Over the years, WordPress has emerged as an immensely popular platform to create not just blogs, but full featured sites. And now, even the challenging task of monetizing your website with a built-in platform for selling products and services, is easily achievable through the vast array of plugins available for WordPress. Here are five of the best solutions available to implement ecommerce on your WordPress blog.
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• WooCommerce
Easily the favourite among the current crop of ecommerce plugins available for WordPress, Woo Commerce is the free platform built by WooThemes. It features a beautiful interface and a decent feature set that can be further improved upon and customized through a wide range of extensions and themes. WooThemes sells their own extensions and themes, but a sizeable community of third-party developers are now building them as well. WooCommerce also supports all the standard payment gateways and quite a few non-standard ones as well.
• WP e-Commerce
One of the original WordPress ecommerce plugins, WP e-Commerce still has a fairly large userbase that swears by its complete customizability. It has a fairly extensive set of features including one page checkout, SEO optimization, and easy-to-use catalog management options. It also integrates extremely well with a number of other WordPress plugins. Some extremely complex and unique sites have been built on WP e-Commerce, but it might represent a fairly steep learning curve for the average WordPress user. The plugin supports Paypal, Google Checkout, and Chronopay, with more payment gateways and features available through the $47 Gold Cart addon.
• Cart66
Formerly known as PHPurchase, Cart66 is a premium ecommerce solution for WordPress that has some extremely unique features. Cart66 Pro costs $99 and is a full featured ecommerce plugin that packs all the regular options. The Cart66 Cloud version, which costs $199 for an annual subscription includes secure cloud space as part of the package and has some extremely useful features such as recurring payments, secure file management for digital products, customer accounts with order history and more. The cloud version also supports 50 payment gateways, and is fully PCI compliant.
• Ecwid
An extremely user friendly option, Ecwid will allow you to set up ecommerce on your WordPress blog in no time. It has a free plan that is good for basic use and paid plans starting at $15 a month that activate advanced features like inventory management, tiered pricing, Google shopping feed, and content delivery network. It is extremely fast and reliable due to its use of AJAX, and although that affects SEO performance, there are several tutorials available that detail workarounds to mitigate this issue. It features excellent social media integration seamless upgrades.
• Shopp
Out of the box, Shopp supports WordPress integrated user accounts, rate calculators, promos and coupon codes, tax and shipping options, RSS feeds, order management, email notifications, and integration with multiple payment gateways. Although slightly pricy at $55 for the single-site version, Shopp comes with an impressive base feature set that is rivalled by few. Priority support is built into the pricetag and is pretty reliable. It is an extremely consistent ecommerce platform that lives up to the billing.
These plugins simplify Ecommerce amazingly. Now that online shopping is a norm rather than luxury, avail them and sell to the ever-expanding virtual audience.
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