation, and integrates with Google eCommerce analytics and support over 100 payment gateways.
For shipping, you can either set your rates or use real-time shipping option. It integrates with many third-party logistics including FedEx and USPS. However, to avail this feature, you need an EasyPost account.
The plugin is free, but you’ll get more features from the premium version at a cost of $99/year. Some of those features like automation like drip emails and coupons. You can create segmented email lists and set timed follow-up emails from the dashboard without having to use an plugin.
Pros of Cart66
- Many features built-in for free
- Excellent value for digital products
- Great customer support
Cons of Cart66
- No extension store for features not built-in
- It seems to be on its way out
6. WP Ecommerce – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin
WP eCommerce is a free plugin that has marketing automation out of the box.
It has features for cross-selling products. This plugin can help you boost sales without much effort.
You can also set discount at certain quantities, give advanced coupon options like time-based coupons and so on.
Advanced shipping is also packaged with WP eCommerce. You can set your own shipping rates or get the real-time rates from UPS and USPS. Some other shipping providers like FedEx are not included out of the box. To avail that you’ll have to get a paid extension. It will costs $99.
The basic plugin is free, but there’s a premium version available – the Gold Cart Extension will cost $99. It has the addition of grid view for products and live product search. There’s an plugin store as well to expand your store, but it’s very limited.
Pros of WP eCommerce
- Marketing automation just out of the box
- Real-time shipping rates from some providers
- No transaction fees and multiple processors
Cons of WP Ecommerce
- Issues with support
- Hardly updated
- Limited plugin store
7. WP Easycart – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin
WP Easycart supports, physical, digital downloads, donations, services, subscriptions, and gift cards.
Some amazing features are like abandoned cart recovery and real-time shipping rates. Another positive site is that it’s easy to use so small business owners can set up whatever they want without a developer.
There’s a free version, but marketing options isn’t included with it, and you pay a 2% fee on integrating Square, Paypal, and Stripe. You could also go for the middle plan at $69 per year. While that’s better than the free plan, you’ll be limited from integrated email marketing, connecting affiliates, and the business tools. Those may not matter to you though.
Pros of WP Easy Cart
- Abandoned cart auto recovery option
- Works with different business models
- Marketing and business tools are available
Cons of WP Easy Cart
- 2% application fee for each payment gateways
- No up-sell/cross-sell
8. BigCommerce – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin
BigCommerce is a fully self hosted eCommerce platform that offers seamless integration with WordPress. This allows you to use a scalable eCommerce platform while using WordPress to manage your content and run your online store.
It has a powerful integration plugin for WordPress that makes it very easy to embed your products. It automatically creates the sign in, shopping cart, user account, and other important pages for you.
Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of using BigCommerce as your WordPress eCommerce platform.
Pros of BigCommerce
- High scalability – It includes all the features you will require with enterprise grade security, high performance, and easy scalability.
- Less Maintainence – Keeping your eCommerce store separate from other content makes it easier to run your WordPress eCommerce site.
- Sell across Multiple Channels – You can use it to sell not only on your own store but also on other channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon.
- No transaction charges – Unlike some other popular eCommerce platforms, it does not charge you on each transaction. You can choose from lots of top payment gateways and only pay the payment service provider.
Cons of BigCommerce
- Limited Integrations – BigCommerce integrates with all the top third-party tools.
- No Mobile App – Currently, it does not have a mobile app to manage your online store on the go.
9. Shopify Lite – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin
Shopify is the fastest growing eCommerce platform that handles everything for you. It isn’t a plugin but it’s an all in one solution that’s completely hassle free.
Let’s look at some of the Pros and Cons of Shopify.
Pros of Shopify
Super Easy for Beginners – No need to worry about the technical aspects of an eCommerce online store such as setting up SSL, integrating with different payment gateways, handling shipping, worrying about taxes rates, etc. Shopify handles all by default.
Supports Both Digital and Physical Goods – Whether you’re selling physical goods like any type of cloths or digital downloads like eBooks or music, Shopify can manage all.
Complete Inventory Management – Shopify comes with an built-in inventory editor and bulk importer combined with an order tracker which makes managing inventory a gentle breeze.
Payment and Shipping Options – Shopify makes it easy for you to accept all credit card both online and in person. Their shipping system streamline your fulfillment process with direct integration with popular shipping providers like USPS.
Facebook Store or create buyable pins on Pinterest – Shopify integrates your store with everything. Whether you want to create a Facebook store or create buyable Pins on Pinterest, you can do all with Shopify.
Cons of Shopify
Monthly Platform Fee – Shopify charges you a monthly fee to use their eCommerce platform which is comparable to purchase hosting and individual add-on using the other plugins in this list.
Shopify Payments – Shopify encourages you to use their payment gateways which is powered by Stripe and is a very good option for beginners. However if you want to over-complicate things and use external systems, then Shopify charges you an additional fee.
Conclusion – The Best WordPress eCommerce Plugins
If you want maximum control, flexibility, and features, then WooCommerce is the best solution for you to build an amazing online store.
If you don’t want to manage all the technical stuff, then Dokan is the best option for you. It allows you to use a SaaS eCommerce platform with WordPress as your content management system.
If you are also just want to sell digital or physical products, then Dokan is also the best option for you.
