Top 5 Most Widely Used E-Commerce Plugins for WordPress

Due to the involvement of more and more people in online shopping, a significant growth of e-commerce ventures on the internet has taken place. This success of various e-commerce websites can be attributed to WordPress, which is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. In recent years, WordPress has become a powerful software tool for creating e-commerce websites for small as well as medium-sized businesses.

However, it requires various WordPress plugins to provide complete functionality to e-commerce websites. For example, in order to add anything that is required for online shopping such as “shopping cart”, “product showcase pages”, and “payment options”; it is very important to install e-commerce plugins.

Plugins and extensions are necessary additional power-aids and one has to spend a great deal of time to choose the best ones for WordPress. There are plenty of WordPress plugins on the market, but all of them have the essential set of features that would be needed to make a complete e-commerce website.

Therefore, with some research and a little bit of previous experience, I have picked the following 5 grossly used e-commerce plugins for WordPress:

1. WooCommerce

My research tells me that WooCommerce is arguably the best free WordPress e-commerce plugin due to its superior integration tools, beautiful potential layouts, and its amazing futures. As a rough estimate, this plugin powers over 28% of all online stores. It provides a whole gamut of features such as a dashboard widget that allows you to check the progress of your online business. WooCommerce is highly customizable making it easier for you to upload all of your products onto the website. It has a huge range of free and paid extensions that fulfill your logistical and technical requirements. Generally, PayPal is a standard payment gateway option for most of the online stores. However, if you want to add more options, WooCommerce allows you to integrate other major payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal Pro, Amazon Payments, etc.  You can install a WordPress buttons plugin and add a “Buy Now” button pretty easily.

2. Shopify

Shopify is an easy-to-use WordPress plugin that provides you a complete e-commerce solution. So, if you want a quick setup and ease of use, then Shopify is the best eCommerce solution for you. It allows you to organize your online products, customize your storefront, accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders. Whether you are selling physical items like mobile phones or digital goods like music, Shopify can handle all. You can integrate various payment gateways, handle shipping, and calculate taxes without writing a single line of code. Shopify also allows you to connect to the popular social media networks and expand your customer base.

3. WP eCommerce

WP eCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce plugins for WordPress. The main benefit of using this plugin is it incorporates “table rate shipping” functionality into its core, which is a configurable extension that allows you to create a table of shipping rates in hundreds of different configurations. WP eCommerce also utilizes bulk discounts and cross-selling/up-selling functionality. It uses as many as 27 official extensions in total. It is extremely customizable wherein you can easily change the look and modify the templates as per your convenience. Its interface can be customized by tweaking HTML5, Meta tags, and CSS stylesheets. It is compatible with all Android, Windows, and MAC devices.

4. Cart66 Cloud

Cart66 Cloud is another popular e-commerce solution that is widely used for creating online stores. It is quite simple to use and highly graded in terms of customizability. An impressive WordPress plugin that connects your e-commerce portal to the cloud, Cart66 Cloud then makes sure that your security scans, data encryption, and payment gateways will be taken care of. Doing this makes your website PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant. You can add products as standard WordPress pages and convert them into product pages using short-codes. It can easily integrate digital sales, recurring billing, and membership website functionality. Cart66 Cloud is really a feature rich plugin and it also supports variable shipping rates.

5. MarketPress eCommerce

MarketPress eCommerce is one of the best designed, easiest to use and most powerful WordPress plugins present on the market. It is easy to install, simple to upload and straightforward to activate with other WordPress plugins. It was specifically designed to increase the UX of an e-commerce website, which makes the plugin very handy in setting up an online store with tons of options as well as customization possibilities. Variations have been incorporated into the code of MarketPress eCommerce plugin due to which you can create unlimited colors, sizes, and materials for any of your products. It also helps you in displaying your products in a beautiful built-in gallery. It accepts payments using 15 popular payment processors, including Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net. The incorporation of many widgets has brought the extra-added functionality to MarketPress, which includes shopping cart, checkout button, product tag cloud, product categories and product list etc.

Conclusion

These WordPress plugins are certainly not the only ones that developers are using for creating e-commerce websites, but they are largely the ones that are the preferred choice. An e-commerce website has to be highly responsive, engaging, feature-rich and easy to navigate; therefore, the above-mentioned plugins will be extremely helpful for you in achieving these important functionalities.