6 Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugins for Online Stores in 2023

Using the right WordPress ecommerce plugins is very important if you want to grow your store. WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems in the world and has become incredibly popular over the years.

Selecting the right WordPress ecommerce plugin is important, especially if you want to scale and grow your store quickly.

With so many WordPress ecommerce plugins to choose from, it can be confusing for you to choose the right one. However, it doesn’t matter if you already own a store or are thinking of setting one up; it’s important that you start off with the right ecommerce plugin.

However, selecting the right ecommerce plugin is often difficult, especially if you don’t know what you are looking for. It’s important for you to know a thing or two about the different ecommerce plugins out there. That’s why we wanted to give you a list of some of the best WordPress ecommerce plugins out there.

What to Look For in a WordPress Ecommerce Plugin?

WordPress for ecommerce is a flourishing niche and combined with the best WordPress plugins, you’re set to deliver exceptional user experiences. However, not all plugins are created equal, and you need to make a careful feature comparison to find out the perfect fit for your requirements.

• Type of plugin: Some ecommerce plugins are good for selling digital goods (such as ebooks, photos, music, etc.), while others are more suitable for selling physical goods that require shipping and inventory management. Some WordPress ecommerce plugins are built to cater to both niches.
• Payment gateways: More importantly, you need to consider which payment gateways you will use to accept payments. Make sure your selected plugin supports your chosen gateway(s) either by default or via add-ons.
• Hosting: It doesn’t matter what plugins you use; you also have to make sure that you choose a fast web hosting for your ecommerce store. Otherwise, the pages will take a long time to load!
• Theme compatibility: Next up is the question of theme compatibility. In rare cases, plugins can conflict with theme features and codebase. However, if you have selected an industry-standard theme and plugin, compatibility is not an issue.

Factors to Consider When Selecting an Ecommerce Plugin

There are plenty of factors you need to consider when selecting an ecommerce plugin. Here are some important ones.

• Pricing: First of all, you need to consider the price of the WordPress ecommerce plugin. For instance, WooCommerce is free, but you will want to integrate several paid extensions to really maximize your usage.
  Many of the top ecommerce plugins for WordPress are paid, so that’s something you have to consider.
• Ease of Use: You also need to consider the ease of use of the plugin first. Thankfully, this shouldn’t be much of an issue, as most WordPress ecommerce plugins are fairly simple to get your head around.
• Purpose: Does the plugin fit your purpose? For instance, if you need a plugin that you are going to use for offering digital subscriptions, it might be a wise idea to consider using Easy Digital Downloads instead.
• Support: How much support does the plugin offer? It’s imperative that you take a look at the support documentation and the team behind the plugin. In case of an issue, you will want to make sure you can get timely support.
• User Reviews: Finally, you need to consider the number of user reviews for the WordPress ecommerce plugin. Ideally, you’d want to choose from WordPress ecommerce plugins with lots of positive reviews.

List of the Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugins

Now that you know how to pick the right WordPress ecommerce plugins, let’s take a look at the best WordPress ecommerce plugins available.

1. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is one of the most popular WordPress ecommerce plugins. It has accumulated more than 5 million active installations. 36.68 percent of all online stores have been built on WooCommerce.

You can use this plugin to create any size of online store. Whether you are a small-scale retailer or an enterprise, WooCommerce will meet your needs.

Despite being a free plugin, WooCommerce has from its many administrative functions: from the management of payment and taxation methods to reports to view the sales trend and the stock report. It also allows the management of coupons and discounts for the products entered.

Learn how to set up and install WooCommerce in easy steps.

Pros

• Free of cost: It’s completely free! With so many ecommerce plugins out there, only a few can really make a smooth website for ecommerce. However, few of them are expensive, except for WooCommerce.
• Built on WordPress: WordPress powers over 64.2% of all websites. It is the most trustworthy because of frequent updates. It ensures that the CMS is at the forefront of security and up to date with the latest web standards.
• Blog Integration: The blog helps you sell more content to rank your website. WordPress makes it simple and easy for you to create a blog together with your store. There is no need to create a separate blog.
• Unlimited Customization: Well, this is easy as the thousands of available themes can change the appearance of your store. Most of the specific WooCommerce themes are free to use.
• Strong Community: The WordPress Community is dedicated to helping out others in no time. Their work has always been excellent. Having been around since 2011, they have a good reputation for the best support.
• Highly Expandable: WooCommerce can be expanded to suit your needs. There are many plugins and extensions that extend the functionality of WooCommerce. These plugins are essential in personalizing the functionality of your store.

Cons

• No hosting – you’ll have to get hosting separately.
• Not as simple – you will require some HTML and CSS expertise to optimize your store.

Interface

As you can see, the WooCommerce interface is fairly easy to understand. It’s accessible directly from your WordPress dashboard, so it’s incredibly easy to manage. You can check products, optimize descriptions, and make as many changes as you see fit to your store.

Check out our WooCommerce vs Shopify detailed comparison post.

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2. Easy Digital Downloads

The main function of Easy Digital Downloads is to sell digital products directly on your WordPress site. It is lightweight and will not strain server resources too much, thus achieving faster loading speed and optimization.

This is a free WordPress store plugin developed exclusively to sell images, audio files, videos, and much more. You could also use WooCommerce to sell your courses online, but Easy Digital Downloads is more immediate and easy to use. Check out this detailed comparison between WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads for clarity.

It has integrated PayPal and Amazon Payments to help you sell your digital content without too many spins. There are also premium extensions to integrate your ecommerce with various tools for collecting reviews, email marketing automation, and hosting files in the cloud.

Learn how to set up and install Easy Digital Downloads in easy steps.

Pros

• Multiple Features: It allows you to set up the shopping cart page, choose from various payment methods, create file packages, use discount codes, and much more!
• Customer Management: It has an advanced customer management system that allows you to view, edit, delete, and track customers’ lifetime value and activity.
• Embedded Widgets: It comes with a number of basic widgets to display in your sidebars: download basket, user’s purchase history, and categories or keywords of downloads.
• Data Reporting: Integrated system provides you with detailed statistical reports such as earnings by date and categories, tax collected by year, sales, and API request logs.
• Payment History: You get the interface for every record of online transactions, so you don’t need to look for any other plugin.
• External File Storage: Sometimes, the WordPress media library is not enough to host database files. This is why EDD integrated Amazon S3 and Dropbox in its platform.

Cons

• You’ll need to buy several add-ons
• Third-party integrations are costly
• Limited in-built options

Interface

Easy Digital Downloads is another WordPress ecommerce plugin that you can use to manage your digital products. It has a fairly comprehensive interface with extensive reporting features. The plugin itself does a great job of presenting all of the key features that you need at your fingertips.

3. Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart

Ecwid stands for “ecommerce widget”.

It is a free WordPress ecommerce plugin, easy to install, customize, and above all, manage. It is highly flexible and customizable with additional features, this involves the purchase of paid versions that are of three types: Venture, Business, and Unlimited.

It is a comprehensive and affordable ecommerce solution that includes web, mobile, and social stores. Sale anywhere, anytime! Ecwid makes it easy to access and manage your store while you’re on the go. Installing your store is a piece of cake, and it will help you along the way.

Ecwid works with major carriers, such as FedEx and UPS, and automatically calculates the shipping costs for each product. The taxes available for Canada, the United States, and the VAT of the European Union are automatically calculated.

 

Pros

• Sell Anywhere: Selling on the go via the smartphone app, Facebook page, and markets like eBay. Easily control your store from anywhere on any device.
• Products Management: Control and edit product options and combinations based on your product features. Update the rating and change the stock, weight, and availability with just a few taps.
• Order Process: Get informed whenever an order is placed and process orders where you are. Just launch the app to inform customers about order updates or to request additional information.
• Accept Payments: Choose from over 40 secure payment options and start accepting payments giving your customers easier and faster control.

Cons

• Not suitable for building a standalone store
• The free plan has limited options
• POS functionality is limited in use

Interface

Like most other WordPress ecommerce plugins, Ecwid also works very well and integrates directly into your dashboard. You can easily view the changes to your store and make adjustments as you see fit. It’s fairly intuitive and easy to manage.

4. BigCommerce for WordPress

If you want to build your website with WordPress but let BigCommerce take care of the ecommerce part of your business, then this integration should be interesting.

BigCommerce for WordPress integrates directly with the BigCommerce engine. It combines the flexibility of platforms, allowing millions of merchants to use WordPress to expand and customize their ecommerce sites like never before.

It supports the front-end experience, while the commerce engine deals with the business side. This plugin offers catalog and order management, shipment and invoice tracking, online transactions, and more.

Pros

• Seamless Experience: It has integrated all the features needed to grow a large-scale online business without compromising website content or user experiences.
• Intuitive Control Panel: You have a single control panel from which you can manage orders, shipments, and catalog updates for multiple websites.
• Easy Checkout Process: The developers have also created a personalized experience for buyers, ensuring that the payment process is as easy as possible.
• Unlimited Scalability: It has become easier to create complex catalogs and manage large volumes of orders so you can focus more on your store.
• Security Features: This plugin manages security aspects, offering you a secure ecommerce store with reduced risk and more resources to use elsewhere.
• Optimized and AMP-Ready: It supports the standard WordPress method to overwrite template files so you can modify ready-to-use projects, including AMP pages.

Cons

• Limited functionality for content-rich websites
• Requires considerable tweaking to get it right

Interface

BigCommerce, a hosted alternative to other ecommerce platforms, has it’s own WordPress ecommerce plugin. And it’s one of the best WordPress ecommerce plugins out there – it’s incredibly efficient and very well-designed, allowing you to manage products and optimize your ecommerce store.

5. eCommerce Product Catalog by ImpleCode

eCommerce Product Catalog is one of the most used WordPress ecommerce plugins for online stores.

It’s main functionality is to help ecom stores build customized product catalogs. Some features you can utilize with this plugin are custom pricing, a shopping cart, a quote cart feature, etc.

You can start working with the free version that’s free forever. However, you’ll to unlock the full potential of the plugin, you may need paid packages. The plugin offers four paid options:

• Standard – $49
• Specialized – $99
• Web store – $149
• Professional – $399

Pros

• Limitless Product Updates: You have the option to upload an unlimited number of products and have a customized catalog look to offer a unique and user-friendly experience.
• Payment Modules: Many online payment modules are supported via extensions: 2Checkout Gateway, PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, etc.
• SEO Extensions: This plugin lets you optimize your product catalogs so your store has a better probability of ranking on search engines.
• Design Options to Optimize the Store: You can access several design plugins which will help you design user-friendly catalogs to increase your conversion rates. You can even launch discount codes, order forms, coupon codes, gifts, etc.

Cons

• The free version is limited in allowance for extensions and doesn’t even offer payment gateway integration.

Interface

eCommerce Product Catalog is a fairly intuitive plugin with a decent interface and a lot of options.

6. WP EasyCart

WP EasyCart is a powerful ecommerce plugin that allows you to easily install the shopping cart to any online shop. You can also download the software on your desktop, PC, Mac, iPad, and Android to manage your cart wherever you are.

It supports more than 30 payment gateways, multiple languages and currencies, coupons, and promotions systems. This plugin has also integrated Google Analytics to get accurate reports and create share buttons for each of your products.

WP EasyCart comes in three different shopping cart versions to cover every need of the online store: Free, Professional, and Premium.

Pros

• Order Management: It allows you to manage orders, print sales receipts and delivery notes, add shipping notes, send an email to customers, and view order information in one place.
• Marketing Tools: It is SEO-optimized for each product, menu, and category you create to help sell your products. It supports sharing on social networks and allows your visitors to immediately link to the products you sell.
• Payment Gateways Support: It is integrated with PayPal Express, Square, and Stripe to receive payment from all over the world safely and quickly.
• Shipping and Taxes: It has a wide table shipping rate for systems based on price, weight, quantity, and percentage and taxes based on states/provinces and countries.

Cons

• Not very scalable
• The interface is a bit on the clunky side and looks outdated

Interface

Then, you have WP EasyCart. It’s one of the best WordPress ecommerce plugins out there, and many consider it to be in their list of the top WordPress ecommerce plugins. It’s highly customizable and gives you control over every element of your store.

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Wrapping up!

It’s true! WordPress was originally built to be a blogging platform. It has achieved great success by extending its use not only to blogs but also to more complex websites such as ecommerce stores. If you want to open an ecommerce store, the above-mentioned plugins can be very useful from the point of view of showcasing products and for having an excellent system of a shopping cart.

At the same time, with giant strides, WordPress is catching up, compared to the most famous platforms for creating ecommerce websites.

I have no doubt that it is today one of the best ecommerce platforms available to online sellers. And if today I were asked for an opinion on WordPress for ecommerce, I would absolutely YES! There are many artificial intelligence tools for ecommerce that might further advance your ecommerce store to the next level. So, do check them out.