No matter what you are selling, if you have an eCommerce website powered by WordPress, chances are, you need a number of eCommerce extensions (such as a shopping cart) to power it up and make sure your online store operates smoothly. Not taking care of this essential step can cost you a loss of time, effort, and sales.
With that in mind, we’ve had a look at 6 tried-and-tested WordPress eCommerce plugins you can use to make sure you have a top-tier online store. Ready to dive in? Let’s get started!
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Table of Contents
Easy Digital Downloads
As the name of the plugin suggests, its main function is to simplify the process of digital downloads on your website and improve the customer journey. It’s a very handy tool, especially for those who are selling digital products, such as eBooks, guides, online courses, to name a few. The plugin is not only intended for text files, but also audios, videos, and other file formats.
The plugin offers a clear and easy-to-navigate interface. While it is simple and intuitive to use, the plugin comes with an extensive list of features you can use to power up your online presence. Here are some of them:
- Shopping Cart allows you to choose “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” options, customize the call-to-action, cater to both registered and guest users, as well as allow cart savings.
- Customer Management System that lets you maintain a separate record for each customer, as well as edit and delete the records, track customer lifecycle and create a customer account page.
- Discount codes that assist in choosing rates, specify discounted products, set start and end dates, and other features.
- Data reporting to view earnings, track taxes, filter reports, and monitor sales.
You can download the plugin for free. However, to use it, you need to choose a subscription package. Plans start at $99/year and grow depending on the functionality.
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Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart
Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart is a WordPress website extension that helps you handle everything in your online store. This plugin is great both for selling digital and physical products, all in one place. All you need to do is to set up your store once, and you can then start selling. The plugin offers options to sync your store with Amazon, as well as social media sync options to simplify the social media management, email marketing, and even the SMS marketing of your brand. Some of the other features of the plugin are:
- Easy-to-use marketing tools allow you to concentrate all your marketing efforts in one place. Tools such as Facebook, Google, and Pinterest ads, alongside a list of other marketing tools simplify and coordinate your promotional efforts.
- Simple control from a centralized dashboard allows you to handle pricing, payment, inventory, and everything else related to your online store from a single place.
- Live support is available to solve any issues you have quickly and efficiently.
- Ecwid app store where you can find, download, and install apps, plugins, and other tools you may need to improve the performance of your online store.
Ecwid offers a lifetime free option with limited tools. More professional functionalities start at $12.5/month paid annually or $15/month paid monthly and increase depending on what you need.
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ACYMailing
If you are looking to increase the sales of your online store and speed up user acquisition, one of the most effective strategies you can use is mailing. There are a large number of mailing plugins for WordPress that can significantly simplify the process, and ACYMailing is one of them. It is one of the most widely used email marketing extensions for WordPress and comes with a plethora of tools that will help you to quickly grow your mailing list. Everything is logically organized, and you don’t need any programming knowledge or employee onboarding training to set up and run the extension.
Some of the tools the plugin offers are:
- Dynamic WordPress content insertion
- Simple drag-and-drop editor
- Personalized communication options
- Newsletter statistics (newsletter click, marketing conversion, and sales tracking)
The plugin has both free and paid options. The free option comes with limited functionalities. Paid packages start at $29/year, and depending on the tools you need, the prices grow from there.
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Cart66 Cloud
Cart66 is a widely-used WordPress eCommerce plugin perfect for stores that have 100 or fewer products. Powerful in functionality, but simple to use, this extension comes with everything your store may need pre-installed, so you don’t have to install new plugins. So, whether you’re running an online clothing store, kids toys, or baby clothing, this plugin will work perfectly.
You can use this plugin to sell physical and digital products, subscriptions, donations, and many other products. It also boasts a super-secure payment method that allows customers to safely and easily handle their purchase and payment data. Here are some more features of Cart66:
- A large list of supported product types so that you can sell everything you want without limiting your store;
- Inventory tracking;
- Package tracking;
- Email marketing tools you can use to promote your online business;
- PCI compliance;
- 5-star customer reviews;
- 100+ built-in payment getaways.
The plugin comes with a 14-day free trial, after which you can choose between 2 plans: the Essential Plan at $19/month and the Complete plan at $49/month.
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WooCommerce
No WordPress eCommerce plugin list would be complete without WooCommerce, the largest open-source eCommerce plugin. With more than 5 million active installations, it is one of the most trusted eCommerce extensions you can use for your WordPress online store. With this plugin, you are the owner of all the information and data about your online shop.
- Build beautiful websites with enticing and artfully designed themes. You can then alter them, add your visuals and design elements to match your business style.
- Choose any of the 100+ payment options to safely and securely handle the payment process of your store. Among the available options are the famous PayPal and Amazon, as well as lesser-known tools such as Stripe and Square. The platform is not yet, however, handling payments with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.
- Customize your product lists in minutes with the product blocks.
- Configure your shipping options through connecting with well-known carriers (available for US only.)
- Manage everything about your store directly in one place, from a clearly structured dashboard, which you can access both on desktop and using a mobile app.
- Add and manage the functionality of your store by adding additional plugins with specific functionalities from the WooCommerce plugin store.
Another benefit of this plugin is the WordPress SEO advantage, as WordPress-based websites are viewed favorably by Google, and your website can rise to the top search results.
As WooCommerce is an open-source plugin, it is free to use for everyone. However, depending on the theme you use or additional plugins you may need to install, you might need to pay additionally for each of them.
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BigCommerce
BigCommerce has been running its own CMS and hosting platform for quite some time now. However, the company has started to make its way into the WordPress world by introducing an eCommerce plugin. Because of its many years of experience in the eCommerce world as a separate CMS, the company gives a rock-solid foundation to its users for building an online store. Before the plugin was introduced, users had no option of combining BigCommerce with WordPress. But now, for example, if a successful blogger wants to open an online store right in their blog, they can easily incorporate it with BigCommerce.
The BigCommerce plugin comes with every tool you may need to operate your online business smoothly. Some of the tools the plugin comes packed with are:
- Design tools you can use to craft beautiful websites for your online store while maintaining your brand identity. This allows you not to be dependent on themes, but to come up with something unique.
- A large number of integration options to make sure you have everything you may need for your store at hand in one place.
- Marketing tools to increase conversion and sales.
- Analytics tools to give you insightful information on how your store is performing, and what you need to work on.
- Robust security options.
- Mobile optimization to ensure your website is just as convenient to browse on mobile. This is increasingly important as people increasingly browse the Internet through mobile devices, and because Google recently switched to mobile-first indexing.
The large feature set of BigCommerce makes it an attractive choice for many online businesses. However, there is one inconvenience that you can experience when choosing BigCommerce to power your online store: at this point, you need to apply for the demo or connect to the sales team directly to gain access to the plugin, as there is no download option. The sales team then calculates the pricing based on what functionalities you want to integrate.
Bonus tool: Random shape generator for website design elements creation.
Ecommerce Extensions
WordPress is a wonderful CMS, but as with many other platforms, it can be made better using 3rd party extensions. Using these eCommerce extensions can help you build a powerful online store that will drastically improve user experience, simplify the process of managing your online product, and boost the growth of your business.
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