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

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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.

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

Activate it

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

Step 4: Configuring WooCommerce

Settings

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

Shopify and BigCommerce are both flexible, feature rich and easy to use ecommerce platfforms. They can be used to create small or even enterprise level ecommerce websites. Both the platforms are efficient and it’s impossible to declare the best from among them. Because which platform works best for you, depends on your requirements. So read on to find out which one satisfies most of your requirements and go for the best one.

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Deciding that you want to take your business online, is the best decision you’ll ever make. So, if you are ready to take the next big step for your business, you need to make some important choices. For creating an ecommerce store you first need to choose the platform on which you will create the website. When it comes to selecting the platform for ecommerce websites, there are tons of fishes in the water. We present here the list of most preferred, secure and best ecommerce platforms that you can choose from, to create your website.

If you have already decided to create an ecommerce shop, the following points are going to make you proud of your decision. If you’re not yet ready, these are the reasons you should be.

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Shopify is one of the leading ecommerce platform to create your ecommerce website effortlessly. It is enough to let you create a fully fledged website to sell your digital/physical products. But if you want to add more features to create a more appealing website, you can use the free/paid apps available with shopify.

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Decided that you want to take your business to the next level by creating an ecommerce website? Good Decision! There are a number of advantages that you can avail through an ecommerce website. The good news is : There are many ecommerce platforms that you can use for this. Selecting the best for your business and capabilities is where you need to be careful. Among the most credible and famous ecommerce platforms, there’s Magento ecommerce website builder, that is popular as one of the most feature rich.

Let us discuss some of the most important traits and abilities of Magento.

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