Best WordPress E-commerce Plugins for your Online Store in 2020
You might have heard of a very popular website builder that powers over 1/3rd of the top 10 million sites. WordPress began its journey in the year 2003 as a powerful blogging platform. At present, WordPress is the most popular CMS platform available online and is the first choice for many e-commerce businesses that are planning to start their online e-commerce store. However, WordPress alone doesn’t have any built-in feature required to power an online e-commerce store. But that doesn’t mean WordPress can’t be used to build your online store. There are thousands of e-commerce plugins currently available on WordPress, and choosing the right e-commerce plugin will help you to transform your website into a fully-functional e-commerce website. If you are one among the many who is looking to have an e-commerce website up and running, Webandcrafts can help you out. Visit our WordPress technology page to know more.
Before moving onto discussing WordPress plugin for e-commerce, let’s have a quick look at whether the demand for an e-commerce store will increase in the coming years?
According to a report by Statista, the worldwide e-retail revenues are expected to reach 6.54 trillion US dollars by 2022, with online shopping being the most popular. Nowadays, an e-commerce website has become a must needed one for many businesses. As more and more people are starting to switch to online shopping leaving behind the traditional brick and mortar stores, the number of e-commerce websites will also increase exponentially in the coming years. In short, in the coming years, we can see lots of businesses starting to make their online e-commerce store by making use of some of the plugins that we are going to list down.
What is a WordPress plugin, and how does it work?
There are many people out there who are still confused about how an e-commerce plugin can help us. Plugins are an essential part of the WordPress ecosystem, and you need those plugins to develop a powerful website. A WordPress plugin is simply an application or software that brings lots of new functionality and features to your site. These plugins run on top of the WordPress software, thereby allowing you to build any website with WordPress. E-commerce plugins are such kinds of plugins that offer you the right set of features needed to build an e-commerce website. Plugins can be of a different type, such as a small plugin that allows you to add only one feature to the site or a large plugin that acts as a platform.
It is important to choose the right WordPress plugin to create a highly interactive e-commerce site. Let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress plugins that can offer excellent website performance needed for your e-commerce business success.
Best WordPress plugin for your online e-commerce store
1. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most powerful and user-friendly free WordPress e-commerce plugin available. Woocommerce powers over 28% of all online e-commerce stores across the globe, with 6% of the top 1 million sites running on Woocommerce. Built on the most popular content management system and regularly audited by Sucuri, WooCommerce is one of the most secure e-commerce plugins. WooCommerce comes with a lot of extensions, thus bringing in new features to the website. It also has a great collection of themes which you can access easily using WooTheme store, thus allowing you to customize your online store. The plugin also supports multiple payment options such as PayPal, credit cards, bank transfers, and even cash on delivery(COD).
No e-commerce businesses would compromise on promotions and driving sales to their website. WooCommerce offers you the freedom to run many promotional campaigns, discount options, and even free shipping options for your customers. WooCommerce simple interface gives you the flexibility to categorize different products and fix their price, thus making it easy for a user who doesn’t have any technical knowledge. Among all the other e-commerce plugins, WooCommerce has a very less number of bugs, thus making it one of the most stable WordPress plugin.
2. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a hosted e-commerce plugin that allows seamless integration with the WordPress website. It comes with a few sets of customizable templates to help you in getting your website designed, after which you can start processing orders and selling products. Bigcommerce is a perfect solution for small and medium businesses that want their website customized like never before. BigCommerce was the first WordPress e-commerce plugin to integrate Google’s mobile-friendly initiative, Google AMP. AMP is focused on increasing the user experience by simplifying the category and product detail pages, thereby increasing site speed on mobile.
The BigCommerce platform powers some of the well-known e-commerce websites like those of Skullcandy, YETI, Natori, etc. Even though developers can tweak the HTML and CSS of the online store, the platform is aimed at people who are not having much web designing and development knowledge. Another feature of the BigCommerce platform is that they have lots of SEO tools that help in the much better search engine ranking for the online store. BigCommerce even allows your business to be integrated on Facebook, thus making use of Facebook for sales and marketing purposes.
3. Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)
EDD is a WordPress plugin for selling digital products such as eBooks, PDF files, music, and so on. Free to use, this plugin makes online selling of digital products look as easy and straightforward as possible. The free version of the Easy Digital Downloads plugin supports multiple payment methods such as PayPal Standard, Amazon Payments, Test Payment, and so on. With more than hundreds of extensions available such as Software Licensing, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Amazon S3, Zapier, and much more, you can add a massive set of features and customize your online store functionalities.
The built-in reporting platform of EDD helps you to get custom reports, stats, and much more. Advanced Reports, a reporting tool offers extended functionality by allowing you to create in-depth reports of your store’s activity. With the plugin, users can generate discount codes and coupons, thereby gaining customers’ attention and encouraging them to buy your products. All e-commerce businesses would like to have their store secure from unauthorized access of customers to their products. With the EDD plugin, only authorized customers can access your product files without the need for any additional configuration. You can even set the file download limit as well.
Cart abandonment is a huge issue faced by many e-commerce businesses. E-commerce stores all over the world are looking for solutions to combat shopping cart abandonment. Cart Recovery plugin is one such WordPress plugin for e-commerce businesses that can help you to track abandoned carts easily. You can view the stats in the WordPress dashboard and initiate automated cart recovery emails. Cart Recovery plugin works well with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Download, and WP e-commerce. The plugin also integrates easily with WordPress’WordPress’ GDPR compliance tools for data access and data removal requests.
All customer information, such as the customer’s name, the email address is captured as soon as they are entered. The plugin is available free of cost with a limited set of features, while the pro version offers more functionality to your online store. With the pro version, you can send multiple emails and can even choose when to send your emails. Another important feature that the pro version provides is, you can view the detailed history of individual carts and can also generate per-customer coupons that allow customers to make the purchase. Using the right card abandonment recovery plugin can help e-commerce stores to convert cart abandonments into sales successfully.
5. WP E-commerce
Considered as a direct alternative to WooCommerce, the WP e-commerce allows users to set up and manage their online store with ease. With the dashboard interface and pricing model, the plugin is somewhat similar to WooCommerce. WP e-commerce is one of the most powerful open-source solutions for e-commerce businesses where they can sell both physical and digital products online. With WP e-commerce, you can further customize your online store if you have the right skill set needed to make changes to the HTML and CSS files. The plugin also supports integration to various systems such as Google Analytics and Google Base, thus helping you in marketing your products.
A large number of inbuilt tools available in the WP e-commerce plugin allows you to add products to your catalog easily. Plugin integrated with a host of industry-leading payment gateways ensures a secure and protected transaction. You can also keep track of your sales and online store performance from the WordPress dashboard itself with the help of basic sales monitoring and reporting tools provided by the e-commerce plugin. WP e-commerce being the original WordPress e-commerce plugin, has a better support team as compared to other plugins. With quite a bit of add ons available, you can expand your store to some extent.
6. WP EasyCart
A free to use WordPress shopping cart plugin that can be installed into a new or an existing website. The plugin automatically creates three new pages for the shopping purpose; store, cart, and account. The free edition of WP EasyCart e-commerce plugin offers a certain set of features that helps store owners to manage orders and receive payments, utilize basic shipping and taxes. The professional and premium edition of the plugin adds much more functionality to the store, such as allowing additional payment processors, promotions, and other marketing facilities. Integrated email marketing, business tools are some of the extra features that come with the paid plan. With the business tool, you can connect with various platforms such as Mailchimp, Quickbooks, TaxCloud, etc.
The product editor allows you to edit and control every aspect of your product. The abandoned cart auto-recovery option provided by the plugin will enable you to automatically send reminders to customers who abandoned the cart without completing the order. Another amazing feature of the plugin is that it allows you to get real-time shipping rates from carriers based on the customer’s location and other parameters and displays it on the cart and checkout page.
WP Product Review is one of the best WordPress plugin available in the market for adding product reviews. With the plugin, you can choose how to display reviews on your website. This plugin will help you in turning your posts into smart reviews with ratings, pros and cons, and so on. The plugin will help you to interact with users more effectively, and you can even add a buy button in your post to drive more sales and generate money. All the plugin’s settings are fully customizable, and you can customize the colors to match that of the website.
Wrapping Up
After reading the blog, you might have got an idea about some of the best WordPress plugin available in the market for your e-commerce store right now. From WooCommerce to WP EasyCart, there are several WordPress plugins available that can help in transforming your site into a fully optimized e-commerce store. All these plugins will only help in increasing the functionality of your online e-commerce site and it doesn’t guarantee that you will start making a profit the moment you start using these plugins.
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