Do you want to create an eCommerce store on your WordPress website? Are you looking for the best WordPress eCommerce plugins? In this article, we’re going to share the best WordPress plugins you need to build your online store from the ground up.

WordPress is the most popular content management system platform. There are lots of plugins to create store and tons of plugins to boost your sales, marketing, and customer support efforts.

There are more than 55,000 plugins to sort through to try to find the right ones. You don’t have enough time for that, you’ve got an empire to build.

Things You Need to Run an eCommerce Store

• Domain & Hosting
• Ecommerce Plugin
• Email Marketing Solution
• Sales Boosting Tools
• SEO

Domain and Hosting

eCommerce websites are resource-intensive, so the first thing you will need is the best WordPress hosting.

If you’re on a budget, then you can start with Kinsta. The eCommerce plan comes with SSL Certificate which you need to collect payments securely, dedicated IP, and a dedicated support line.

If budget is not an issue, and you want the best performance, then we recommend using a managed WordPress hosting provider like FlyWheel.

Next, you will need to choose a perfect domain name for your website. Here is our guide on how to choose the perfect domain name for your eCommerce site.

Lastly, you will need to choose essential business plugins (we have described here) which helps you reduce shopping cart abandonment and increase sales.

WordPress eCommerce Plugins: How to Choose the Right One

Since the eCommerce industry is booming nowadays, you’ll get dozens of different WordPress eCommerce plugins that let you easily add a store to your WordPress website.

Choosing the right eCommerce plugin for your needs is very important for your business because it’s hard to back out from your original decision if it turns out to be a poor match.

Let’s take a look at some factors you need to consider for choosing the right WordPress eCommerce plugin.

1. Ease of use

Whether you want to add a product, create a coupon code, or do any other task, an easy-to-use interface makes it very easy and simple. That way you can save time in your WordPress dashboard figuring out how to do it.

2. Support

Before choosing an eCommerce platform, you’ll need to double-check whether the plugin’s been constantly updated and maintained.

3. Addon availability

It’s in your best interest to choose an eCommerce plugin that has a wide range of addons / supported plugins.

4. Overhead costs

WordPress is so flexible that it allows you to integrate a self-hosted eCommerce platform into your WordPress site.

A self-hosted platform might be a good choice for you if you don’t want to spend resources on optimizing your WordPress eCommerce store. In other words, a hosted platform may help reduce overhead costs.

Best WordPress eCommerce Plugins

WordPress eCommerce Plugins to Build a Single Online Store

1. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a powerful WordPress eCommerce plugin that is full of FREE. It’s powered by more than 30% of all online stores and offers incredible flexibility and customizability.

With just a few clicks, you can create a beautiful WooCommerce store.

Key Features of WooCommerce:

• Thousands of extensions and themes, making it easy for you to add new features to your eCommerce store
• Supports physical products as well as digital downloads products
• It is possible for affiliate marketers to add affiliate or external products to your site, providing users a better experience
• Easy to manage inventory 
• Built-in support for popular payment gateways. You can also add many other payment options using extensions
• Automatically calculate taxes, shipping costs, and other related expenses
• Excellent support including documentation, online help desk, and community forums

The main drawback of WooCommerce is its scalability. As your store gets larger, you’ll need to move to a managed hosting provider to scale your eCommerce store.

2. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another SaaS eCommerce solution that’s specifically designed to help businesses with online sales. You can create stores like Skullcandy, Ben & Jerry’s, CamelBak, and other super well-known online stores.

BigCommerce is a cloud-hosted platform and offers seamless integration with your WordPress website. This platform offers awesome scalability, enterprise-grade security, and high performance.

Key Features of BigCommerce:

• You can sell your products on other channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon
• Support top payment gateways and only pay the payment service provider (no transaction charges)
• Comes with 80+ predesigned, responsive templates to help you design the best store
• Social sharing for products & purchases
• Dropshipping management

The drawbacks of BigCommerce are:

• If you look at the Pricing page closely, you’ll notice there’s a row detailing limits for how much annual revenue each plan is given.
• The themes are also very expensive to startup with.

3. Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads is another WordPress eCommerce plugin that comes with all the features you need to sell digital products without hassle.

You can sell digital products with other eCommerce plugins, but they come bundled with many features for selling physical products that you’ll never need if you sell only digital goods. Easy Digital Downloads plugin doesn’t do that.

Key Features:

• Hundreds of extensions available for everything from payment gateways to email marketing platforms
• Works with almost any WordPress theme, but also has specific built-in themes
• Templates
• Data Security
• Inventory Management
• Mobile Optimization

The main drawbacks are:

• You have to pay for the payment gateway add-ons.
• It’s not possible to make the integration outside of WordPress.

4. WP eCommerce

WP eCommerce is another open-source eCommerce platform that is filled with WordPress plugin options. It has frequently been seen as a direct alternative to WooCommerce. The main reason for this is because the plugin set up very similar to WooCommerce, including the dashboard interface and the pricing model.

First, you have to install WordPress on your hosting server and then followed by the WP eCommerce plugin. It looks like a regular WordPress dashboard, so you can add products, run promotions, create categories, and more.

Key Features of WP eCommerce:

WP eCommerce has almost all the features you want.

• Easily add products to your products catalog.
• Integrate with many popular WordPress plugins
• Possible to monitor sales and reporting.
• Use built-in marketing tools to sell more.
• Manage orders and catalogs with powerful built-in tools.
• Configure taxes and shipping zone.
• Support all payment gateways.

The main drawbacks are:

• There is no documentation, no support, and no clear code.
• Braintree requires xmlwriter error.

5. Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart

The Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping cart is an excellent WordPress plugin to set up a store that looks like WooCommerce. The main difference is that Ecwid can be used on any website you’d like. If you have a Drupal site, you can use Ecwid to launch an online eCommerce store. The same goes for Tumblr, Facebook, WordPress, and many more.

Key Features of Ecwid:

• Seamless Shopping Experience
• Easy Checkout
• Customer Address Book
• Language Detection
• Save Favorite Products
• Smart Shipping Calculator
• Track Inventory
• Sell Digital Goods

The main drawbacks are:

• Very restrictive design choices, making customization difficult.
• Very basic and limited tools on the free plan; for example, no access to the app market.

6. Cart66 Cloud

Cart66 Cloud is an easy and perfect plugin for many types of online WordPress stores. You can sell actual products with shipping options, offer memberships and subscriptions with recurring billing, or sell digital products available for immediate download after purchase. Cart66 Cloud does it all without a need for a single upgrade or extension.

Key Features of Cart66 Cloud:

• Support for 50 payment gateways
• Recurring billing options
• Membership & subscriptions
• Support for 7500 subscribers
• Customer accounts
• Customer purchase history
• Follow-up emails
• PCI compliance
• Security

The main drawback is, Cart66 is less extensible with the secure connected services and no third-party marketplace of add-ons.

7. WP EasyCart

WP EasyCart is a streamlined shopping cart plugin that slickly integrates with your WordPress website.

You can get started with the free version of this plugin which lets you set up your website with unlimited orders, products, and Paypal payment method. However, if you are looking for more control and want to add more payment methods, you can always choose the professional and premium solution.

Key Features of WP EasyCart:

• Supports almost all of the most popular payment services.
• Offers tiered pricing, B2B pricing, featured products, and more.
• Supports global shipping.
• Includes marketing and coupon tools.
• Integrates c-commerce conversion tracking.
• Offers social sharing options.

The main drawback is there is no easy way of doing this with WP Easycart when using Elementor. Additionally, editing products seemed very daunting with a lot of scrolling and clicking just to change/update the most minimal thing. 

WordPress eCommerce Plugins to Build a Multi-vendor marketplace

Dokan

Dokan is a commonly used multi-vendor WordPress eCommerce plugin that leveraging the power of WooCommerce. It is the best plugin to built the multi-vendor marketplace like Amazon or eBay.

Till now, Dokan has created more than 40,000+ online marketplaces worldwide and has downloaded more than 608,000 times.

With Dokan every seller will get a unique URL for their store to manage products and orders from the front-end site.

As a site owner, you will get a commission from each sale. This is the platform where both the seller and site owner will earn money. The main advantage of Dokan is it supports PayPal, PayPal Adaptive, Stripe, Bank Cheque, and Cash on delivery.

Key Features of Dokan:

• Free extensions to customize a website like Product duplicator, PDF invoice, WPML integration, WP vendors migrator
• Free WP User Frontend to make the site more user-friendly and secure.
• Support all payment gateways.
• Add unlimited products and corresponding product images.
• Selling option of both digital and physical products.
• You can add affiliated products directly to your store
• Multiple shipping options (including free shipping)
• Support multiple currencies.

Grow Your Email List with WordPress eCommerce Plugins

These plugins are considered all times heavyweights in this category. Take a look at each to see which plugins have features that fulfill your business.

1. OptinMonster

OptinMonster started out as a WordPress plugin but is now a full-on software. They are providing cloud-based service that opens up new opportunities. For starters, you can use this software on sites outside of WordPress. You can also do all your forms from within the software.

They offer awesome tools for publishers, eCommerce, agencies, and B2B. No matter what business you do. OptinMonster has a solution for you that will help you increase sales, get more subscribers, and convert more of your web traffic into customers.

With their drag and drop campaign builder, you can easily create beautiful, effective, high-converting, mobile-friendly options in minutes.

The Key Features are:

• A/B split testing
• Sidebar forms
• Floating bar
• Content locking
• Yes/no forms
• Slide-in scroll trigger boxes
• Full-screen takeovers
• Campaign scheduling
• Drag-and-drop form builder
• Reporting & statistics
• Animated effects

2. WP Subscribe Pro

WP Subscribe Pro is the solution of MyThemeShop for capturing user email addresses. It supports Feedburner, MailChimp, GetResponse, Aweber, and more email marketing companies. You can set up any of these subscription services from the setting page.

Key Features of WP Subscribe Pro:

• Unlimited Subscription Forms
• 30+ Pre Designed Form Templates
• Popup Forms with Delay
• Mailchimp and Constant Contact integrated
• Email Configurations 
• Enable disable each form components 
• Ajax Form Submission
• Subscribers CSV Export 
• Translation Ready

WordPress eCommerce Plugins to Increase Sales

1. TrustPulse

Adding social proof to your store promotes trust on your site, which helps you drive more sales. With TrustPulse, you can instantly boost conversions on your eCommerce site by leveraging social proof.

70% of your website visitors leave your site thinking you are not trusted. TrustPulse helps you convert that 70 % into customers by showing them what others do on your site and thus promoting trust.

Key Features of TrustPulse:

• Incredibly Easy Setup Process
• Useful Analytics to Help You Boost Conversions 
• Easily Customized Notifications
• Smart Targeting
• Works seamlessly with all popular website platforms
• Top-Rated Support Team 

2. WP Product Review Lite

WP Product Review Lite is the best WordPress plugin for eCommerce on the market for product reviews. You can easily add a product review and manage and display reviews on your website.

It allows you to change the color of some elements, including the ratings as well as the pros and cons list.

If you want to take advanced features such as integrating with Amazon, creating a comparison table, or uploading custom review icons, you need to pay for the premium version which starts from $59/year.

Key Features of WP Product Review Lite:

• Add specific user review options to WordPress comments
• Create a top products review widget
• Add a download button in the posts
• Easily update all the colors of the widget from theme options
• Add rich snippet ( schema ) to your posts

WordPress eCommerce Plugins For SEO

1. SEMrush

SEMrush is a complete marketing toolkit for SEO professionals. It not only helps you keep track of how well your own site is doing but also what your competitors are doing. With SEMrush, you can set up side-by-side domain comparisons, conduct competitive analysis, and create up to 50 target keyword lists.

Key Features of SEMrush:

• Organic Research 
• Advertising Research 
• Display Advertising Tool 
• Audience Insights 
• Backlinks 
• KW research
• Product Listing Ads 
• Traffic Analysis

2. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin available on the market. It helps you ensure that your website content is SEO-driven, helping you increase traffic and earnings on your eCommerce site. 

It lets you easily add SEO titles and meta descriptions to all posts and pages on your website. You can also use this to add Open Graph metadata and social media images to your articles.

Key Features of Yoast SEO:

• Content and SEO analysis
• Paragraph structure
• The snippet preview shows you how your post or page will look in the search results
• Keyword density
• Cornerstone content and internal linking features help you optimize your site structure
• Social sharing

Which is the Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin?

Choosing the best WordPress eCommerce plugin is tricky and it all depends on your personal requirements.

From a WordPress point of view, WooCommerce is the best WordPress eCommerce plugin if you want to sell physical goods on your website. Integrating a WooCommerce storefront with your existing WordPress site is easier than any other solution.

However, Dokan is easier to get started with a multi-vendor marketplace. It is completely hassle-free from scalability and security points of view. They also offer 24/7 support which makes them more reliable than a native WordPress eCommerce plugin like WooCommerce.