WordPress has come a long way in its journey as the top website creation tool. What started as a simple blogging platform has grown into an intuitive and smart way to build a full-fledged ecommerce website. In fact, WordPress is such a great way to build an online store that there are a multitude of WordPress plugins available to help you grow your ecommerce site. That’s why we compiled 5 essential ecommerce plugins for you. Read on to learn more!
1. WooCommerce
With WooCommerce powering 30% of the internet’s online stores, it’s hard to argue with the fact that WooCommerce is one of the best ecommerce plugins for WordPress. WooCommerce is flexible and designed with the user in mind. It gives you complete control over your ecommerce site. But the best part? It’s free.
The WooCommerce plugin has a lot of great features. Let’s look at some of our favorites:
1. Ability to update your inventory quickly. All you have to do is set up your product features once. When you get more products, you can quickly update your inventory.
2. Sell downloads. The plugin supports selling downloads (e.g. music from your album).
3. Affiliate sales. If you work as an affiliate for different merchants, you can easily set up WooCommerce to sell others products on your site as well.
4. Robust payment options. WooCommerce integrates well with PayPal, credit card merchants and more. This will give your customers more convenient payment options. You can even offer your customers the ability to pay by check or cash on delivery.
5. Shipping and tax costs are easy. WooCommerce automatically calculates taxes and shipping costs for you. This means you don’t have to do any fancy coding to make sure you are charging the correct amounts.
6. Inventory tracking. Inventory tracking is built right into the plugin, so you don’t have to manually keep track of your stock.
7. Mobile access. Do you need to check your WooCommerce stats on the go? No problem. WooCommerce allows this option with their mobile app.
8. Style. You can easily customize the style of your storefront.
9. Integrations. WooCommerce integrates well with several platforms like Google Analytics, PayPal, and hundreds of other popular systems.
10. Built with developers in mind. The plugin is extendable and adaptable, so developers can customize as needed.
2. Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)
If you are not sold on WooCommerce, another great option is EDD. Easy Digital Downloads is another free plugin with simple features and an intuitive system. It’s a great option if your online store is smaller and more focused on selling digital goods. The plugin is a little barebones, but also easier to navigate. Rather than having to sort through hundreds of features, EDD offers the simplest and most common features that ecommerce websites generally tend to need.
Another great feature of EDD is its reporting tools. The plugin has a strong reporting system that helps you easily see all of your earnings and sales, and quickly understand your analytics. If you’re looking for something simple, straightforward and easy to use, EDD is a great option.
3. Yith WooCommerce plugins
If you want to offer your customers a great experience on your WooCommerce web store, you should consider installing Yith’s WooCommerce plugins. They currently offer four amazing plugins:
1. YITH WooCommerce Wishlist allows your customers to create lists of products they want to buy. They can even share these lists with family and friends. You can greatly benefit from this plugin by analyzing your users’ most popular products in their wishlists.
2. YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards does exactly what it says on the tin. With this plugin, you’ll be able to sell gift cards in your shop. This is especially useful during the holidays! Your customers will be able to give a gift card to friends and family without stressing out to search for specific products.
3. YITH WooCommerce AJAX Product Filter allows you to build a powerful filters section on product pages. This will help your customers to easily filter your products based on their requirements. You can also customize the style of the filters, so they match the layout of the theme you’re using. What’s more, the plugin allows you to show filters on custom pages too, and not just the standard WooCommerce pages.
4. YITH WooCommerce Customize My Account Page does what it promises. When you install this plugin, you can customize the My Account page of your customers. You can create custom sections with promotions and ad-hoc content, such as coupons, surveys, video tutorials, news, and notifications.
4. WP eCommerce
The final ecommerce WP plugin that we recommend is WP eCommerce. This plugin is also quite simple to use, but the features are powerful. With WP eCommerce, you can completely control the style of your ecommerce site. You can also easily sell physical products, downloads, memberships, subscriptions, or a combination of all of these options with this plugin.
Additionally, this plugin integrates well with many payment merchants, giving you multiple quick and easy payment options.
5. AMP
Lastly, we want to recommend the AMP plugin. While it’s not a specific WooCommerce plugin, AMP helps to optimize the loading speed of your mobile website. Which is an important part for every website, but especially web stores. Nowadays, a lot of people browse and buy on their phones. If you have a fast website, your customers’ experience will be greatly improved. Your customers will be happier, thus making them more likely to buy from your store.
Find what works for you
Of course, there are tons of different plugins available for ecommerce websites. It’s not a simple matter of “one size fits all”. You might not need the big shot plugin when you run a small business. That’s why we recommend that you try out a few plugins and see what works best for you.
If you want to know what other ecommerce plugins we recommend, click here.
