Once known as an awesome blogging software, WordPress has already developed into a full-featured CMS that is suitable for some other purposes, such as e-commerce, portfolios, and business websites. The things that make WordPress a good option for e-commerce are not only the ease of use, but also the powerful plugins which enables you to gain more visits and sales easily.
Good plugins usually bring more beneficial e-commerce features to make the sites easier to manage and more attractive for consumers, just like payment gateways, order management, product variations and shipping management.
The top 5 WordPress e-commerce plugins selected in this article are all coming with the ability to add a large amount of powerful e-commerce features. If you are running a high traffic blog and considering selling products and services directly from the blog, you should have a try to benefit from the following plugins.
No.1: WooCommerce
Requirement: WordPress 3.5 or higher
Downloads: 1,406,913
Price: Free
WooCommerce e-commerce plugin is designed to transform your WordPress site into a thorough-bred online store. Delivering enterprise-level quality, WooCommerce is built with the best WordPress practices on both the front and back end. This plugin allows users to keep a close look at all the statistics of the site and sales from the WordPress dashboard. The full customizability is another highlight of it, as it works well with any themes.
Unlike some other plugins that provide a messy shipping feature, WooCommerce helps you set shipping cost based on individual products, charge a flat rate, offer free shipping, or require a coupon to enable free shipping. The shipping needs are handled by several shippers.
Highlighted features:
PayPal Standard Gateway & Mijireh Checkout, which accept payments via PayPal and several other ways like Stripe and Authorize.net.
International delivery, Local delivery & local Pickup.
ShareYourCart, which encourages your customers to share their purchases to get coupons.
Google Analytics, providing e-commerce tracking and some other statistics of your site.
Download WooCommerce Plugin
No.2: WP e-Commerce
Requirement: WordPress 3.4 or higher
Downloads: 2,553,136
Price: Free
As a popular WordPress e-commerce plugin having gained over 2.5 million downloads, WP e-Commerce is specialized in offering users an extremely easy and happy online selling experience. This plugin is suitable for anyone who would like to sell products, services and downloads within a WordPress blog.
WP e-Commerce supports multiple payment gateways to make it convenient for your customers to make purchases, such as PayPal, Google Wallet, Authorize.net, eWay, and Paystation. Besides, it also comes with search engine optimization, allowing adding meta-information for products and categories, supporting RSS feeds, and integrating with Google and All in One SEO plugin.
Highlighted features:
Multiple shipping options for shippers and shipping rate management.
The support for video tutorials, instant support, and speedy response.
Marketing services included.
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No.3: Ecwid
Requirement: WordPress 2.8 or higher
Downloads: 134,591
Price: Free
Ecwid, which stands for "e-commerce widgets", is a fully functional shopping cart and an e-commerce solution that is easy to install, use and customize. Ecwid uses AJAX, which makes the site modern with the drag and drop feature, but this is also a drawback of this plugin because SEO can be negatively affected. Moreover, you should have JavaScript enabled before using it.
However, the limitations have no means of stopping Ecwid from becoming one of the most popular free e-commerce plugins for WordPress, because the features included are extremely useful for you to make a successful online store out of your blog.
Highlighted features:
The ability to be integrated to any existing site or Facebook profile.
Easy management of your store on many sites from one place.
The ability to integrate with social networks to let customers share the links of your products and their purchases on Facebook, mySpace and some others.
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No.4: eShop
Requirement: WordPress 3.4 or higher
Downloads: 540,259
Price: Free
e-Shop is another excellent e-commerce plugin for WordPress that is free and easy to install. The admin dashboard is quite friendly for various managements including adding products, reviewing products, checking statistics, and some more. e-Shop is fully customizable, which means that you can decide every aspect of it to adopt to your site's design.
The plugins comes with a large number of features, such as sales reporting, product variation, accounts and discounts creation, and inventory management. The limitations are that eShop only supports PayPal and Cash/Cheque and doesn't support some other gateways like Authorize.net, Payson, and Webtopay.
Highlighted features:
The utilization of WordPress pages or posts to create products.
Basic stock control & Google Base Data creation.
User configurable email templates & the support to upload downloadable products.
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No.5: Cart66
Requirement: WordPress 2.8.2 or higher
Downloads: 119,843
Price: Free or Paid
Cart66 is a powerful e-commerce plugin for WordPress designed for selling both digital and physical products online easily and efficiently. Using this plugin, you can simply place a product on any page or post on your WordPress site to add new articles. Besides, Cart66 has integrated with PayPal, Manual Checkout and Mijireh Checkout, which makes shopping and purchase a breeze.
Cart66 has 2 editions – Lite and Professional. The former is free of charge, while the latter one costs $89 for a single site license and $179 for multi-site license (up to 5 sites).
Highlighted features (for Cart66 Lite):
The easy management of orders and promotions.
Custom fields for products & multiple shipping options.
Domestic and international sales & affiliate platform integration.
Download Cart66 Plugin