Ecommerce has experienced a massive boost with everyone wanting to shop online with convenience from their home or office. There’s no better time to build an ecommerce website than in 2023.
When it comes to developing a professional eCommerce website, there are several approaches and solutions to getting this done, some of which include using Bigcommerce, Webflow, Shopify, Prestashop, Magento, and the rest.
But out of all of these eCommerce solutions, WordPress combined with Woocommerce remains the most popular approach to building an eCommerce website on a budget. According to Barn2.com and Builtwith.com, there are over 4 to 5 million eCommerce websites in 2022.
WordPress remains the most cost-effective solution to build an ecommerce website today, and that’s owing to its open-source nature. WordPress is much appreciated for its flexibility, versatility, and cost-effectiveness and that makes it the best Content Management System (CMS) solution in the market today.
No matter the idea or the product you’d want to create an eCommerce store for, there’s definitely an eCommerce plugin to help you get your store up and running.
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What’s in a WordPress eCommerce Plugin?
The market right now is filled with several WordPress eCommerce plugins, all of these WordPress plugins come with their distinctive features, benefits, pros, and cons and some are more applicable for certain use cases than others.
Take for instance, if your online shop is a digital shop for selling things like ebooks, courses and downloads then easy digital downloads might be a better option than Woocommerce which is suitably designed to cater mostly to the needs of physical product online shops such as fashion e-commerce or tech product e-commerce website development.
The idea is to first understand your market and product, and the type of online store you’d want to create, is it a physical products store? A dropshipping e-commerce shop or digital download store for music, images, ebooks, etc. This will help you to make the right choice of WordPress eCommerce plugins that can suitably cater to all the features you require to run your business.
But in all, let’s consider some factors you need to consider before developing an eCommerce with WordPress.
1. Payment solutions
Your eCommerce business needs to be able to process payments, and for this, you need to pick a WordPress eCommerce plugin that can offer the preferred payment gateway applicable to your region.
For instance, Stripe and PayPal payment integration are common for businesses in Canada, America, and Australia but in Africa, you’re talking about different payment gateway providers such as Flutterwave and Paystack.
2. Design and customization
Next, how much customization can the e-commerce plugin allow? A good choice of eCommerce platform for your WordPress online store must be extensively customizable and design-ready.
There should be templates that you can use to change the look and feel of the web and also not be too rigid for customization. A flexible plugin allows you to easily customize the plugin to integrate important features.
3. Apps and integrations
Integration with other apps must be possible. You need a couple of eCommerce solutions and applications to run your eCommerce business. From email marketing software to CRM & ERP software, accounting software, Payroll, POS, etc. These third-party apps are needed to grow your eCommerce business.
4. Support options
A good eCommerce solution must offer quality support for its users this way you’re sure to save the business from incurring losses and losing money due to a lack of timely support when you most needed it.
What is required to create an eCommerce Website?
From a development standpoint, I can tell that e-commerce websites are resource-driven, intensive resources are needed to run your online shop.
1. Web Hosting
One of the most important elements when developing an eCommerce website using a self-hosted solution is reliable and budget-friendly eCommerce web hosting that can deliver. For this, we recommend Bluehost, Hostinger, or HostGator. Bluehost and Hostgator give you a free domain name and SSL certificate so you can process payment securely on your website while safeguarding the data of your customers.
Other benefits of these top hosting providers :
- Super fast speed loading pages
- Quality customer support
- Dedicated IPs
- One-click installation apps like softaculous power your eCommerce installations.
- Reliable service with 99.9% uptime, so you don’t have to worry about your business ever going offline.
2. Domain name
Next, is a domain name. We expect by now you may already have your business name ready. If you don’t, you can use the Shopify business name suggestion tool to come up with some ideas. Your domain name is a short excerpt of your business name. Here are some tips to come up with the ideal domain name for your eCommerce website.
- Make sure the domain is not too long, short, or concise
- It’s unique and memorable
- No characters or numbers (if possible).
3. Ecommerce Themes
WordPress has the largest number of eCommerce templates and designs, from free themes to paid templates.
You have a plethora of themes to pick from. For serious business and professional business image. I recommend you go with a premium WordPress eCommerce theme such as Porto, Savoy, shopkeeper, kingdom, Flatsome, Gem, Lotus, etc. You can as well explore the Themeforest platform to find an ideal WordPress theme suitable for your eCommerce business model.
4. Plugins
There are several WordPress plugins to add e-commerce functionality to your WordPress website, Woocommerce seems to be the most popular but there are other great plugins that might come in handy for different use cases.
WordPress as a CMS solution like other CMSs uses Plugins generally to add extra functionality to your web. According to Hostinger, there are more than 58,000 WordPress plugins making it one of the most popular CMS solutions on the market today.
From security to email marketing, and product management there’s a plugin for every feature you need for your online shop.
To recommend a few; you need a shopping cart abandonment plugin, email marketing plugins such as Optin monster, bulky Woocommerce product edit, smart e-commerce product review, and more.
Having said that, let’s consider the best WordPress eCommerce plugins in the market right now.
Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugins
In this guide, We will explore 10 of the best WordPress eCommerce plugins in the market today. Woocommerce as noted earlier is the most popular eCommerce plugin in the market right now.
WooCommerce was originally developed by WooThemes on September 27, 2011, by Mike Jolley and James Koster who were developers at Jigowatt. Fast-forward to May 2015, Woocommerce was acquired by WordPress’s mother company Automattic and has since been constantly updated with new features to make it a robust solution for building e-commerce websites.
1. WooCommerce
A lot has been said about WooCommerce already, and no doubt, it’s the biggest and most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It has a marketplace for free and paid Woocommerce extensions. It is backed by a solid team of developers and with millions of users, you’d be sure to have a vast community of passionate users sharing their expertise.
Pros of using Woocommerce
Let’s look at some advantages of using e-commerce as your WordPress eCommerce plugin:
1. Excellent support and help desk
2. Exclusive documentation and knowledge base
3. Ability to integrate third-party growth tools for your business growth
4. SEO-ready
5. Built-in Affiliate feature to create your own referral platform
6. Suitable for both physical and digital stores
7. Supports the most popular payment gateways in the world
8. Calculating shipping and taxes is seamless.
9. Inventory and store management
10. Thousands of themes, plugins, and extensions to introduce new features to your e-commerce site.
Cons of using Woocommerce
1. A little bit complex settings interface which can be confusing for newbies
2. Even though there are thousands of extensions, getting the right extension can sometimes be a hassle.
2. Easy digital downloads
EDD is popular for selling digital products on e-commerce, it’s almost becoming the go-to plugin for digital shops on WP.
It comes with lots of features and a far better experience for businesses who want to sell digital products online and offer products in form of downloadable to users.
It’s intuitive and very to use. The team at WP Beginner uses this plugin to sell some of their most popular WP solutions such as WPForms and Monsterinsights.
Pros of using Easy digital downloads
1. Designed to sell digital downloadable products such as images, files, scripts, music, ebooks, etc.
2. It’s super easy to use; from adding and managing products
3. Well-documented to keep you going for development
4. Great support service and a large community of users
5. Ability to integrate third-party apps and tools
6. You can create your affiliate platform to reward referrals
7. Software licensing for SaaS businesses.
8. Suitable WordPress themes
9. Easy to use and trusted by over 50k users
10. Suitable for all types of digital products
Cons of using Easy Digital downloads
1. Suitable for only digital products
2. Selling other extern products to earn a commission is a bit complex.
3. MemberPress
With the MemberPress plugin, you can create a subscription-based e-commerce website with WordPress. There are several plugins in the market that offers this same solution, but this seems to be the best of them all. It integrates well with Woocommerce and other third-party apps.
Pros of using MemberPress
1. Selling membership and subscription-based products or services is a breeze
2. Intuitive content restriction, management, and access control feature to create subscription packages
3. Create and sell your own courses with the super easy in-built course builder
4. Content dripping to grow a committed user-base
5. Integrates well with third-party extensions such as Affiliate systems and learning management systems, etc
6. Beginner-friendly
Cons of using MemberPress
1. Limited payment option. You can only work with PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize, in case your payment gateway is absent, then you turn to Woocommerce for payment processing which makes the setup and installation become a bit complex to pull through.
2. Annual pricing only.
4. Bigcommerce
If you’re looking to expand your online business, BigCommerce for WordPress is the best option for you. Your company may grow with WordPress on the front end and BigCommerce on the back end, allowing you to focus on what matters most: running your business.
One of WordPress’s up-and-coming competitors in the headless eCommerce space is BigCommerce. It takes care of the necessary technological infrastructure so that you can concentrate on expanding your company.
From a single plugin, you can access all of our eCommerce tools, as well as the option to sell on various marketplaces from a single spot, and best of all, an integrated checkout experience that handles all of the PCI compliance and customer protection on your behalf.
As your company expands, it relieves you of the headaches associated with the process of growing your hosting needs. At the same time, you won’t have to worry about finding extensions for search engine optimization (SEO) and caching, nor will you have to worry about speed or security issues.
Pros of Using BigCommerce
- A highly scalable solution that’s standard for eCommerce platforms.
- Responsive, secure, and high-performance.
- Easy scalability with dedicated developers on hand to assist.
- The only app that offers the highest scalability and enterprise-grade security.
- Combining all the features you need in one, so you don’t need to install a separate addon to do so much stuff
- Create your own content in minutes, without worrying about your eCommerce engine crashing.
- No need to worry about how it will affect your existing website.
- No transaction charges
- Ability to sell on multiple channels
- Hosted on Google cloud so you don’t have to worry about speed
Cons of Using Bigcommerce
- Limited capabilities when it comes to integrating with top popular apps
- Cost can skyrocket when the annual sales threshold is maxed out
5. WordPress Simple Shopping Cart
You can put a “Add to Cart” button for your product on any posts or pages with WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart. This simple shopping cart plugin allows you to sell products and services right from your own WordPress site. It turns your WordPress site into an eCommerce website in just one click.
It also makes it easy to add the shopping cart to or show it on any post, page, or sidebar. The cart shows the user what they have in their cart and gives them the option to change the number of items or cancel the order.
The main benefit is that your users can use a shopping cart. This means they can put more than one item on their list of things they want to buy. It provides you with a little more flexibility in how you sell things on your website.
Once the plugin is installed, you can use the interface to create new products and get a shortcode for each one. Then you can add them to your pages, posts, and areas where widgets are allowed.
The plugin works with all mobile devices, which guarantees that responsive design standards are built in. The PayPal Sandbox feature can be used by WordPress users who want to test it. It gives you a chance to try selling things in a more private setting. Then, you can use the results of your tests to make live product buttons that are ready for production.
6. WPEasyCart
Do you need a full-fledged e-commerce solution for your WordPress website? WP EasyCart is a WordPress shopping cart plugin that allows you to instantly transform your WordPress website into a full-fledged e-commerce web.
You can instantly start offering products for sale; items and digital material, promote free content and do a variety of other things.
EasyCart combines a Stripe cart, a Square cart, and a PayPal cart into one! Stripe payments may be used to sell subscription and recurring billing goods, as well as to accept Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Microsoft Pay.
With our Facebook and Instagram premium extensions, you may sell your items on social media. With WP EasyCart, you can easily sell on Facebook and Instagram using your WordPress shop.
WP EasyCart provides SCA-compliant payment methods (Stripe, Square, and PayPal Express) as well as GDPR compliance choices. EasyCart can handle international eCommerce carts with ease.
Native integration of providers such as USPS, FedEx, and UPS is one of the shipping features. Native Google Analytics will enable you to monitor your sales and no-sales to better understand your items and their selling points.
This will tell you where and how consumers begin and conclude their purchasing experience. There is no need to be concerned about social media. To assist optimize product social exposure, all product pages will have a social sharing button.
Get a quick WordPress eCommerce shopping cart store up and running in minutes! Retail products, subscriptions, digital downloadable goods, gift cards, contributions, services, and other items may all be sold!
Need an Ecommerce Website?
At Web Design Nigeria, we specialize in creating modern and visually appealing websites that are sure to grab the attention of potential customers. With a focus on user experience and search engine optimization, our team of expert designers will work with you to create a website that accurately represents your brand and effectively promotes your business. Let us help you take your online presence to the next level. Call us today at 08114900422 or Email us.
