WooCommerce Alternatives for WordPress (and non-WordPress)

WooCommerce is a powerful WordPress plugin, and used more than most other ecommerce solutions in the market. However, maybe you’re looking for more ecommerce options for your online shop than WooCommerce. That’s okay, because in this article, you’ll learn about WooCommerce alternatives for WordPress.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a popular and very robust ecommerce plugin for WordPress. It is not to be confused as a separate entity from WordPress, but an ecommerce extension of the content management system. Out of the box, WooCommerce is free and allows you to manage your own online shop, while helping to automate your shipping and shopping cart.

You can customize the look of your eshop, and offer subscriptions, memberships, courseware, and more. WooCommerce can calculate taxes, and help you manage your inventory, while also providing your shop’s progress reports. If you need more tools, WooCommerce has a large community of free and paid plugins behind it, from payment gateways, coupons, analytics, shipping integrations, variable product options, and much more.

Why would you want to use a different ecommerce plugin for WordPress than WooCommerce?

For some, WooCommerce might be a bit too much. You might only have a few products on your website, and don’t need the overhead that WooCommerce brings. That’s completely okay. There are plenty of other solutions you can choose from.

However, as a note, with some optimizing for site speed, WooCommerce can still be a pretty powerful ecommerce solution. If your shop grows larger, then WooCommerce is something that can scale up.

3 WooCommerce Alternatives for WordPress

Here are some of the WooCommerce Alternatives for WordPress. Please note that while there are non-WordPress/ WooCommerce solutions, this list is solely for other ecommerce WordPress plugins.

1. Easy Digital Downloads

2. eCommerce Product Catalog Plugin for WordPress

3. WP EasyCart

Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads is the perfect ecommerce solution if you’re only selling items like software, graphics, music, and other products that are downloadable. When your customers purchase a product, they can log in and get access to download everything they’ve bought. If you’re selling themes or plugins or software that require licenses, you can also retrieve your license key from your account.

Some of the features of the free version of Easy Digital Downloads are:

• Shopping cart with easy checkout

• Payment Gateways - Stripe, PayPal, and Amazon Payments

• Ability to manage customers

• Sales reports

• Secure protection for files

• Discount code option

• Compatible with most themes

• Compatible with the Gutenberg content block editor

If you need more features like different payment gateways, or integrations with specific plugins or email marketing services, you can upgrade to Easy Digital Downloads Pro for as low as $99.50/year for one website.

eCommerce Product Catalog Plugin for WordPress

eCommerce Product Catalog Plugin for WordPress is a simple lighter option if you don’t want to use WooCommerce. The free version of eCommerce Product Catalog includes:

• Display product list on your WordPress site

• Customize product display

• Product organization

• Product search

• Ability for customers to request a quote for a product

With this plugin, if you wish to sell products, you will need to purchase an extension. For example, their PayPal extension is $79/year. However, this is actually a great plugin if you wish to handle payment or ordering by phone or other means.

WP EasyCart

WP EasyCart allows you to sell an unlimited number of products from your WordPress site using Stripe, Square, or PayPal in the free version. Other features include:

• Product inventory and order management

• Basic design options

• Calculate tax

• Static shipping options

• Integration for Facebook Pixel and Google Adwords

• Integration for Google Analytics

If you need more options for WP EasyCart, you can purchase the pro version of the plugin for as low as $69 per year. Their pricing page has an excellent side-by-side comparison table of what each of their levels offer.

5 WooCommerce Alternatives non-WordPress

Below are a few WooCommerce alternatives that are not WordPress related. A lot of lists across the Internet lop these solutions in with the WordPress ecommerce plugins, so this is to make sure that you are aware of the difference in the two lists. Some of the non-WordPress ecommerce options below may or may not have a WordPress plugin integration option, if you still prefer to use WordPress (which makes a lot of sense).

1. BigCommerce

2. Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart

3. Etsy

4. Shopify

5. Wix

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a fantastic non-WordPress all-in-one ecommerce solution, especially if you’re building a store that will probably need scaling up. If you run an enterprise-level store, then BigCommerce can handle it. However, if you prefer to use WordPress, you can use the BigCommerce for WordPress plugin to integrate your products, while allowing BigCommerce to handle the payment processing, shipping, and other heavy lifting.

With BigCommerce, at $29.95 per month, you can take advantage of the platform's various payment gateways, email marketing integration, implementation with big marketplaces (example: eBay, Walmart, and Amazon), single-page checkout, and much more.

Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart

Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart has been around for some time in the WordPress community, and provides a nice eshop solution comparable to WooCommerce. Aside from selling your own stuff, you can use Ecwid to sell through marketplaces. With Ecwid, it’s interesting as you can bridge WooCommerce and the Ecwid eCommerce API. Signing up is free.

If you have under 100 products, and utilize Ecwid’s payment gateways and shipping options, their pricing packages start at $19/ month.

Etsy

Etsy is a great ecommerce platform for the do-it-yourself and craft crowd. You can sell your handmade items. While Etsy doesn’t have an option to give you a full website experience, you do get your own little nook on their platform. Also, you only pay 20-cents per listing, and then any percentage of the transaction.

You can manage your products on Etsy and let them do all the ecommerce processing for you. You only need to make sure to ship your item. In the case you want to still have WordPress, there’s a plugin called Etsy shop, in which you can list your items from Etsy on a page.

Shopify

Shopify is an all-in-one type ecommerce platform, much like BigCommerce. Shopify provides all the tools to manage your products, as well as provide the means to process your payments and such for as low as $26/month.

If you want a blog, you might want to use a subdomain or a subfolder of your domain to create a WordPress site. This may be a bit tedious to manage 2 parts of your website, but it is a known workaround in the WordPress development community. In the case you only have a few products in your Shopify store, the other workaround is that you can embed the product into your WordPress posts or pages.

Wix

Wix is a hosted content management system that has been compared to WordPress, as it offers blogging and ecommerce. Wix’s Premium plans start at $32/year and include access to their built-in ecommerce platform. The ecommerce platform includes the following features:

• Recurring payments

• Abandoned cart recovery

• Subscriptions

• Online booking

• Ticket and event management

• Take orders online

• Manage hotel reservations

The downside of Wix is that if you need to change your branding down the line you will need to redo each of your pages. Additionally, if you feel Wix isn’t for you, then there’s no easy conversion to another platform, for the website and for your ecommerce products.

In Summary

Hopefully the list of WooCommerce alternatives for WordPress in this article will help you on your way to choosing the right ecommerce solution for your needs. Try each plugin out on a test site to check out whether it’s something easy for you to use. Good luck with your online shop!

Consider choosing hosting for WordPress or managed hosting plans for WordPress from Verpex if you want to make sure your eCommerce WordPress site is hosted with a reputable company.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does It take to set up a WooCommerce store?

You can install WooCommerce to your WordPress site with just one click. Then, you just need to add your products and you’re off. You could be up and running in just a few hours.

How much does WooCommerce hosting cost?

Prices are very reasonable and start from just $2.99 per month at Verpex.

Is hosting a WooCommerce site complicated?

Not at all. We can arrange managed hosting here at Verpex and can provide advice and guidance on getting the most out of the platform.

How easy is it to switch between WooCommerce and Magento?

At Verpex we can host either site no problem. However, you’ll need to be aware that there can be some difficulties due to the customizable nature of Magento, and functionality could be lost.