BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce

Choosing your ecommerce platform is not just the first, but the most important decision you’ll make. The choice of your ecommerce platforms depends on many factors, while the usability and success of your ecommerce website directly(or indirectly) depends on your ecommerce website. So, there are many things that you should consider while choosing your ecommerce platform and those include the expected traffic, the type of products you want to sell, the features you want to see in your website, etc.

Here is a category-wise comparision of each and every feature. This will help you find out the platform that is best for the much-needed features of your website.

Performance

When it comes to performance, both the contenders deserve appreciation. Both are designed to perform and both are equally popular.

The only difference I see is that BigCommerce being specifically designed for creating ecommerce store, whereas WordPress is a blogging platform that is modified to include sales oriented features through WooCommerce

Support

You can look forward at WooCommerce for support. But the things go complicated when you are using a half dozen of plugins and add-ons from different providers.

So, if you are not very confident and feel like you will need to consult the expert and need their help on certain matters, you better go with BigCommerce. Because a 24X7 live service agent is ready for your help even when you subscribe their cheapest plan. Even though WooCommerce is widely used and very efficiently supported, it does not offer support through phone call.

And oh! The call charges won’t be applied, It’s FREE!!

BigCommerce wins!!

Customizing your site

Bigcommerce comes with a set of ready to use features. It sure does deserve appreciation for all for providing everything served in a plate. But depending upon the requirements of your business, you may need different features. The features that the ecommerce platforms comes with may not suffice, you may sometimes need more customized features. In order to get the customization – difficult

WooCommerce, with WordPress is easier to handle. Because it has modular built, which means

Pricing

BigCommerce being a commercial platform for creating ecommerce website has some peculiar pricing plans. However, it is cheaper than the other self-hosted ecommerce platforms.

WooCommerce is free and WordPress is free as well as open source. This implies that WooCommerce and WordPress, you will be able to start with the basic sales on your website without paying anything for  the platform as well as the features. However for advanced features, you may subscribe to their paid package.

WooCommerce wins here, it provides you with almost-everything – for FREE!!

Hosting

BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform with the facility of hosting. You definitely will have to pay for their hosting plans. Whereas WooCommerce website will need you to find a proper host to install your website on.

Bottom line – If you don’t want to spend time to search for the best ecommerce hosting platform go for BigCommerce. If you are very peculiar about hosting and want to host your ecommerce shop on a third party host, WordPress and WooCommerce isn’t bad.

Scalability

WordPress and WooCommerce,

However a larger number of products and visitors implies that you will need more server space and bandwidth. So, you will be compelled to choose an efficient host that offers speedy page loading, brilliant bandwidth and subscribe for some more server space.

 

Product Management

Compatibility issues

WordPress is an open source CMS and the plugins and add-ons are created by third parties. There’s no guarantee about their compatibility. This means that if you are using multiple add-ons from different parties, they may sometimes conflict with each other and you may have a hard time finding out which one is causing the problem.

on the other hand, BigCommerce comes with an app-store that consists of tested and approved app. Most of the apps are sure to be okay with the platform and other apps. This makes it easy to choose your favorite app and integrate it into your BigCommerce website. However, WooCommerce makes it easy to choose, but compatibility is not assured.

Extensions

Others

If you’ve been researching for BigCommerce for a while, or if you happen to know how it works, you might be aware that it is highly praised for its “out of the box features”. The features that are designed to work in a specific way, to fulfill a specific task. However WooCommerce is a simple plugin that capacitates your WordPress website with sales related features. What it does is manage inventory, orders, tax, shipping details and sales. For the other enhancements, however, there are plugins and add-ons.

Conclusion

The criteria on what you judge an ecommerce platform are different for everyone. some of you might want an assured support, while some would prefer ease of use, some would look at the pricing. So, here’s everything clearly classified. Check about the things that matter to you and you can decide which one fits your needs better.

Must have Prestashop Modules for your ecommerce shop

Prestashop has made it very easy to create an ecommerce store. With the easy to use features and flexibility, it makes it possible to sell variety of products online. To complement your website with more features, you can use the prestashop modules.

Most of the ecommerce platform follows modular built. The ecommerce platform comes with all the basic utilities of managing the sales but the advanced features can be added later. These features are available in the form of append-able modules.

These modules generally are for the features that enhance the user experience, boosts sales and pertaining to reports, management and analytics. They can be added into your prestashop store at any time and removed as per your wish.

It’s important to note here, that your prestashop ecommerce website will run as good as without these modules. These modules can be added to the shop to enhance the features of your website. To make your prestashop store more affluent, here is the list of the ecommerce modules that you should try out to enhance your eshop and boost your sales.

All-in-one Rewards

Want to offer the provision of reward points into your website? This is the best plugin to do so. This module is designed to let your customers earn and use the reward points on your website. Easy to use, easy to manage, this module helps you boost your sales and maintain the customer relationship. It is a full-fledged system for managing reward points feature.

SEO expert module

How can a list for the must have prestashop modules be complete without a module for SEO optimization? SEO expert module comes with most of the SEO oriented features that you will need to run your ecommerce website. It’s main aim is to help you with the meta tags. It helps you boost productivity and traffic. Manage the meta tags, URLs and social media referencing through this plugin.

Customers ratings + reviews pro

Never underestimate the magic that the customers reviews and ratings can do. They are too good for generating a large amount of user generated content which is good for SEO. Customer rating and reviews enhances customer experience on your products as they are allowed to voice out their opinions of their product. The prospect customers are also affected by the reviews and ratings. Incorporate a sleek system for commenting using this plugin. Along with ratings and reviews, it also includes the features to aid the Google Rich Snippet module.

Abandoned cart pro

Abondoned cart pro sends a message to the customers when they add products to their cart but do not proceed for checkout. This module is a reminder for the customers to recall them of what they were trying to buy and did not. It surely helps you increase conversions.

Google Analytics

It’s good to keep a track of the user activities on your website. This will help you find out the traffic patterns and whether you are making progress or not. Once in a while, it is very important to find out your own flaws and work on it, rather than studying the competition. study the customer behavior and plan the modifications for your website to instigate more user actions.

Quick edit products

Quick edit products is for those who want faster result without investing much of their time. It makes editing your products very easy for you.

Sendin Blue

It’s good to stay in touch of your customers and keep them updated with the latest trend. If you wish to do this by sending the emails to your subscriber, then you should try sending blue. It is a perfect module for sending newsletter to your subscriber.

Online quotation

Let the visitors request you for the quotation of the products they wish to purchase. This can be created and managed easily using this amazing prestashop module. So provide your customers with the estimations and improve your conversions.

Conclusion

So these were the best Prestashop modules. They are the modules that add some utility oriented features into your website. Besides these features, there are many more modules and you can find it here. Prestashop is easy to use and so are these modules. All you need to do is install them and make some necessary configurations.

We would love to hear from you. Leave your opinions and reviews in the comment section below.

Selling digital products on your ecommerce website using Premium WordPress Themes

Ecommerce websites are taking the customary trade and retail businesses to a next level. The buyers are now looking for convenient ways to buy the products. The ecommerce website have successfully provided them the whole market at their finger tips.

Over the last decade, the demand and market for digitized products has inflated a lot. And therefore if you are thinking of starting an online business, there is a great scope. Digital files in the form of audio, images, ebooks, documents, softwares and applications are downloaded and uploaded in a large number everyday. For selling such digital products, there are ecommerce platforms which automatizes the process and makes it easy to protect the documents online and only allow them to be downloaded when the customer pays.

Digital ecommerce stores like mp3 downloads portal, for ebooks or any other documents, or for games and app store. These products are intangible and are available for download.

What kind of products can you sell online?

The following are the most common types of digital goods that can be sold online. These products are in form of electronic documents/files. Later, we will also discuss the popular ecommerce platforms for selling digital products.

ebooks and pdf documents

e-book-1209040_960_720

The most popular of the digital goods is “ebooks”. So, you can sell the digital ebooks using your online shop. The people who love to read now prefer to carry the digital copies of their books in their mobile devices. The hard copies of the books are difficult to carry while the digital copies are so easy to be transported. You can carry hundreds of books in your pocket and take it wherever you go.

Audio and Music

e-book-1218398_960_720

Internet is the greatest source of music. Most people prefer to download music online instead of buying CDs and disks. So, you can sell music online. There are many website that sells music and songs online. Music can be of many type : Songs, ring tones, instrumental music, etc.

Images, graphics and photographs

photo-256887_960_720

If you are a graphics designer or a photoshop expert and you’ve got the art then you can create and sell designed images, vector graphics, logos, icons, etc. online. The photographers can also sell the images online using the digital download tools available.

Videos & Video games

minecraft-636754_960_720

Not just images and audio, you can also sell videos online. Videos in the form of movie, documentaries, tutorials, etc. Accept the payment from the customers and allow them to download the requested video from your website.

Softwares and applications

applications

You can sell softwares for both, computer as well as mobile phones. The best example here is – How you buy photoshop and install it in your desktop. Such products are provided in form of .exe (executable) or zip files. They are the installation files that the users can download and install.

Online Courses

Online courses are a way of delivering knowledge and specialisation through the internet. There are plenty of online educational websites, or LMS(learning management system). These systems offer online courses that you can pay for to get access.

Themes, plugins, logos, graphic designs, etc

This is the age of CMS and web platforms. The companies who design the themes, WordPress templates, add-ons sell them online. These themes are available as zipped files and they can be downloaded by the users from the theme provider’s website. The themes and plugins can be free or paid.

 

So, these are the products that you can sell online. Now, we will discuss the best platforms that you can use to sell your digital products online. These products are designed to let you sell your products effortlessly. Most of the platform allows you to concentrate on your products while they handle the order processing and selling process.

Ecommerce platforms for selling digital goods online

sellfy

sellfy

Selling digital goods with sellfy is very simple. If you already own a website you can start selling downloadable products online buy integrating a button or you can create a storefront using sellfy.

Sellfy is used by a large number of artists and creators who sell their products and make moneyeasily. Sellfy also lets the visitors find great digital products online. It is a great place if you are a graphic designer or a musician and looking for the most convinient place to sell your products online.

Visit this page to view the pricing plans of sellfy. They charge a fixed monthly fee plus a little transaction cost.

Sendowl

sendowl

Sendowl lets you sell your downloadable products online. It is a flexible, easy to use and transparent system for selling digital products online. It also has the feature of pdf stamping, free updates downloads, an affiliate system, and integrates with the best payment processors like PayPal.  All you’ll need to do is get the button from sendowl on your website.

sendowl

You can try their free trial version for 30 days. After that, you can choose from their monthly subscription plans. Click here to check out their pricing plans. Sendowl does not charge you based on the transactions or the sales you make.

DPD

dpd

With DPD all you need to do is upload your products and place the button you get from DPD, that’s it! DPD, like any other platform listed here, aims to help you sell products conveniently, without worrying about the background processing of the order and its fulfilment. So as a seller, all you need to do is to concentrate on your products.

DPD works with a wide range of Payment processors and supports a large range of marketing and analytics tools.It allows some basic customisation, easy upload and  safe processing. Click here to check the available pricing plans. However, the good news is – You won’t have to pay per transaction charges.

Pulley

pulley

Pulley is a service from BigCartel to enable you to sell downloadable goods online. If you are not a bigcartel user, Pulley provides you with a button to sell your products online. Pulley comes with the basic ecommerce features included, it does not complicate the process with high-end features. Pulley is quite simple to use and implement.

We recommend you to take a 14 days free trials before you subscribe.  Click here to view the pricing plans of pulley. It does not charge you any per transaction fee.

 

WordPress and WooCommerce

woocommerce

WooCommerce is the best ecommerce solution for WordPress. WooCommerce is one of the best and complete ecommerce plugin. It is very easy to use and flexible. Moreover, it is free! WooCommerce is a complete solution for selling your products online. It lets you easily upload the product through an intuitive form and then sell online.

WooCommerce is for selling physicals as well as downloadable products. WooCommerce lets you add features to your website using the extensions. View all the extensions here. However, you can sell your products without including any of the extensions. They are only for advanced features and enhancements.

Here is a brilliant tutorial on how you can sell your digital products using WooCommerce. Also refer this one.

Shopify

shopify

Shopify is one of the leading ecommerce platforms that lets you sell physical as well as digital products. Shopify can be enabled for selling digital products using the Digital downloads app available in the app store. It is a free app, you just have to pay the shopify fee according to the plan you choose.

Downloading and installing this app in your Shopify website makes it ready to sell your digital products. Shopify is easy to use and has flexible subscription plans. Even the people with very little or no technical knowledge can use shopify to sell their products online.

Fetchapp

fetch-app

Fetchapp is a highly integrable ecommerce platform for selling downloadable goods. It is designed to work with the most successful and popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WordPress, Goodsie and BigCommerce.

Fetchapp accepts a nominal monthly fee based on your storage requirements. There are different plans you can choose from. See all the plans here. They also have a free plan if you have a very little storage requirement.

Fetchapp is easy to use and there are many plans you can choose from. Once you subscribe, you will be allowed to use all the fetchapp features with the allotted storage.

Easy digital downloads – For WordPress

easy_digital_downloads

If you want to sell your electronic documents and medias using WordPress, Easy Digital downloads is the solution. As the name suggests, it is specially designed to let you sell your digital goods. Easy Digital downloads is a complete solution for selling such products.

The plugin is totally free to use. However, you will have to pay for the additional extensions or add-ons. You can get these extensions and add-ons if you want extra features like advanced analytics tools, more payment gateways, etc.

Easy Digital downloads provides you with a shopping cart for selling Digital products along with the features like download tracking, reports, discount codes, etc. There is no limit to the downloads you can provide.

ejunkie

ejunkie

ejunkie provides you online ecommerce tools to sell your digital products. Here’s  a screenshot from the e-junkie website to show you the simple four-step procedure to start selling digital products online.

ejunkie-4-steps

You can start with the 7 days free trial before you actually subscribe and pay. So take your time and experiment with the platform. If you don’t like it, you can stop using it without ever paying or you can continue using it if you subscribe by paying the fees.

It also has an affiliate program. This will enable you to encourage your buyers to promote your products on their website and blogs.

E-junkie charges you a monthly subscription fee and that’s all. There is no extra/hidden charges and no monthly limitations of bandwidth or transactions. They have a straightforward and clearly defined pricing plans. You can check their pricing plans here.

Gumroad

gumroad

Gumroad is a unique and accomplished ecommerce solution for selling your digital products online. Along with the digital products, you can also sell your physical products through Gumroad.

You can also offer discount codes, create license numbers and sell multiple version of the same software. Visit this page to view all that you could do with Gumroad.

Gumroad directly interacts with the credit card companies. It does not use the PayPal payment processor whereas most of such companies does. Gumroad does not charge a monthly fee, instead it charges you for the transactions as well a nominal fixed cost (5% + $0.25 per sales). So, you will only pay for the sales you make.

Conclusion

So these were the digital products and the best ecommerce platforms through which you can sell them. With digital goods, there will be no shipping and shipping charges. That way, selling digital goods is much easier than with selling shippable products. There are platforms and softwares that makes it very easy to sell these kind of products online.

We’ll love to hear from you. You can leave your reviews and opinions in the comment sections below.

Prestashop review: How suitable it is for your ecommerce website?

There are plenty of ecommerce platforms to choose from to create your ecommerce website. And we understand how difficult it is to select the best one from them. The ecommerce website building frameworks come with different features and different level of flexibility and ease of use. The ecommerce platform you choose for your website also plays a major role in the success of failure of your business. Therefore, this decision needs to be taken very carefully. There are many things that you should consider while selecting the ecommerce platform.

Choosing the platform is a one time decision. You cannot switch ecommerce platforms as and when required. It’s a complicated and expensive thing to do. So cautiously choose the ecommerce platform so that you don’t have to regret it later. Now if you are confused about choosing the right platform for your website, here is a detailed Prestashop review, to let you figure out if it works for you.

Watch the live demo

What is prestashop?

Prestashop is an ecommerce platform to create an online shop. Prestashop is completely free to download and it is open source. It comes with all the basic features included and then there are addons that you can include to enhance the features.

You can download prestashop and find the hosting for yourself. Or you can subscribe the cloud based hosting service for your prestashop website.

Basic requirements

All you need is to download a free Prestashop setup, a computer with working internet connection. Besides you will need to subscribe to a hosting provider. You can also opt for the cloud hosting service for Prestashop website. Prestashop is not for people with zero technical knowledge. Whereas, ecommerce platforms like shopify and BigCommerce are really easy to use.

Prestashop – The basic features

All the features you need to sell are included in the free download. And for more features you can rely on the addons. It comes with the

The features can be managed using a mobile device too. So, you need not open up your computer every time to manage your shop. You can do it right with your mobile phone, ipad or any such device.

Prestashop templates and addons

When you are creating a website with Prestashop, you have the option of choosing from some very elegant themes. There are free as well as paid templates to choose from.

View the theme store>>

Prestashop is free to use. It comes with all the required features inbuilt. But you have the flexibility to extend the features of your website using the addons.

View the addons store>>

Payment Processing with Prestashop

Prestashop is flexible and it offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to choosing the payment processor. The default is Prestashop payments by Hipay. However, the other payment gateways are available as extra add-ons.

Prestashop supports most of the popular payment gateways and so you can choose the convenient payment gateway for your shop. This makes it possible for you to allow your users to make payment with a reliable payment gateway based on their location.

Installing and using the payment modules is very simple. Download the addons from the app store and configure it to start accepting payments.

Community help and documentation

Prestashop community now has more than one million members. The members of this community are continuously working to improve the platform and they provide consistent updates with bug fixes and added features.

Who should use Prestashop?

Prestashop is not that hard to use. But it does needs you to have some technical knowledge. There are a lots of ecommerce platforms available in the market. Prestashop can be a right choice for you if your project is medium to large sized. As mentioned earlier, you will have to spend on hosting and the apps and features for a utility oriented website.

Prestashop pricing

Prestashop is free to download and use, it is opensource. However, the add-ons that you would want to use are not free. However the add-ons and integrations are optional. You can add apps based on your requirements. You will have to subscribe for hosting or you can choose their cloud based hosting for your ecommerce website.

Ultimately, the cost of your website depends on the addons you choose to include in your website and the hosting plan you choose.

Shops that use Prestashop

Get inspired! Here are a few example websites you should take a look at before you start with your own. They’ll help you estimate what you can do with prestashop.

Click here to view the websites made using Prestaprestashop-showcase

Conclusion

Prestashop is without doubts a complete and efficient system for creating your ecommerce website. It is however, not for newbies and the people who’ve never tried coding and are not looking forward to learn it anyways. It is basically free but the advanced features will cost you.

Prestashop has a great community and is a developing platform. So you can expect it to improve with every new version. The themes and apps are great. Yes, you’ll have to pay for them, but they’re really good. Prestashop also has a positive reputation when it comes to SEO.

So I recommend Prestashop to the techno-enthusiasts who want to make the things work their way and for larger website. If you want to create small basic websites with limited products and features, you can opt for Shopify, or WordPress and WooCommerce.

Prestashop surely helps you create amazing ecommerce websites with beautiful features and great looks. Prestashop is free and therefore you can try it at your localhost first.

Best BigCommerce apps to enhance your ecommerce website

best bigcommerce apps

Ecommerce platforms are flexible and easy to use and are designed to aid the non-technical persons to create their online shop.

Most of the ecommerce platfoms come with the basic features included and for advanced features there’s an app store. This is a modular way to offer features. All the fundamental facilities are already included into the platform and the additional and optional features are offered as add-ons.

BigCommerce does the same. The platform can run flawlessly without any plugin but if you want to enhance the online shop, you can visit the app store and get appropriate app,

In stock notify

When the customers land on the product detail page of a product that is out of stock, you know that it is waste of opportunity for you. However,

This app works to notify the users when an item that went out of stock recently, comes back in stock. When a user accesses the product page of a product that is out of stock, he will be provided with a form. The user will be notified when the item comes back into stock, so that he can proceed to buy it.

Know more about InStockNotify

Sweet tooth loyalty points program

If you wish to run the loyalty points program into your website, this is the app for Big Commerce.

This app is easy to customize and use. You can just include it and start your own loyalty point programme for your customers. It’s always good to provide extra benefits to your loyal customers. All you need to do is to select the action for which you want to reward your customers. This app lets you choose from more than 10 of such profitable actions.

Know more about Sweet tooth loyalty points program

Apptive

Your customers will be able to access your store more conveniently if you provide an app for your ecommerce website (also it is possible via Wp eCommerce themes). This can be done using apptive. This add-on helps you deliver better results on mobile devices. So attract more customers and let them shop through your shopping app! Helps improving the user experience and convenient mobile checkout helps better conversions.

Know more about Apptive

Yotpo

There no denying that User generated content plays an important role in your website. Yotpo focuses on It contributes positively for your SEO. Yotpo is a reviews app to allow the customers to leave reviews and comments on your BigCommerce product pages.

This mobile friendly reviews tools helps you generate UGC and

Know more about Yotpo

Optimizely

optimizely is a testing tool. When you want to decide the best method to implement for improved sales and performance of your ecommerce website, you can use this split testing tool to find out which method works best.

This tool works in the simplest way, It will show two different version designed by you to the customers and let you track the performance to find out which version converts better. It comes with an automatic goal tracking mechanism too!

Know more about optimizely

Justuno

Justuno is a plugin with combination of features that aim to improve the profitability of your website by increasing conversion of the traffic that your website has. It works on four main grounds – increased social sharing, increase email subscriptions, and reduce the abundant carts.

Know more about Justuno

zompim

Zompim is a simple and straightforward tool to track the users that are currently viewing your website and the products they are viewing. This is the best tool if you want to integrate the feature of live chat into your website.

The live chat box will be customizable so that you can change its color according to the design requirement of your website.

Know more about Zompim

Klaviyo

klaviyo is an email marketing tool that you can use to communicate well with your existing customers. It is a system through which you can send post purchase emails, loyalty appreciation emails, and targeted mails for a specific segment of customers.

SearchSpring

You know how important it is to take care of your customer’s choices, don’t you? Therefore this is Searchspring, it monitors users behavior and searches and estimates the best products. This plugin does everything to help the customers find the most relevant products on your website. You will be able to provide custom filtered searches.

Know more about searchspring

Sellbrite

Using different platforms for selling your products is a great way to maximize the sales. However, managing the inventory and syncing the sales on various platform can be extremely difficult. Sellbrite can help you here.

Sellbrite lets you sell your BigCommerce products on multiple sales channel. It enables you to list your products on websites like eBay, Amazon, Rakuten, Newegg, Sears and Etsy. It is simple and very easy to use. So, you can sell your products on more than one sales platform. You can even update your BigCommerce website with new products from your Sellbrite inventory.

Know more about sellbrite

TrueShip

TrueShip helps you manage the fulfillment once the orders are placed. It is a shipping management system that integrates with your BigCommerce shop and all your shipping carriers. It induces manageability and flexibility in your shipping procedure. You will be able to print a perfect invoice including the shipping information.

Know more about TrueShip

Social rebate

Social media is one of the best platform to promote your ecommerce shop. How good it would be if all your customers recommend your products to their friends on social media. This plugin encourages your customers to do so and earn some exclusive discount!

Social rebate is a great tool for getting your customers to promote your products. You can make your customers share your store and products with their social circles and let them earn discount on their purchases. With all the settings options available you can set up the number of clicks needed to earn the cash discount, the rebate amount, etc.

Know more about social rebate>>

Conclusion

Be careful while you add features into your website. You can use these apps and augment your simple ecommerce store. Some of the apps are free and some are premium apps. However, excessive use of apps may just make your website more complex than required. And a combination of right apps may just boost the usability of your website to a whole new level. So its all about the choices you make. The right ecommerce platform, a suitable design and the combination of the apps to magnify your website.

7 myths of ecommerce and the truth behind them

 

Creating, managing and maintaining an eCommerce website demands lots of efforts. Before you start selling online, you will need a proper market research and know-how about the business domain. While  you search the internet for fact-finding regarding your business area, you might come across some common misconceptions about eCommerce. These misconceptions are nothing but facts that are partially right but not complete. So here are 7 myths of eCommerce with the truth behind them.

Traffic will come automatically

As the quote goes “Nothing worth having comes easy” and so, no useful traffic will come to your website automatically. But don’t let this statement unnerve you. Today, there are a number of ways you can promote your eCommerce website and inspire people to visit your website. Remember that when you start an eCommerce website, you are stepping into a domain of intense competition.

If you ask me, the hardest part of setting up eCommerce website is not designing or developing. It is to bring about traffic. The eCommerce platforms and the website building tools made it easy to create and develop a website, but the real struggle begins when your website is online and you are ready to sell. This is when you will need to find out ways through which you can bring in traffic. There are various ways to do that.

To attract traffic

  • Launch targeted advertisements, use cross-links and other marketing
  • Use social media for promotions
  • Optimize your product pages to rank well for the targeted keywords.

The bottom line is, the traffic won’t come automatically, but working in the right direction with a planned marketing strategy, promotions and other things like product page SEO, website ranking, directly helps you bring traffic to your website.

Setting up eCommerce is inexpensive and easy

Setting up eCommerce website is not easy at all. However, doing it right will help you sell online and make substantial profits.

Not to dishearten you, but creating and managing eCommerce websites is not a piece of pie. It will need your time, efforts, and constant contemplation before you start making substantial profits.

For a smooth running eCommerce website, you need to make some correct decisions first. Choose an appropriate eCommerce platform on which you can build your website. Next is to choose the relevant design/theme. And then maintaining and managing your eCommerce website. Keeping it updated with the products, and the latest trends. All of this needs patience and efforts.

SEO is a one time task

No it’s not! It’ s not like you will hire an SEO expert and get your website optimized, Once and for all. But it doesn’t work that way. SEO demands constant attention and modifications. You will need to stay in touch with the market progressions and keep your website updated according to the latest trends.

SEO requirements for your website will change according to the competition, market trends, etc. Also, at different period of time, you will have to focus on different aspect of your website. So, be prepared for this! SEO of your website will need constant follow ups and updations.

Click here to know what you  can do to aid the SEO of your eCommerce website.

Good products are enough

Good products obviously help you to sell more. But there are other things related to the product that matter as much as the quality of the product. The most important thing you would want to make right is “Product presentation“. How you display your products on an eCommerce website really makes the difference.

There are some product presentation techniques that you must learn. The products should be well described and clearly displayed. The product pages should be easy to access and should answer all the questions that a prospective customer would have.

You won’t need any online experience if you are well informed about the physical or spot market

Not saying that your experience of market won’t help your eCommerce website, but you need to realize that selling online is a totally different thing. Consider this, you are in a shop and a customer arrives asking for a mobile phone. He will tell you the features and you will find out a phone that does exactly what the customer wants. Now, consider the same customer comes to your eCommerce website. Here, not you but your website will interact with the customer. So you need to make sure that your website has the features to let the visitors find what they want, easily.

Ecommerce platform doesn’t matter

Why wouldn’t it? The platform you choose to create your eCommerce website is like the foundation on which a building is constructed.

The eCommerce platform you choose for creating your online shop DOES matter! Even the subscription plan matters. This is because different subscription level comes with different SEO options, Security essentials and features. Therefore, the plan that you choose should include all, it should be flexible enough to let you manage the SEO of the content and the pages. Even a theme that you choose, somehow influences the success of your website.

Myths about Security of your website

Never, never take the security of your website for granted, especially when it’s an eCommerce website. An eCommerce website will have a lots of financial transactions involved. So the security of such website needs to be taken seriously.

Installing one or more eCommerce security plugins compatible with your eCommerce platform will surely help you securing your website. But the hackers always find new ways to attack and damage. Therefore, use preventive measures against potential threats. Keep checking for vulnerabilities and work to block them.

Network security is one of the main part of IT industry and it undergoes constant development and updation. Make sure you keep up with it and are not left behind.

Conclusion

These were some common misconceptions about eCommerce that are completely false. You may hear these things at first when you are new to the online business and it’s very important  that you don’t believe them. However, the businesses, specially online businesses are completely unpredictable and dynamic. So, you need a careful start after intense studies, and market analysis. And nothing equals experience. After a while of surviving the market and the competition you will be able to derive better decisions for yourself.

 

Best WooCommerce plugins 2020

woocommerce plugins

WooCommerce is Number 1 ecommerce plugin to create an online shopping website using WooCommerce. This is because of all the features it lets you use out of the box. WooCommerce comes with all the basic ecommerce features to create and run a simple ecommerce website. For the advanced features however, you have the abundant extensions and add-on that you can use to add features to your ecommerce website. Here is the list of the best WooCommerce plugins that you can include to enhance your online shop. Let’s see what they are about.

WooCommerce Multilingual

woocommerce multilingual plugin

If the scope of your ecommerce website is global, then you sholud probably go for a multilingual website using the WPML plugin. But what about the product and the shop pages. Well, that is what this plugin is about. This plugin lets you translate the shop/product pages. However, you can only use this plugin if you have the premium WPML plugin.

Download WooCommerce Multilingual 

WooCommerce Catalog mode

WooCommerce catalogue mode

Some of the WordPress ecommerce themes designed for WooCommerce may provide you with catalog mode. But if your WordPress theme comes without the catalog mode, here is the WooCommerce aid that comes to rescue. This plugin helps you to convert your WooCommerce website into a catalog. This will change your website into a catalog while maintenance. So your visitors will still be able to see the products, contact you and send inquiries.

Download YITH Catalog mode

Stripe for WooCommerce

Woocommerce stripe

If you are habituated to accept payments through Stripe and want to do the same through WordPress WooCommerce website, you can use this add-on. It integrate Stripe as your payment processor and ensure safe and secure transactions.

Download stripe for WooCommerce

Product Details Customizer

product details customizer

You need to use the product detail page to precisely present your product and its properties. So, this plugin will let you customize the product detail page.

Download WooCommerce product details customizer

WooCommerce Product Gift Wrap

product gift wrap

Facilitate your buyers to get their products gift wrapped. This plugin will add an option of “Gift Wrap” to the products. You can even charge extra for this service.

Download WooCommerce product Gift Wrap

WooCommerce Poor Guys Swiss Knife

Just like the swiss knife , this plugin is a bundle of powerful extensions. It is free to use. This plugin provides various customization options for your WooCommerce shop. You can add custom fields, manage country specific needs, etc.

Download WooCommerce Poor Guys Swiss Knife

Pay With Amazon

pay with amazon

Save the users the trouble of creating an account on your website and adding all details required for checkout. Let them use their Amazon account for paying. This plugin allows your users to pay directly through their amazon account for shopping on your WooCommerce store.

Download  Pay With Amazon

WooCommerce Customizer

Woocommerce customizer

This is a plugin I would recommend to someone who likes to be very peculiar about the design of each and every element of his shop. WooCommerce customizer provides you a way of customizing the elements of your WooCommerce shop. Customize the labels, text fields, buttons, etc. However, you will need a little coding knowledge to use this plugin.

Download WooCommerce Customizer

WooCommerce Checkout Manager

WooCommerce checkout manager

As the name suggests, this plugin is all about the checkout manager. What it lets you do is to customize the checkout of your website. If you do not want to go with the basic checkout that WooCommerce provides, you can install and use this plugin. You can add new fields to the checkout form if you want to collect additional information from your buyers. You can also make fields compulsory/optional and change their order of appearance.

WooCommerce checkout manager

WooCommerce EU VAT Compliance

WooCommerce VAT EU compliance

This does exactly what the name says. Based on the customer’s location and the product price the VAT will be calculated.

WooCommerce EU VAT Compliance

WooCommerce Smart Sale Badge

WooCommerce smart sale badge

When you are creating sale on your online shop, this plugin comes to your rescue. Show the customers what exactly they will be able to save by purchasing a product within the sale period. It is a smart and efficient add-on.

Download WooCommerce Smart Sale Badge

WooCommerce My Account Widget

WooCommerce My account Widget

Let your customers get every bit of their account at one place. This add-on displays all the customer particulars, like the customer account, shopping pages, cart, etc and allows the user to easily access everything.

Download WooCommerce My Account Widget

Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce

WooCommerce Order delivery date

This is a simple and straightforward plugin. Installing this plugin will allow the users to select a delivery date for their products when they checkout. This plugin will add the field and all the users will have to do is to select the date.

WooCommerce Order delivery date

Weight/Country Shipping for WooCommerce

Weight Country Shipping for WooCommerce

The world has become a small place now. Your ecommerce website can serve different countries at once. So, if you want to sell your products in different countries, the calculation of the shipping cost will be different for different places. This plugin lets you manage that.

Download Weight/Country Shipping for WooCommerce

WooCommerce – Gift Cards

WooCommerce gift cards

You can sell gift cards to your users using this plugin. This way you can allow your customers to sell gift card to their friends and relatives.

Download WooCommerce – Gift Cards

YITh WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier

YITH Zoom Magnifier

The effect of this plugin will be seen on your product detail page. The product image will be zoomed on hovering the mouse pointer on it. YITH WooCommerce Zoom magnifier is a lightweight plugin. The product detail page and the product page are the main players in an ecommerce website. So, this add-on may directly help you deliver better product presentation.

Download WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier

WooCommerce New Product Badge

WooCommerce product badge

The WooCommerce product badge plugin will enable you to show badges on your WooCommerce products. It will let you show new, sale, featured, etc badges on your products. It is lightweight, simple and translatable.

Download WooCommerce New Product badge

WooCommerce Photos Product Tab

WooCommerce photo products tab

Product images in an eshop are very important. If you want to display the product images in tab, then you can use this plugin. You can select the size of the images you want to be displayed in the tabs.

Download WooCommerce Photos Product Tab

WooCommerce Advanced Product Quantities

WooCommerce advanced product quantities

If you want your customers to buy a certain amount of quantities and only allow checkout if the condition is met, then you can use this plugin. It lets you set the maximum and minimum values. The customers will only be able to checkout if the requirement is met.

Download WooCommerce Advanced Product Quantities

WooCommerce PDF & Print

WooCommerce pdf and print

Many users will want to save the product details to their local machine or to print it. This is what the plugin lets you do. This plugin allows the users to directly download the product page and save it as pdf for reviewing later. They can also print the page directly.

Download WooCommerce PDF & Print

WooCommerce Product FAQs

WooCommerce product faqs

Product FAQs are my personal favourite when it comes to shopping online. They’re a better way to answer the queries of your users. The Product FAQs plugin will be displayed with your product page itself. So, if any user has a question, he can add it there. This question will then be retained as a part of FAQs. This features eliminates the need of using the contact form to ask for support.

Download WooCommerce Product FAQs

WooCommerce Currency Switcher

WooCommerce currency switcher

This plugin, as the name suggest will let the users switch the currency. The plugin is very useful if the scope of your website is across different countries with different currencies. It is a light weight plugin that you can integrate and make your website more useful.

Download WooCommerce Currency Switcher

WooCommerce Colors

WooCommerce colors

Want to change the colors of the elements of your WordPress WooCommerce store? WooCommerce colors lets you do that very easily. So now you can change the colors of the element to match the theme color of your store.

Download WooCommerce colors

Minimum Purchase for WooCommerce

WooCommerce minimum purchase

This plugin lets you set the standards for minimum purchase through your website. Before you are allowed to checkout, the conditions are checked. If the qualifications are not met, the checkout is not allowed.

Download Minimum Purchase for WooCommerce

Conclusion

These optional WooCommerce plugins are designed for some specific purposes. They are simple and easy to use. All you need to do is to download and install the extension. Most of these add-ons are really easy to configure.

Adding more features to your ecommerce website helps you improve the user experience which may eventually result in more conversions. At the same time profusion of  these features may result in unnecessary complication of your website. This may make it difficult for the customers to interact with your website easily. So only go for the features that are absolutely needed.

You can post your comments and let us know your view point. Also post your opinions, reviews or anything that can help us make this article better.

 

Best WordPress ecommerce plugins 2020

wordpress ecommerce plugins

WordPress is one of the most popular as well as most used CMS. It is popular because it is flexible, feature rich and easy to use. Moreover, it is free and opensource. WordPress is also one of the best alternatives for creating your ecommerce website. Even though it is not particularly designed for ecommerce, it has made it’s place among the best ecommerce platforms. This is due to its adaptability and the incredible and the best WordPress ecommerce plugins that make it possible to turn your WordPress website into a fully fledged online shop.

Confused? Refer this article to find out – Is WordPress good for ecommerce?

Here is a list of the best WordPress ecommerce plugins that make it possible for you to create a full blown ecommerce website effortlessly.

WooCommerce ecommerce plugin

woocommerce

Lets start with WooCommerce. It is the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress. Creating a WordPress ecommerce website with this plugin is as easy as a pie. Install WordPress, make necessary configurations, upload your products and you’re ready to go. This makes it possible for you to start selling online without writing or tweaking a line of code.

What I like the best about WooCommerce is the “setting options”. Firstly, all the settings options are greatly grouped and organized and you won’t have to click on ten links to find a certain options. Next is the fields of these options are self-explanatory and generalized phrases. Intuitive options make the configuration very easy.

When it comes to features, WooCommerce has everything that you need for an online shop. Inventory management, Shipping, Discount, smooth checkout, accounts, etc. Adding products is equally easy using the “add product” form. With WooCommerce you can sell shippable as well as downloadable goods. WooCommerce has some addons that enhance the functionality of WooCommerce and helps you make your ecommerce website more facilitated.

WP Ecommerce plugin

wp-ecommerce

WP Ecommerce is an alternative to WooCommerce. It is also a full-purpose ecommerce plugin to start selling online with your WordPress website.

The payment processing will be SSL secure and allows integration with many payment gateways. This plugin surely provides you with powerful tools to create, manage and maintain your ecommerce website. WP ecommerce provides the basic selling features and then you can go for the add-ons for more features. It is good for selling physical and digital goods, membership and subscription packages.

Easy Digital Downloads WordPress shopping cart free

easy_digital_downloads

As the name suggests, Easy Digital Downloads is for selling the intangible goods. You can create a WordPress website to sell digital goods using this plugin. You can sell music, ebooks, photographs, icons on your WordPress website.

So the bottom line is, get this plugin if you are determined to sell the digital products only. You can do this by any other ecommerce plugin like WooCommerce or WP Ecommerce but Easy digital downloads provides you with solutions specifically designed for downloadable files. WP Ecommerce also lets you maintain and view accounts. You can create discount codes and track the activities of your users too.

Go for it if you want to create a straightforward website that allows digital downloads!

iThemes exchange WordPress ecommerce plugin

ithemes

iThemes exchange is an ecommerce plugin which claims to be “simple”. It lets you create online shop, display your products and collect payment for them. Moreover, you can add more features if you want.

iThemes exchange is more of a straightforward system that makes it possible to sell with your website, without involving unnecessary complications. However, if you like more options and more features, WooCommerce is the one for you. One noteworthy thing about iThemes exchange is that you can use the add-ons to extend the functionality of your website. It allows stripe and PayPal for accepting payments.

iThemes exchange gives you pretty-much everything without actually complicating the process. So you can decide the features of your online shop and add them as you go.

Shopify ecommerce for WordPress

shopify

Shopify is one of the most successful ecommerce platforms. This independent ecommerce platform allows you to easily create and manage ecommerce website without any technical know-how. However, if you are affluent with WordPress and want the shopify features into your WP website, then this plugin is a gift for you.

Shopify promises professional product presentation, shopping cart and secure checkout features. It is flexible and simple. It allows SSL safe checkout and integration of PayPal and Stripe for transactions. Besides there are many other features that makes it a reliable choice for selling on your WordPress website.

I recommend this plugin if you want to sell a few products along with your blog or business website. Because, to create a full fledged shop, you can instead go for shopify ecommerce platform or opt for WordPress + WooCommerce.

Jigoshop ecommerce plugin for WordPress

jigoshop

Jigoshop is indeed a feature rich ecommerce plugin for WordPress. This plugin lets you create online shopping website with all the features it requires.

Even though it is not as widely used as WooCommerce, it does prove to be a complete ecommerce solution. It is easy to setup and configure. It lets you add products as easily as WooCommerce does. It helps you manage shipping and taxations. You can also create discounts, view reports and manage stock.

This plugin is extendable. You can add more features to your ecommerce website using the 100+ addons.

ecwid WordPress shopping cart free

ecwid

Ecwid is has made its reputation a pluggable shop. The first thing you should know about it is Ecwid stands for Ecommerce Widget. The name gives quite an idea about what it does.

So now you create your shop with ecwid and then you can plug it into your existing website. With ecwid you can sell on facebook, ebay, etc. This is a great advantage to those who already own a website with great traffic and credibility. You would definitely want to use these benefits to help your online shop. So, create a new page and insert your pluggable eshop and start selling right away. The best things about ecwid is its portability and compatibility. It is surely one of the best alternative when you already own a website and want to start selling through it.

Cart66

cart66 WordPress ecommerce

Cart66 focuses on security. They strive to provide the most secure ecommerce service. It claims to be the most secure ecommerce plugin for online sales.

Cart66 supports more than 100 payment gateways. It lets you sell physical goods, digital products, subscription and membership packages. It lets you manage inventory, view reports and even charge recurring payments. It has the easiest way to manage taxes, shipping, promotions, discounts, etc. Furthermore, it has an HTML  based email center that lets you send promotional emails or notifications.

Shopp WordPress ecommerce plugin

shopp wordpress ecommerce plugins

Shopp is simple, flexible and secure ecommerce plugin for creating efficient online shopping websites. It has been in this business for a long and there are a number of stores successfully running their ecommerce businesses with Shopp.

Shopp focuses on quality of the features. It does not overwhelm you with distinguished features, but at the same time, it does everything that it should. With this ecommerce plugin, you can create a secure shop. Shopp is one of my favorites.

Marketpress ecommerce

marketprss

Marketpress is an efficient ecommerce plugin that does everything out of the box. They don’t seem to like the concept of using the add-ons and extensions for adding features to your website.

If you are determined to create a massive ecommerce website with maximum features, Marketpress will let you do that. It supports most of the currencies as well as payment gateways. It is easily customizable and comes with widgets and shortcodes for easy management of your shop. It works well with BuddyPress too.

Conclusion

Ecommerce website demand efforts, not just to create it, but also to maintain and manage it. CMS like WordPress and other ecommerce platforms, however, revolutionized the concept of website building. There was a time when all this had to be done by coding and the domain of website building was restricted to the programmers. The merchants, traders and retailers had no alternative but to hire a programmer at great costs to sell their products. But now, with the availability of these ecommerce platforms and automated tools, even a person with no technical knowledge can create and maintain his own website.

Where once it was required to write lengthy and complicated codes, now all you need to do is fill up the fields and configure these plugins according to your requirements. Creating and managing ecommerce website has definitely become simpler, easier and efficient. You have a considerable amount of options to choose from the ecommerce platforms. WordPress alone gives you the choice of choosing the ecommerce plugin for your ecommerce website.

We hope this list helps you choose your WordPress ecommerce plugin easily. You can leave your suggestions, opinions and reviews in the comment section below.

Beginners guide : Setup a WordPress ecommerce website in less than 30 minutes

WordPress ecommerce

Want to start selling online? Great! Creating and managing online sales in now not as difficult as it used to be a decade ago. Newer technologies and the ecommerce platforms has made it possible for every vendor to be able to create and manage an online shop for himself.

In this tutorial, we will show you how you can start an ecommerce website in minutes. With these simple steps, you will be able to start selling your products online and accept payments for it. Before we start, here are a few things you should know about WordPress and WooCommerce.

An Overview of WordPress and WooCommerce

WordPress is a name associated with blogs, isn’t it? But we all know that it is capable of many more things. It is one of the most commonly used content management systems used all over the world. There are many reasons that make WordPress the best of its kind.

  • Free and opensource
  • Extremely easy to use
  • Flexible
  • Large community
  • Abundant add-ons and themes

Besides, there are several other reasons to use WordPress. Taking about ecommerce

Note : Besides WooCommerce there are several other ecommerce plugins designed to convert your WordPress site into an ecommerce website. Here is an article that will tell you about all the WooCommerce alternatives. However, WooCommerce is the best and most used ecommerce plugin. It’s free, simple and feature rich.

step 1: Install and activate WordPress

You can download the latest version of WordPress from here and install it. You can try using WordPress along with WAMP or XAMP in your local computer before you try it on server.

Step 2: Design/Get a theme

Next thing you’ll do is get a design for your ecommerce website. Preferably a theme, a theme that goes well with WooCommerce. WordPress, as I mentioned earlier has a great community working around it and there are tens of thousands theme available for it (Or even more!!).

When you are sure that you want to use WooCommerce you will need to find the themes that are compatible with WooCommerce. These themes are specially designed to work seamlessly with WooCommerce. There are many companies out there, providing premium paid as well as free ecommerce themes compatible with WordPress.

So find a theme that suits your requirements and install it.

Step 3: Download and install WooCommerce

Get WooCommerce and install it. Simply login to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to the plugins section.

wc1

Then Add new >> Upload plugin >> Upload the downloaded WooCommerce setup >> Install now.

wc2

Activate it

wc3

WooCommerce is now ready to use, just configure it according to your requirements.

Step 4: Configuring WooCommerce

wc4

Settings

One of the best things about WooCommerce is that it is very easy to use. Everything is very intuitive.

settings

Navigate to your Dashboard. Find the settings option under the WooCommerce menu. This will let you set the shipping options, products management, checkout features and even edit the automated emails that the system will send on event triggers.

Pages

pages

WooCommerce is amazing. Install it and these pages are ready to use. They don’t need you to do anything. You can start adding products right away.

Step 5: Adding products

Once you have installed and configured WooCommerce your website is ready to sell online. So, start uploading your products. Uploading Products using WooCommerce is really easy.

Creating product categories : Before you start adding products, you need to create proper product categories and subcategories. To do so, navigate to your dashboard and find “Products” from the left menu. Click on the categories. You can use this form to create categories and subcategories.

Note : If your theme supports categories icons, you can even add icons dedicated to the categories from here.

Now to add products, navigate to your dashboard >> Product >> Add product. This will allow you to add products. You can upload the particulars of your products with the straightforward and descriptive form.

product1

And your website is ready to go.

PS : This article aims to help you create your ecommerce website. However, you need to market your website and products to gain traffic and conversions. Don’t worry! Here are the Best ecommerce marketing tips to promote your ecommerce website.

 

Wix ecommerce – For your online shopping websites

wix ecommerce

Wix is a cloud based website building platform that lets you create any kind of website very easily. This Wix ecommerce platforms aims to let you create an ecommerce website with easy  drag and drop options. Configuring and managing your website will be as easy as a child’s play. Ultimately, it can be looked upon as one of the best ecommerce platforms for small shops and business. For creating mightier shops, however, there are better options.

Wix provides amazing design templates

Wix lets you choose from the amazing and modern ecommerce templates to create your website. There are abundant templates and it is most likely that you will find a template most suitable to the theme of your shop.

So, if design is very important for your ecommerce store, than Wix provides you with pleasant choices. Again, the drag and drop builder helps you to easily enter content wherever you wish. Considering the design and customization possibilities, Wix has enough flexibility.

Basic ecommerce features

Wix is a website builder that provides you the best drag and drop tool to create your website. However, you can use this amazing website builder to create full-featured ecommerce websites too. It has all the tools and features that you will require to do so.

Be assured that Wix will give you everything that an ecommerce shop requires. It is a pro at doing the basic ecommerce things. For the advanced ones, there’s an app store.

2016-11-15-13_26_04-online-store-_-wix-app-market-_-wix-com

As seen in the image, Wix provides you with app related to social networking, marketing, etc. Therefore you can enhance the features of your website using these apps.

Ease of use

Wix is the easiest. Even if you have no technical knowledge, you can easily create an online shop with the tools and options available. The drag and drop builder lets you create amazing designs and insert content anywhere. And the notable factor is, that it is as easy as a child’s play. The features can be accessed and used easily.

Wix is however, the simpler solution. It is for beginners and simpler websites. So, if you want to create a complicated and full-fledged ecommerce website, you should look for some other platform instead. In my opinion, you should try Shopify, Bigcommerce or Magento.

Wix payment options

The Wix provides enough payment options. Although payment options provided by Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento are far more flexible. With Wix, you can easily accept payment with the popular payment gateways like PayPal and Authorize.net. The other few payment gateways can be included and used too.

Wix ecommerce Support

support

Wix is created for beginners and therefore it comes with a great support. It has an efficient support team that will help you with your ecommerce website’s setup and management. Besides, they have a strong documentation center where you can find the basic guides about what you can do and how.

Not everyone in the ecommerce business need massive websites and want to sell thousands of products. There are some online shops that sell a limited number of products and wish to keep their ecommerce website simpler. Wix is for them. It allows you all the ease to create and manage your website and has fantastic set of basic features.

Wix is great for a small ecommerce shops. You will be able to create, manage and maintain an ecommerce shop using the intuitive options. With the drag and drop Wix, everyone is a designer! Create professional looking ecommerce websites with the Wix and start selling your products online.

Wix ecommerce security

Wix provides you with SSL security for encrypting the credit card details of your users. So, you can really trust this platform for secure ecommerce transactions.

Conclusion

Wix stands at par when it comes to providing the basic features. It gracefully lets you do everything that an ecommerce platform should do. But if you want to create a large ecommerce website with many products and unlimited visitors than you should go for some dedicated ecommerce platform.