WordPress Plugins for eCommerce

With ecommerce within the US expecting to cross over $1 trillion in 2022, it’s a good time to consider opening your own eshop. There’s a lot of online shop solutions out there to choose from, but one of most powerful solutions to power your store is WordPress. WordPress contains countless ecommerce plugin solutions, and some of the best flexibility to sell both digital and physical products. In this article you’ll be introduced to a short list of the WordPress plugins for ecommerce, and what they can do for you.

Streamlines processing orders.

In most cases, the system will process your orders and send you a notice on what to send to your customer.

Product sales reports.

Some ecommerce plugins for WordPress provide detailed product reports so you can track your sales progress, or determine what products are performing better. You can even sync in other traffic tracking tools like Google Analytics to further extend your sales reports.

Automatically sync with popular shipping companies.

Rather than trying to figure out by yourself on what to charge your customers a shipping fee, most ecommerce plugins for WordPress offer options to sync with 3rd party shipping companies like USPS and Fedex.

Manage customers.

Some ecommerce plugins for WordPress offer a customer portal, and you can manage your customers.

Products can be digital or physical.

You can sell digital or physical products to customers. A few plugins offer solely digital solutions, but others offer both options.

Ability to offer subscription services.

If you are offering special products that are shipped out monthly, you can put together a subscription service. Your ecommerce plugin for WordPress will handle the monthly payments, and customers can cancel anytime, or even upgrade if there are larger subscription packages.

Calculate taxes for you.

The less you have to do, the better, and if your ecommerce plugin for WordPress can automatically calculate taxes for each purchase, then that’s a great asset.

Automatically sync with 3rd party drop shippers to sell products from other places.

If you don’t have your own products, but use drop shippers to sell things like custom design t-shirts, hats, and other products, some ecommerce plugins for WordPress offer solutions to sync with those places to help with the entire sale process.

Ability to start reward programs, coupons, and affiliates sections.

Attracting more customers means you need to sometimes put in some perks. Thankfully, some ecommerce plugins for WordPress provide extensions that you can either start a rewards program, offer coupons and discounts, and even get an affiliate section going.

Reliable web hosting that can scale up with your needs.

As your store grows, whether by increased number of products, or from website traffic, you need reliable web hosting that can scale with your business.

Website domain.

You will need to pick a memorable domain that will not just serve as part of your company’s branding, but people can relate to.

SSL certificate.

Security is important, and you should be providing a secure shopping experience for all of your customers. As a note, here at Verpex, we offer free SSL with most of our hosting packages.

WordPress plugin for ecommerce.

Rather than tediously create individual buy now buttons out of PayPal or other payment processors, you need an ecommerce plugin for WordPress, in order to save your time, and automate a lot of the shopping experience from your website. The less you have to do, means the more time marketing and engaging with your customers, and even having a life outside of your business.

Extensions for payment processing, shipping and handling fees, calculate sales tax if necessary, and more.

Some of the ecommerce plugins for WordPress may have some built-in payment processing, or other features, but you may need to install extensions to add the functionalities you need. While some of the plugin extensions may be free, there are also ones that you may need to pay a yearly fee to keep using and receiving updates.

The following list of WordPress plugins for eCommerce are free, and aren’t 3rd party services like Shopify or BigCommerce. Now, both Shopify and BigCommerce are excellent services and do have some WordPress plugin integrations, but in the case of this article, we’re listing some of the best plugins that you can solely run a shop from the WordPress backend.

Please note that while the following WordPress eCommerce plugins are free, some extensions related to them may cost.

WP EasyCart offers a free robust ecommerce platform that you can manage unlimited products. Out of the box, you can accept payments via PayPal Express, Stripe, and Square. Of the entire list, this is the only plugin that gives you a leg up on how to install and set up your products, as they list some beginner tutorials on the plugin’s download page on WordPress.org.

Easy Digital Downloads is one of the most trusted plugins for selling digital items like images, zip files containing multimedia, PDFs, and even music. If you develop WordPress themes or plugins, you can use Easy Digital Downloads to sell them and even provide licensed subscriptions.

If you want to run a membership site, like for a non-profit community, while being able to accept yearly dues, Ultimate Member has a lot of potential in working alongside WooCommerce (there’s a paid extension to bridge both plugins) to achieve that type of website. You can extend your customers profiles with the added user options from the plugin, integrate it with your MailChimp newsletter, and much more.

Learning online has become huge in the last decade. Many people are offering their own courses. Namaste! LMS is just one of the many WordPress plugins that allows you to offer courses and make money while teaching people.

WooCommerce is one of the most popular ecommerce solutions, and the best store plugin for WordPress. It powers about 8.8% of all websites online. WooCommerce offers a lot of tools out of the box, and has many free and paid extensions for shipping and handling, dozens of payment processor options, subscriptions, and much more. You can even sell both digital and physical items, as well as offer a lot of product variations! Many courseware and membership plugins integrate well with WooCommerce, and there are many free and paid ecommerce focused themes available.

Hopefully with this article, you’ve learned a little bit about WordPresss plugins for ecommerce. While this article doesn’t list every shopping plugin available for WordPress users, it’s a good beginning. Check them out, try them on a test WordPress installation, and then see what would fit for your store’s needs. Good luck, and happy selling!