Best WordPress Plugins for Ecommerce Sites
For beginners and new Ecommerce website owners, it is a bit overwhelming to decide which WordPress Plugin to install. We have therefore created this short-list of top WordPress Plugins that we believe every Ecommerce site should install. We not only explain what the Plugin does, but also why we believe it is critical for any Ecommerce site
What to Look for in a WordPress eCommerce Plugin for Your Site?
There are tons of Ecommerce plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Marketplace. But, keep in mind that not all of them will have the right set of features that best suits your products, niche, customer preference and market (geo) location.
For example, some Ecommerce plugins are best suited for selling digital products like eBooks, photos, software, etc. Others are better suited for selling physical products.
Basically, you need to consider what you will be selling and what kind of features you would need to efficiently run your online store.
Apart from that, following are some of the most important factors you need to look for deciding which WordPress Plugin to install:
Customer Outreach & Acquisition (Marketing)
Plugins that help you proactively reach out to current and future customers everytime you add a new product or as a reminder for an existing product. Examples are plugins that enable e-mail marketing and push notifications on your site.
Site Speed
It is imperative that your site is discoverable in Google Seach results for the related keywords. It is also imperative that your site speed is satisfactory. There are plugins that help you accomplish these two, what we call as technical optimization tasks for your WordPress Site
Apps and Integrations
These are integrations available for third-party apps like CRM software, accounting software, etc. You’ll need those tools to manage and grow your ecommerce business more effeciently.
Support Options
This can be as simple as a chat software or as sophisticated as a modern ticketing system that lets you manage customer queries.
Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugins
Being the most trusted WordPress resource site, our experts test over 100 free and premium WordPress plugins every month, so we can make it easy for our users (you) to find the best plugins to take your Ecommerce site to the next level.
Now that you know what to look for in an eCommerce platform and what you need to get started, here are our top picks for the best eCommerce platform for WordPress users.
1. Webpushr - Web Push Notifications
Website push notifications offer E-commerce businesses one of the best ways to engage with their existing traffic i.e. the folks who have already visited your website.
Web push notifications are clickable messages that are sent by a website to their subscribers’ browsers. They work very similarly to mobile app push notifications (notifications sent by a mobile app that land in your notification tray) except that they work on websites instead of apps and can be accessed on all devices (desktop, mobile, tablet, etc).
Push Notifications are much better compared to traditional email for promotional content in that it delivers messages in real-time and it has also reported higher response rates compared to email (Open rates for push notifications are 50 percent higher than for email, and click rates are up to twice as high
Push Notifications are much better compared to traditional email for promotional content in that it delivers messages in real-time and it has also reported higher response rates compared to email (Open rates for push notifications are 50 percent higher than for email, and click rates are up to twice as high
We recommend using Webpushr as your WordPress Plugin for Web Push Notifications. Webpushr offers the best set of features and value and is the new standard in web push notifications. With Webpushr WordPress Plugin, you can send web push notifications to your site visitors across all browsers. Your visitors receive these notifications even when they are not on your site. It only takes a few minutes to install. Both HTTP & HTTPS WordPress sites are supported.
Webpushr is better than other push notification providers such as OneSignal as it offers much better pricing (over 80% cheaper) and richer features such as conversion tracking that lets you measure effectiveness of push messaging directly.
Once you have set it up, your site visitors will start seeing opt-in message to receive web push notifications from you. Once they have opted in, you can send them push messages anytime you want.
You can configure the WordPress Plugin to automatically send push notification to your subscribers any time you publish a new post. You can also also view your subscriber count and useful user reports (such as browser & device type) right from the plugin – and for completely free without any limits.
2. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a flexible, open-source eCommerce solution built on WordPress. Whether you’re launching a business, taking an existing brick and mortar store online, or designing sites for clients you can get started quickly and build exactly the store you want.
WooCommerce is often considered one of your best solutions when trying to rapidly build and expand an online store. You could create a store for your blog with five products or include a large collection of thousands of products. The pricing for the plugin is always the same: free. That provides support for unlimited products and visitors, as long as your hosting and infrastructure can handle it.
Activate the free WooCommerce plugin on a new or existing WordPress site, follow the optional guided tour, and set up a new store in minutes with:
- Product, Cart, and Checkout pages
- Secure payments by credit card and alternatives
- Integrate content and commerce across your site via modular blocks
With WooCommerce, you can sell both physical and digital goods in all shapes and sizes, offer product variations, complex configurations, and instant downloads to shoppers; and even sell affiliate goods from online marketplaces.
And those are just the out-of-the-box options. With paid extensions, you can extend your WooCommerce store to take bookings, offer memberships, set up recurring payments by subscription, create dynamic pricing rules, and much more.
3. Easy Digital Downloads
Download Easy Digital Downloads
If you are selling a physcial product that needs to be shipped, you can ignore this plugin. If you are selling a digital product, this plugin is a must-have plugin for your Ecommerce store.
Easy Digital Downloads is a complete eCommerce solution for selling digital products on WordPress.
It offers you all the features you need to run a successful online store: multiple payment gateways, options to create promotional sales, a cart system for purchasing multiple downloads at once, complete payment histories, and more.
Other marketing tools include advanced options for discount codes, promotions, and email marketing with MailChimp and AWeber. It integrates with many payment processors like Stripe, PayPal and Bitpay. But most of these are not free. We do not like that you have to pay $89 to integrate a payment processor when many other plugins do it for free.