Announcing Duplicator WP-CLI Commands (And How They Speed Up Backups)
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Announcing Duplicator WP-CLI Commands (And How They Speed Up Backups)
Joella Dunn
Joella Dunn
John Turner
John Turner
Online shopping has boomed, making it essential for your business to have an ecommerce website.
WordPress, the popular content management system (CMS), offers a versatile and affordable solution. With the power of ecommerce plugins, you can sell products, accept payments, and handle orders — no matter the size of your business.
In this post, we’ll explore the best WordPress ecommerce plugins to create and manage an online store!
While WordPress started as a blogging platform, it has evolved into a powerful content management system suitable for all kinds of websites — including ecommerce stores.
To turn WordPress into an ecommerce storefront, you’ll need plugins. Plugins are add-ons that extend the core functionality of WordPress, allowing you to incorporate new features.
Dedicated ecommerce plugins give WordPress the ability to handle online selling. With the right plugin, you can add product catalogs, shopping carts, checkout processes, payment gateways, inventory management, and more.
Some top ecommerce plugins even rival the capabilities of specialized ecommerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce. But they integrate seamlessly with WordPress, letting you leverage WordPress’s content management strengths.
Before choosing an ecommerce plugin, consider factors like:
If you plan to sell a high volume of products, you’ll need a plugin that can handle large catalogs and scale as your business grows.
Selling simple products is different from offering digital downloads, subscriptions, or memberships. Ensure the plugin supports the types of products you want to sell.
Most major plugins integrate with popular payment processors like PayPal or Stripe. You should check if payment methods important to your audience are supported.
You may need additional features like marketing tools, analytics, abandoned cart recovery, etc. Evaluate if the plugin provides what you need.
While WordPress itself is free, premium plugins come at a cost. Factor in one-time and recurring fees to determine if it fits your budget.
To help you narrow your search, we found the best WordPress ecommerce plugins! Let’s dive in.
When it comes to WordPress ecommerce plugins, WooCommerce is hard to beat. It’s a free and user-friendly plugin trusted by millions of online stores worldwide.
As soon as you install WooCommerce (or Woo), it’ll walk you through each step of setting up your online store. You’ll customize your store’s theme, create new products, add payment information, and other important tasks.
WooCommerce will automatically include tools to manage customers, keep track of orders, build shop pages, and more. If you don’t find the functionality you need, the plugin is highly extendable through both free and paid extensions.
While WooCommerce is free, certain extensions are premium add-ons.
Overall, WooCommerce stands out for its comprehensive ecommerce toolkit, flexibility, and popularity.
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is the go-to ecommerce plugin for selling digital products like ebooks, software, music, videos, and more. It makes it easy to manage an online store for digital goods.
EDD is an affordable solution with no transaction fees or listing fees. You won’t have to worry about losing any of your hard-earned profits.
Right from the start, you can add information about your business, connect with Stripe, write email receipt confirmations, and create your first product. This might sound daunting, but EDD provides a step-by-step onboarding process.
Easy Digital Downloads has a free version. You can upgrade to the pro version starting at $89.55 per year.
EDD excels at its core focus — providing a lightweight and optimized platform for digital sellers and creators. If you want to sell digital products, you can’t go wrong with Easy Digital Downloads.
If you want to sell memberships, online courses, or subscription services, MemberPress might be right for you. MemberPress is a WordPress plugin that you can use to build a membership website.
Ever wanted to paywall your blog like the New York Times? MemberPress lets you do just that. Using access rules, you can decide exactly what content your online audience can see for free.
MemberPress goes beyond simple content protection. You could use it to design online courses, build a community, sell digital products, and much more.
MemberPress is a premium plugin that starts at $179.50 annually.
MemberPress is unmatched when it comes to creating membership sites and selling access to exclusive content or services.
Unlike the other plugins on this list, BigCommerce is an independent ecommerce platform. However, it created a plugin to integrate BigCommerce with WordPress.
The BigCommerce For WordPress plugin allows you to store your product catalogs, customer logs, and fulfillment logistics on a BigCommerce server. The plugin will pull your products from BigCommerce, displaying your online store on your WordPress site.
Using BigCommerce For WordPress, you’ll offload resources on an off-site server. Your WordPress site only needs to display a copy of your products, making it load faster. This could have a positive impact on your SEO and conversion rates.
BigCommerce starts at $29 per month.
I’d recommend BigCommerce if you need to offload extensive product catalogs and business processes. It could suit larger businesses that want BigCommerce hosting with a WordPress front end.
Shopify is another leading ecommerce platform. Millions of business owners use it to create unique online stores and start selling products.
Unlike BigCommerce, Shopify doesn’t directly integrate with WordPress. Instead, you can find a third-party plugin for the job. For example, ShopWP allows you to add and sell Shopify products in WordPress.
To get started with Shopify, you’ll pay upwards of $29 per month. If you want to integrate your store with WordPress, you’ll also have to pay for a third-party ecommerce plugin like ShopWP.
Shopify has an easy setup and many out-of-the-box features. This makes it a good choice for beginners. However, keep track of the extra fees!
Maybe you don’t need to create an entire online store. If you’re a freelancer or artist, you probably only need to accept payments on your WordPress site. Many of the ecommerce plugins on this list have a lot of unnecessary features.
The best plugin for collecting payments in WordPress is WP Simple Pay. It allows you to accept Stripe payments, as well as credit cards, Apple Pay, iDEAL, and other gateways.
WP Simple Pay connects with Stripe in one click. You won’t have to worry about losing new sales because of a complicated setup process.
There is a free version of WP Simple Pay. For more advanced features, upgrades cost $34.65 per year.
If all you need is a simple way to monetize your WordPress site without an entire online store, WP Simple Pay provides a straightforward solution.
Instead of creating a single business, you might want to manage a multi-vendor ecommerce marketplace. With WC Vendors, you’ll turn your WooCommerce store into a platform where multiple vendors can sell their products.
WC Vendors can help you support smaller shops with physical products, similar to Etsy or Amazon. Your vendors could also sell digital products, services, subscriptions, or second-hand goods.
WC Vendors is free. For flexible commission structures and vendor memberships, you can upgrade starting at $99.50 annually.
WC Vendors eliminates the need to build a multi-vendor marketplace from scratch. It provides all the functionality to onboard and manage independent sellers within your WordPress store.
Ecwid is an ecommerce platform that integrates with any website, including WordPress, Wix, Weebly, and Joomla. If you already have a website, you don’t need to build one from scratch on Ecwid. It can simply add ecommerce functionality to your current site.
Similar to BigCommerce, Ecwid has a WordPress plugin called Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart. It adds the Ecwid control panel to your WordPress site, so you won’t waste time switching back and forth.
With this Ecwid plugin, you’ll get extra Gutenberg blocks for ecommerce. These will help you add products, buy buttons, and product search bars to your posts and pages.
Ecwid has a free plan. You can start selling 100+ products by upgrading to a premium plan for $21 a month.
Ecwid is ideal for small businesses wanting a simple, budget-friendly online store integrated with WordPress.
While not as well-known as WooCommerce, WP EasyCart is packed with features for running an online store on WordPress. It helps you sell retail products, digital downloads, donations, gift cards, and other products.
Like other ecommerce plugins, WP EasyCart creates pages for your store, shopping carts, and customer accounts. Your customers can use their preferred payment method since WP EasyCart offers more than 30 options.
WP EasyCart also provides detailed inventory and order management. You can notify customers about low-stock items, backorders, and minimum order amounts.
WP Easy Cart is available for free. Its premium plans start at $69 yearly.
WP EasyCart is a free and user-friendly alternative to WooCommerce.
WPForms is a WordPress form builder that integrates with many major payment methods. This allows you to easily accept payments and sell products/services directly through custom forms.
WPForms has tons of pre-designed form templates for different types of business needs. You can create booking forms, simple order forms, monthly rent payment forms, and much more.
The drag-and-drop editor lets you customize forms based on your business needs. WPForms connects to Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Authorize.net, making it easy to collect new orders.
WPForms has a free plugin on WordPress.org. The premium plans start at $49.50 per year.
If you have a small business, you’ll need custom order forms but maybe not a complex ecommerce plugin. WPForms can help you customize forms and collect payments from each submission.
In my opinion, these are the best WordPress plugins for an ecommerce site:
These are plugins designed to add ecommerce functionality to your WordPress website. However, you may need extra plugins to manage and grow your business.
If you want to avoid losing any of your hard work, use Duplicator to back up your site. You can set up automatic backups and restore them with one click when you need to.
To succeed in an online business, you need to focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I’d recommend AIOSEO or Yoast SEO to make sure your product pages show up higher in search rankings.
While WordPress.com (the hosted service) provides a user-friendly way to create websites, it has limited ecommerce functionality. For more flexible online selling, self-hosted WordPress.org (open-source software) is the better option. It has dedicated ecommerce plugins like WooCommerce.
If you already have a WordPress.com site, here’s how to move to WordPress.org.
Yes, you can build an ecommerce website with WordPress for free. WooCommerce is a popular ecommerce plugin that’s free and easy to use. To get started, read this tutorial on WooCommerce for beginners.
We hope this helped you find an ecommerce plugin to get your online store off the ground!
While you’re here, I think you’ll like these extra WordPress guides:
Once you build your ecommerce store, you won’t want to lose it to unexpected server errors or hacks. To protect your customers and products, set up automatic backups with Duplicator Pro!
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