10 Plugins That Every WordPress E-Commerce Venture Should Know

WordPress might have earned its reputation as the leading CMS system for blogging and content-rich websites, but it is also regarded to be a great platform for ecommerce stores, especially because of the variety of plugins that can add value to the user experience. Building a feature rich and high-performance website on WordPress is no longer difficult with the available range of plugins for every different purpose. When it comes to WordPress plugin development, the ones built for ecommerce make up a considerable portion.

Here through the length of this post, we have picked the most important plugins that can turn a WordPress website into ecommerce store with all the required features and functionalities. In doing so, we have explained the principal reasons for using these plugins and their features.

1. WooCommerce eCommerce Plugin

WooCommerce has been built by WordPress for helping the WordPress users to incorporate eCommerce store functionalities right into their websites. Naturally, this plugin comes with all the strengths of typical WordPress features. Now it is not only the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin out there, but it also comes with its own reserve of rich WooCommerce plugins. At present, it is credited to power one-fifth of all eCommerce websites.

Not just that, these plugins allow you to process the payment in a NET-D way. How? Simply by adding the WooCommerce NET-D plugin for WordPress. Moreover, you can build online stores furnished with the rich feature set and great shopping experience, just like WordPress, the WooCommerce platform also demands a meticulous consideration about your choice of plugins.

After a successful WooCommerce integration, all that you need is to select a range of useful plugins to deliver all the required features and functions of a store. Fortunately, you have a really extensive range of plugins for WooCommerce eCommerce websites.

Let’s have a look at the key WooCommerce features and strengths of this platform.

• WooCommerce is free and comes with a whole array of value-added and free plugins. For a small business willing to turn the website into an online store, it comes as an inexpensive option.
• It is built by WordPress, the world’s leading CMS platform and WooCommerce developers are known to make value additions continuously with plugins and extensions for the millions of users and websites it caters.
• WooCommerce is a simple eCommerce platform with most advanced features and user-centric attributes.
• A vast majority of WordPress themes are designed to cater to the WooCommerce store.
• The platform comes with a very low learning curve and it is equally easier for the beginners and advanced learners to adapt its norms.

2. Easy Digital Downloads

This plugin having been launched very recently rose to fame and became appreciated globally for helping people selling goods over digital platforms. It has been adopted by a vast majority of digital goods sellers thanks to an effortless sales and shopping experience.

• Easy Digital Downloads allows integrating most of the well-known payment gateways that range from Stripe. Braintree, Authorize.net, PayPal, Bitpay to several others.
• There have been an array of themes built for this plugin alone. It also comes with a rich library of add-ons loaded with extensions like EDD Message, ConvertKit, MailChimp, and Software Licensing.
• It allows advanced user-centric features like Wishlist, saving cart, profile building, etc.
• Compatible with several CMSs: Just like the WooCommerce platform, EDD is compatible with any CMS besides the WordPress.
• It also comes with a rich set of marketing tools and extensions for every different purpose. You have newsletter extensions such as MailChimp and AWeber and other tools for social media buttons, SEO and landing pages.
• EDD also offers a few quality add-ons for subscriptions and memberships.
• It also comes with a very powerful customer management center.
• For promotions, it comes with several discount code and performance oriented coupon options.

3. BigCommerce WordPress Plugin

BigCommerce which is already known to be a standalone eCommerce CMS system also offers a fully featured WordPress plugin. While the BigCommerce was always regarded to be a best CMS for online stores, it is now possible for the WordPress users to integrate the platform’s functions within a WordPress store for allowing transactions and sales of products.

Here are some of the key features and popular functions of BigCommerce WordPress plugin.

• The plugin brings together the power of one of the most popular CMS systems and a very sophisticated eCommerce platform.
• BigCommerce thanks to its partnership with an array of processing companies are often capable to deliver one of the best rates for the credit card processing fee.
• With this plugin, your frontend manages and showcases the contents while the eCommerce features are managed in the backend. This helps in boosting the performance of the site.

4. Metrilo

As of now, we have mainly spoken about the big and most popular WordPress plugins that can add eCommerce features to a regular WordPress website or blog. But since WooCommerce almost became synonymous to a WordPress ecommerce platform, we need to mention one or two deserving WooCommerce plugins as well. When you need a robust WooCommerce plugin for analytics, CRM and automated emails, you need to look no further than Metrilo.

Metrilo comes as the ultimate marketing tool for any WooCommerce store. Here are the key strengths and features of Metrilo plugin.

• It is capable to track most of the important eCommerce KPIs and user activity metrics.
• It delivers granular level reports with information and insights corresponding to sales, traffic, campaign, product and other aspects in a truly understandable manner.
• It is capable to make a comparison of ROI among various marketing channels.
• It also offers retention analysis feature to help you win customer loyalty.
• It comes with a robust email automation feature powered by detailed customer segmentation and profiling.
• The plugin also comes with the ability to correlate products for better recommendations and promotions.

5. Beeketing

Beeketing is a robust marketing and sales plugin for WooCommerce that delivers a complete automation suite for businesses running on WooCommerce. It is a complete marketing automation platform loaded with upselling and cross-sell feature, promotions and gifts, powerful social promotion, email marketing, personalized product recommendations and many more.

Here are the key features of this powerful plugin.

• It allows creating beautiful popups to boost email subscription and social followership.
• It runs popups to prevent abandoned carts and features for upselling and cross-selling products based on buyer information and customer cart.
• It comes with intelligent product recommendation capability with categories like Recently Viewed, Who Bought This Also Bought, Best Sellers Of Store, Hand-picked Products Just For You, etc.
• It comes with robust promotional features that include a free gift, discount code and free shipping promotions.
• It also offers customer-centric notifications to promote sales, boost sales completion and to enhance brand awareness.
• It also comes with a Facebook live chat widget allowing customers to chat with the store official directly via Messenger.

6. Ecwid eCommerce Shopping Cart

The Ecwid eCommerce Shopping cart is a very flexible and power-packed plugin for WordPress eCommerce stores. It allows using the plugin across all content management systems including WordPress. While the core plugin comes as absolutely free with an array of built-in features, for advanced functionalities you can always opt to pay a reasonable monthly price. In contrast to other eCommerce plugins, it comes with a lot of inbuilt features instead of add-ons. The only downside is the product limit restriction of 10 products with the free plan. But with $15 monthly plan you can escalate it to 100 products and with $35 you can have a store featuring as many as 2500 products.

Some of the key features and strengths of this awesome eCommerce plugin include the following.

• You get a free starter website and a fully equipped mobile point of sale (POS).
• You also get a Facebook shop to market your products on the most popular social media platform. It also comes with an array of social media tools.
• It offers a discount coupon and other promotional features.
• The plugin also offers abandoned cart saver and notification capability to bring back respective customers on board.
• It comes with automated tax calculation capability.
• The plugin also offers full Google Shopping support.

7. WP eCommerce

WP eCommerce according to many experts is regarded as the most credible alternative to the WooCommerce. In fact, this plugin in look, feel and substance is much similar to the WooCommerce, in respect of both dashboard and pricing. While the core plugin comes as free you can always opt for variously paid add-ons for the sake of value additions. By selling some powerful add-ons that a user will not want to miss is priced accordingly to make up the lost revenue with free users.

Here are some of the key strengths and features of this plugin.

• WP eCommerce comes with better customer support and guidance for setting up an eCommerce website when you don’t have any professional help on your side.
• The robust choice of powerful add-ons allows you extending the capabilities of your website.
• WP eCommerce plugin modelled after WooCommerce makes the experience even better with more value additions and more support.

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8. Cart66 Cloud

Cart66 Cloud is a unique plugin that focuses on minimizing the number of plugins to boost performance while not missing all the irreplaceable functions and features of an eCommerce website. It primarily focuses on easing out the process of development and value additions with an extensive package of inbuilt features. It is particularly useful for all those eCommerce startups and people having no development background and experience.

The best part is even when the plugin offers choices of add-on, it offers the same through its own marketplace, i.e. Cart66 Marketplace. It delivers the core plugin for absolutely free but the best and most sought-after features come against the monthly payment of $49

Here are the key strengths and features of the Cart66 plugin.

• It comes with one of the industry’s best customer support teams.
• You have both the options of choosing free and paid premium plugin.
• As most of the required features are built-in, especially with the paid version you don’t need to take the pain of configuring or introducing changes.
• The plugin comes with more than 100 payment gateways covering almost all the existing options.
• Some of the key features the plugin comes packed with include content restriction, subscription and recurring payments.

9. Yoast SEO

Every WordPress site including both blogs and eCommerce websites needs one quality SEO plugin. When it comes to SEO, there is hardly any better plugin than Yoast SEO for boosting search engine rank and listing. This plugin over the years has almost become synonymous with SEO for millions of WordPress and WooCommerce users.

Some of the key features and strengths of Yoast SEO include the following.

• A very effective page analysis tool.
• A great tool to boost the technical aspects for WordPress Search Engine Optimization.
• Inbuilt XML Sitemaps functionality.
• Yoast SEO page analysis allows you effortlessly detecting all the issues and shortcomings in your pages and contents for achieving best search results.

10. Google XML Sitemaps

Finally, there is not a better tool than Google XML Sitemaps for ensuring your WordPress eCommerce website and its context are properly indexed so that Google shows your content in search ranks. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin allows you generating a sitemap effortlessly. It is extremely important from the perspective of the search engine as it will allow indexing web contents easily. This indexing is equally important for eCommerce websites.

Here are the key strengths and features of Google XML Sitemap plugin.

• It helps to break the eCommerce site data into small sitemaps. This reduces the chance of disapproval.
• Helps to create an image sitemap for better product listing in Google Image search.
• Easily submits all the category listing pages and contents rich with respective keywords and search terms.
• Provides suggestions for creating better sitemaps for search rank optimization.

Do you want a better guidance on plugins for your WordPress eCommerce website? We are ready to help you with expert advice based on your precise requirement. Feel free to drop us a message and we are going to respond at the earliest.