When you talk about the word "plugin," you usually think of the type of plugin that adds to a WordPress site's capabilities. There are millions of WordPress sites, each using one of thousands of WordPress themes. Indeed, according to Netcraft, 35% of the internet is powered by WordPress. However, WordPress out-of-the-box has few eCommerce capabilities. If you want to engage in eCommerce on your site, you need some form of a plugin to make it viable.
Some of these plugins are full-blown eCommerce platforms, designed to sit on top of a WordPress site – WooCommerce is an excellent example of a specialist WordPress eCommerce platform. Others bring many of the capabilities of a stand-alone platform to WordPress sites – the WP Shopify plugin is an example of this. Other plugins serve a specific purpose useful to eCommerce – Cart Recovery for WordPress is a typical example of this plugin type. The fourth type of plugin we look at is the more general plugin that is not specific to eCommerce sites but greatly helps their efficient running – Yoast SEO being an example of this type of plugin.
Top eCommerce Plugins to Make Your eCommerce Site Powerful:
WordPress eCommerce Platforms
WooCommerce is a top-rated open-source eCommerce solution. It is particularly suitable for firms with an established web presence who want to add an eCommerce platform to their existing site. Of course, it will always be easier to build a site from scratch, using a WooCommerce-enabled WordPress theme from the WooCommerce Theme Store. You can use WooCommerce to showcase physical and digital goods, product variations, custom configurations, instant downloads, and affiliate items. Bookings, memberships, subscriptions, and dynamic pricing rules are only an extension away. And you can always leverage WordPress’ SEO advantage to bring people to your eCommerce store. You can keep tabs on the performance metrics most important to you with WooCommerce Admin – a powerful, customizable central dashboard for your store. Another essential advantage of a WordPress-based WooCommerce site is that your data will always belong to you. Should you wish to migrate to a different platform, you’re free to export all your content and take your site wherever you choose, with no restrictions. BigCommerce for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to scale eCommerce. You can use WordPress as your site’s front-end while using BigCommerce to manage things like catalog management, processing payments, fulfillment logistics, and more on the back end. It is built to integrate seamlessly with WordPress yet gives you access to BigCommerce’s native eCommerce features from a single plugin. You can use it to sell across multiple channels and marketplaces from a single location. It provides you with an embedded checkout experience that takes on PCI compliance and customer security on your behalf. This plugin pairs the unrestricted customization of WordPress with BigCommerce’s scalable SaaS eCommerce engine. It ports over a copy of your product catalog and stores products as custom post types in WordPress. It also creates pages for your cart, checkout, account profiles, sign-in, shipping & returns, gift certificates, and order history. You don’t need to install additional extensions to get access to common eCommerce features. You may not want to create a full Shopify site, but WP Shopify empowers you to sell and build custom Shopify experiences on WordPress. You can display a single buy button or a whole list of products with ease. WP Shopify provides powerful and seamless ways to show your products. WP Shopify also creates your checkout and cart experience, with no setup required. The base plugin includes many of the features you would expect of Shopify, including automatic syncing that keeps the products you display on WordPress “in sync” with your Shopify store and product detail pages that sync your Shopify data with your WordPress codes. Alternatively, you could opt for WP Shopify Pro, which includes additional shortcodes, PHP Templates, Gutenberg Blocks, Dedicated Live Support, and much more. At one point, Shopify had an official WordPress plugin, but that has now been discontinued. Shopify has instead moved attention to their Buy Button, an open-source library that allows you to embed products with HTML and JavaScript snippets. It does, however, require the use of iFrames that limit your ability to customize your design. WP Shopify uses a combination of the Buy Button and Shopify API to create an iFrame-free experience. The Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart helps you add an online store to your WordPress site. It is powerful, easy-to-use, and Gutenberg-friendly. It integrates with major carriers, including USPS, UPS, FedEx, Canada Post, Australia Post, and others, to automatically calculate shipping rates. It includes automated tax rate calculations for the U.S. and Canada, as well as EU VAT. Integration with TaxJar provides automatic sales tax reporting and filing in the U.S. You can add your online store to Facebook and sell to millions of Facebook and Instagram users. Ecwid automatically synchronizes your products, customers, orders, and inventory between your WordPress and Facebook storefronts. With Ecwid, you can include your eCommerce shop on multiple websites, blogs, social sites, and eCommerce marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Google Shopping and sell simultaneously everywhere. Your online store data is fully hosted on Ecwid’s secure servers, regardless of the WordPress hosting service you use. Cart Recovery for WordPress focuses on abandoned cart recovery and tracking to your WordPress store. You can track customer names and emails as soon as they’re entered at checkout. It sends automated cart recovery emails. It comes with WooCommerce, WP e-Commerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and Restrict Content Pro compatibility out-of-the-box. You can track abandoned carts, view stats in your WordPress dashboard, and configure automatic recovery email sending. Also, a Pro version is available that includes the ability to generate and include dynamic per-customer discount codes. It offers flexible email timing; you can choose when to send a schedule of multiple emails. With the Pro version, you can view both details of carts in the recovery process and detailed interaction history of individual carts. If you want to sell digital products from a WordPress site, then Easy Digital Downloads should make your life easier. It provides a complete system for effortlessly selling your digital products, whether they be software, documents, photos, eBooks, songs, graphics, videos, or any other media file type. Easy Digital Downloads aims to be simple enough for eCommerce beginners to configure without sacrificing any important functionality. It includes a front-end shopping cart, so customers can browse your product catalog, add items to their cart, and check out when they are ready. They can even bypass the cart using Buy Now buttons. Buyers complete their purchase with ease, directly on your site’s checkout page. The plugin lets you view and manage detailed records of all customers and their purchase history. You can keep track of your earnings, refunds, sales, and more. It works with any theme, so you can design your site how you wish. The core version of the plugin supports PayPal Standard and Amazon Payments. Additional payment gateways are supported through free or premium extensions. MemberPress calls itself the “all-in-one” membership plugin for WordPress. It helps you build WordPress membership sites, accept credit cards securely, sell online courses, control who sees your content and sell digital downloads. You can use it with any WordPress theme. With MemberPress, you can manage your members by granting and revoking their access to posts, pages, videos, categories, tags, feeds, communities, digital files, and more based on the memberships to which they belong. MemberPress integrates with many third-party solutions for processing payments, running an affiliate program, email, and more. OptinMonster is a lead optimization toolkit. It targets marketing agencies, bloggers, eCommerce websites, and all small businesses. You can use it to grow your email list, improve your website conversions, and reduce cart abandonment. OptinMonster can be installed on nearly every website platform on the internet and integrates with every major email marketing service. The only requirement is that you must have a website where you can add custom JavaScript in the body of your website’s pages. It has a WordPress popup plugin that integrates OptinMonster with your self-hosted WordPress site. There are three steps to using OptinMonster: The FOMO & Social Proof Notifications by TrustPulse plugin uses FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to boost your sales and conversions with social proof notifications. It helps boost sales on your WooCommerce store, increase signups on your membership site, and get more email subscribers. TrustPulse is a stand-alone social proof app that integrates with all website platforms, including WordPress. It comes with an easy-to-use social proof notification builder that allows you to create beautiful WordPress FOMO popups that are proven to convert. You can customize the message, colors, images, and more to match your FOMO social proof notifications with your website. If you don’t want a full-blown store on your WordPress site, the WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart lets you add an ‘Add to Cart’ button for your products on any posts or pages. It enables you to directly sell products and services from your WordPress site and turn any WordPress blog into an eCommerce site. You can add/display a shopping cart on any post, page, or sidebar easily. The shopping cart shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to change the quantity or remove the items. You can create products by using shortcodes dynamically. Indeed, you can sell digital products via this plugin easily too. If you want your eCommerce store to be visible for organic search, you need to ensure that you correctly use search engine optimization (SEO) on your site. Yoast SEO is the #1 WordPress SEO plugin. Yoast’s mission is SEO for Everyone, and the plugin’s users range from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet. It covers virtually every aspect of SEO, from optimizing your title and meta description templating for better branding to the most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality at the push of a button. Amongst other advantages, Yoast SEO Premium adds the ability to expand Yoast SEO with the News SEO, Video SEO, Local SEO, and WooCommerce SEO extensions. Even eCommerce sites need special pages. Coming Soon Page, Maintenance Mode & Landing Pages by SeedProd helps you create appropriate Coming Soon pages, Maintenance Mode pages, landing pages, and custom 404 pages. You can upgrade to Landing Page Pro for even more features. It works with any WordPress theme and uses a drag and drop page builder. Landing pages can be handy for eCommerce stores, as you can send people to them without the distractions of the rest of your site. You could also put together special landing pages for different promotions and audiences as part of your marketing. The Pro version includes more than 100 professionally designed landing page templates with layout sections. It also features integrations with MailChimp, AWeber, ActiveCampaign GetResponse, ConvertKit, Zapier, and more. Contact Form by WPForms is a drag and drop form builder for WordPress. It allows you to create beautiful contact forms, feedback forms, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your site in minutes. WPForms comes with pre-built form templates to help you save time. You can add, remove, or re-arrange fields as necessary. The contact forms are 100% responsive and mobile-friendly by default. You can embed your contact form on any page with an optimized title and description. This plugin is a lite version of the WPForms Pro plugin. Relevanssi replaces the standard WordPress search engine. There are both free and paid versions of Relevanssi. Search results are sorted in the order of relevance, not by date. It features fuzzy matching: match partial words if complete words don’t match. You can find documents matching either just one search term (OR query) or require all words to appear (AND query). Relevanssi also recognizes searching for phrases with quotes, for example, “search phrase.” You can search comments, tags, categories, and custom fields. Relevanssi includes even more advanced features, however, including adjusting the weighting for titles, tags, and comments, and Google-style “Did you mean?” suggestions based on successful user searches. Advanced filtering helps hack the search results the way you want. There are many additional features in the Pro version, including indexing attachment content (PDF, Office, Open Office) and searching across multiple sites in the same multisite installation.1. WooCommerce
Stand Alone eCommerce Platforms With a WordPress Plugin
2. BigCommerce
3. WP Shopify
4. Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart
Specialist eCommerce Plugins
5. Cart Recovery for WordPress
6. Easy Digital Downloads
7. MemberPress
8. OptinMonster
9. TrustPulse
10. WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart
General Plugins Useful to eCommerce Stores
11. Yoast SEO
12. SeedProd
13. Contact Forms
14. Relevanssi
