5 Best eCommerce Plugins to build and develop your online store

Picking up the right eCommerce plugin for your online store is vital for the growth and profit of your business. There are many eCommerce plugins in WordPress which help you to achieve this. In fact, WordPress offers over 60000 free plugins and thousands of paid plugins to sieve through to find the right ones. Obviously, we know that nobody is going to have time for that. So, out of the numerous plugins presently available on WordPress, we have tapered it down to six of the best plugins for an eCommerce website.

Before going to the listicle, firstly you must be familiar with how to set up an online store with WordPress. We suggest you go through our previous blog to get a clear idea of creating an online store. Secondly one must know what to search for in an eCommerce plugin for your store. For beginners and new website owners, it might be a little breathtaking task to find the ideal plugin for your website. 

Besides the ‘plugin’ factor, you also need to keep an eye on certain aspects like Payment solutions, Support options, Hosting providers, etc when choosing an eCommerce platform.

Among the thousands of plugins, only a few will have the fundamental features that you would want while others may not. For example, some plugins are designed for trading digital stuff like eBooks, while others are more applicable to sell physical commodities that need shipping and delivery. Besides the ‘plugin’ factor, you also need to keep an eye on certain aspects like Payment solutions, Support options, hosting providers, etc when choosing an eCommerce platform.

For the time being, we assume that you have created your WordPress website. Now it’s time to turn it into an online selling platform with the help of eCommerce plugins. So, here are the WordPress plugins you need to build your online store.  If you are in a haste or would like to directly start experimenting with the eCommerce plugins, here is a quick list of our top picks.

1. WooCommerce

WooCommerce, the king of eCommerce plugin is a powerful free plugin that happens to be the backbone of 30% of all online stores. It is the most widely accepted eCommerce plugin across the world and is owned by Automattic. WooCommerce plugin is the most extensive solution that permits you to sell both physical as well as digital entities in your online store.

With a lot of free and paid extensions, WooCommerce makes it simple to create and build up your store. Thus, making it possible for you to start adding products in just minutes. It also provides many premium features to personalize your store. If you want a customized online store, then you can hire WooCommerce developers easily, thanks to the large community. Apart from hosting, a large number of companies still pay for certain elements that blend with WooCommerce. For instance, many premium WordPress themes are made to work perfectly with WooCommerce–with a shopping cart and beautiful product galleries. 

If you want to figure out why WooCommerce has become the most loved eCommerce plugin, here are the reasons.

•  Designed to support both physical and digital goods
• Availability of various themes and extensions, making it effortless for you to add new features to your store.
• Provides built-in support for payment gateways.
• Excellent documentation, knowledgebase, help desk, and community forums available to help users.
• Using WooCommerce, Affiliate marketers can add external products to your site, giving users better shopping experience.
• Ability to easily manage your inventory or even assign it to a store manager

2. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another perfectly hosted eCommerce platform to build your online store quickly. It offers flawless integration with your website which makes it very easy to add your products. This makes the plugin outstanding in terms of scalability and performance. It also comes with a lot of active eCommerce templates to select from. 

BigCommerce is actually a SaaS (Software as a service) eCommerce platform, but with its WordPress plugin, you can have the best of both worlds. Before they developed the BigCommerce plugin, bringing together WordPress with BigCommerce was not possible. You had to choose either one of them. Nowadays, BigCommerce is in the process of combining the power of WordPress content with the superior selling power of BigCommerce. Some of the other key features of BigCommerce plugin are:

• You can choose from various best payment gateways and you won’t be    charged for each transaction
• It comes with many predesigned, responsive templates to help you compose the perfect e-Store.
• Easily customize your store with BigCommerce apps
• It can be used to sell products not only on your website but on multiple channels like Facebook, Instagram, etc.
• Makes it uncomplicated to run your website as it keeps your eCommerce engine separate from other content.

3. Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads is the best plugin exclusively available for selling digital goods. It has all the features that are required to sell a digital product without a tussle. Easy Digital Download is a user-friendly plugin that has loads of extensions for disparate payment gateways, services, and platforms. You can install it on your website and instantly have a sales platform, with features for discount codes, file access control, and activity tracking.

While they go along with any WordPress themes, it also has its own gorgeous themes that are built precisely for the plugin. You can also find dozens of extensions that complement the functionalities of your storefront and customize it. As mentioned, the EDD core plugin is free of cost. Anyhow, you also have the benefit to move up to a yearly subscription. Let’s take a look at the pros of using the EDD plugin to sell your products.

• Easy to use, even for beginners
• The extension library is filled with dozens of addons from payment gateways to marketing platforms
• EDD has an effective community of bloggers and developers. If any problem arises, you are just a blog post away to get a solution.
• The plugin is well documented and provides free support forums, tutorials, and an IRC chatroom

If you wish to have an online digital store, refer our guide on How to set up an online digital store using EDD.

4. Ecwid eCommerce Shopping Cart

Ecwid can be used on any website you like such as Facebook, WordPress and so on. Whereas a plugin like WooCommerce is fully dedicated to the WordPress content management system. When compared to other eCommerce plugins, Ecwid is less expensive. Though the core plugin is free, they also provide reasonable monthly plans. The freebie plan itself is impressive in terms of the general online store. You get a mobile-friendly shopping cart, support for up to 10 products, and the capability to sell on several sites.

The Ecwid WordPress plugin creates reasonably transparent checkout pages that include all the essential features you will need for an eCommerce website.

Getting an elementary store set up with the Ecwid plugin is quite easy. There’s also an onboarding checklist that helps beginners to understand the main things they need to do as well. You can also trade digital goods with Ecwid, but the size of the products cannot be more than 10GB. The Ecwid WordPress plugin creates reasonably transparent checkout pages that include all the essential features you will need for an eCommerce website. The following are the reasons for us to regard Ecwid as one of the best plugins.

• It allows you to add a shopping cart to any website.
• They support nearly 40 international payment gateway options, real-time shipping integration, and 45 languages. 
• All plugin upgrades occur naturally with Ecwid, whereas most other WordPress plugins need a manual upgrade.
• When you introduce Ecwid to a new site, all the store data from another site can be transferred to the new website and synced so that the selling takes place on different platforms. 

5. WP EasyCart Shopping Cart and eCommerce Store

This is another perfect plugin for small business owners which helps them to set up whatever they want without the help of developers. It provides a striking fast configuration process and coherent tools intended only for those non-techies out there. It supports physical, digital downloads, services, subscriptions, donations,  and even gift cards. WP EasyCart works more like a SaaS eCommerce platform. The only alteration is that here, you have full command over your site with WordPress and your own hosting. 

The features are very much unconventional in the free version, with support for infinite products and live shipping calculators. But you don’t get marketing options, and you will have to pay a fee for integrating Paypal, Stripe and Square. You could also opt for the ‘middle plan per year’. While that’s better than the free plan where you will be narrowing yourself from integrated email marketing, connecting affiliates, and the business tools. In order to avail these features, you will have to stick to the highest plan. Other advantages of using WP EasyCart are:

• Offers the best free customer support and simplest interfaces.
• The premium plan itself is quite enough for small business, and we can guarantee you that you won’t go bankrupt.
• Each and every extensions are precisely made for small businesses

Now, that covers up our list of best eCommerce WordPress plugins. According to us, these are the top WordPress plugins that help you to launch, design and manage your online store. We hope that this article has enabled you to find the best eCommerce plugin for your site. If you have any other plugins that you think we should include in this article, please comment on the section below. 

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