With the rise of online shopping, more people today prefer buying things from eCommerce stores. This doesn’t come as a real surprise because shopping online is convenient and affordable.
Think about it: no dressing up, getting in your car, traveling to the mall, or waiting hours in long queues/lines!
While the WordPress platform makes it easy to set up an eCommerce site, either to complement your physical business or as your primary business, there’s a vast library of plugins available, specifically designed to simplify and automate your digital store’s processes.
However, selecting a WordPress plugin suitable for your business’s needs can be confusing. After all, there are so many plugins to choose from it’s hard to distinguish the best from the rest.
Don’t worry, though; we’ve researched and listed 11 of the best (and free) WordPress plugins. All of these plugins can enhance your customers’ overall online shopping experience. So, are you ready? Let’s begin!
1. MarketPress
MarketPress is a feature-rich, well-designed and easily customizable plugin, written by professional developers at WPMU DEV. The developers designed this fabulous plugin to help businesses deliver an enjoyable, simple, and beautiful shopping cart experience for users, without using any extensions or add-ons.
The plugin intelligently combines the powers of various robust plugins into one, single, standalone eCommerce solution. It comes with a range of appealing and eye-catching themes, which you can customize without any coding.
MarketPress is also compatible with Multisite and BuddyPress. This means you can quickly build your own network of digital stores (such as Amazon and eBay) and take a certain percentage of each sale.
The premium version of MarketPress, however, offers a range of advanced features, such as calculated shipping modules, product personalization, eCommerce tracking, and a full suite of payment methods.
2. Cart66 Lite
Formerly known as PHPurchase, Cart66 is a highly efficient, secure, and lightweight eCommerce solution that allows you to create a “PCI compliant” site of any kind. Written by the experts at Reality66, the plugin processes credit card information securely to your favorite payment gateway with Mijireh Checkout.
What’s even more interesting is that Cart66 Lite can also integrate with Amazon S3 perfectly, allowing you to sell your digital products without any hassle.
As a matter of fact, unlike most of the complicated eCommerce plugins you come across online, this one is powerful yet incredibly easy to use. Cart 66 Lite offers multiple currency and shipping options, which gives your business global recognition and reach.
It also includes a range of powerful features, such as affiliate platform integration, customizable email receipts, custom fields for products, and more. It has almost everything you need to set up your digital shop, and get it up and running within minutes!
3. Jigoshop
Jigoshop is a robust, reliable, and highly secure WordPress eCommerce plugin, developed by Jigowatt, a Web design agency based in the UK. The plugin is best suited for SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and features an intuitive dashboard that allows you to set up and manage your eCommerce store in a matter of minutes!
You have more than 30 highly customizable and full-fledged themes to choose from, suitable for setting up almost any kind of digital store.
Also, you can take your Web store to the next level with the hundreds of powerful extensions. Jigoshop also has a range of reporting features that provide you a real-time view of how your eCommerce store is performing. That’s not all, though! With it’s user-friendly and straightforward inventory system, you can easily manage inventory with Jigoshop.
Not many people know Jigoshop was initially a fork of the most popular eCommerce platform on the Web today, WooCommerce. However, the plugin is becoming more popular on its own with each passing day.
4. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a powerful eCommerce plugin, built by the experienced folks at WooThemes. It’s packed with various top-of-the-line features, which empower businesses to turn their ordinary WordPress site into a money-making eCommerce store.
One of the best things about this plugin is its collection of paid and free extensions and themes that you can tailor to meet the unique needs of your online store. As mentioned earlier, WooCommerce is one of the most popular free eCommerce plugins for WordPress available today.
Some of the most reputable brands in the world, such as Harley-Davidson and Entrepreneur, use it. The plugin currently powers more than 30 percent of all the online stores on the Web! You have to admit; those are some pretty impressive figures when compared to the other plugins out there.
WooCommerce plugin offers a range of useful features. These include a flexible couponing system, PayPal Standard integration, easy inventory management, sales and reviews reports, as well as multiple shipping options.
If a highly customizable, robust, and intuitive eCommerce plugin is what you’re looking for, WooCommerce is worth giving a shot. Many digital stores use it, and so far it’s proven a valuable tool for each!
5. Easy Digital Downloads
A simple, lightweight, and feature-rich eCommerce solution, Easy Digital Downloads allows you to sell digital downloads through WordPress for free. Unlike other plugins, which offer some useless features, Easy Digital Downloads provides only the most useful features to make selling your digital goods easier.
One of its key features is its robust reporting system that enables you to see all your business’s sales and earnings through easy-to-analyze data tables and interactive graphics.
Since the plugin keeps the coding standards of WordPress in mind, it’s perhaps the most developer-friendly eCommerce solution you’ll find! This means it’s incredibly easy for developers to make changes to the code base of Easy Digital Downloads.
With more than 200 extensions and themes to choose from, you can tailor EDD according to your store’s needs. However, if you’re only selling digital products, EDD is without a doubt the best possible choice for you.
6. Ecwid
Ecwid primarily caters to businesses that don’t want to go through the hassle of starting a brand-new site. The key feature of this plugin is that you can take your existing site and quickly integrate it into the Ecwid system in a matter of minutes.
The system will also mirror onto several other sites if you’re planning to sell your products elsewhere on the Web. This allows you to manage all your sites from one place, rather than to switch between multiple dashboards. Another feature worth mentioning is the ability to add an online store on Tumblr, Facebook, or any other social media platform.
Ecwid eCommerce plugin is the most popular eCommerce app on Facebook; it powers more than 40,000 stores! Ecwid offers four plans with a free one. Although it offers limited features, it’s more than enough to help you sell your products online with ease and without any hassle.
The best thing about this plugin is where others offer you a free trial (which means you have to pay eventually), it offers a plan that’s completely free.
7. WP eCommerce
WP eCommerce is a powerful WordPress eCommerce plugin, developed by Gary Cao, Justin Sainton, and Dan Milward. Around for the past several years, it’s among the plugins that are extremely easy to use. The plugin allows you to customize CSS and HTML, so you have complete control over how your eCommerce store appears.
It doesn’t matter if your business sells subscriptions, physical inventory, memberships, or digital products, WP eCommerce has everything you need to make selling an easy task!
With more than 70,000 customers and 3 million downloads, WP eCommerce is the second most popular plugin on the Internet. What’s more interesting about this plugin is its streamlined checkout process, which boosts the conversion rate of your online store significantly.
Moreover, WP eCommerce can integrate with numerous shippers and payment processors. If you’re looking for extra functionalities, you can get plenty of them by purchasing the premium add-ons and upgrades available.
8. iThemes Exchange
iThemes Exchange is an intuitive, extendable, and simple eCommerce plugin for WordPress, developed by the experts at iThemes. With its user-friendly interface, the plugin makes product creation relatively easier. And instead of creating an entire database for customers, like most other plugins do, it adds customer information to its page by using WordPress’ built-in user system.
This feature allows you to manage all your customers more efficiently since you can edit transactions, add notes to customer information, as well as view products purchased and available downloads with absolute ease.
Getting started with this plugin is simple and takes only a few minutes. All you have to do is install the plugin, activate it, select the payment processor of your choice, add your products, and start selling! Exchange uses Stripe as its built-in payment gateway to make the purchasing experience easier than ever for your customers.
The plugin also comes with support for PayPal Standard as a core add-on. Also, there are several themes available to choose from to meet your specific needs!
Other Free eCommerce WordPress Plugins to Build Online Store:
9. eShop
An easily accessible WordPress plugin, eShop provides many methods for listing your products. With this plugin, customizing settings and adding products is extremely easy. Not to mention its simple interface and quick browsing makes it easier for your customers to shop at your eCommerce store. It provides multiple shipping options and merchant payment gateways. You will also find the statistics for purchases useful!
10. Quick Shop
A simple shop plugin, Quick Shop has built-in support for both email and PayPal functionalities. It adds a sidebar to the page, which displays the visitor’s shopping cart. This makes it easier for shoppers to know what’s in their carts while they browse through other items to purchase. The plugin also allows you to add products almost instantly with its TinyMCE button. You can also create product options, drop-down lists, and more.
11. ArtPal
As the name implies, ArtPal is an eCommerce plugin intended for artists so they can sell their masterpieces online. The plugin offers a few key features, such as professional support for B2B sales, easy PayPal integration, and real-time sales updates. It disables an item as soon as it’s sold to prevent duplication of sale. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t matter whether you’re selling a hard product or your artwork, you will love using ArtPal!
Over to You
And with that, everybody, our list of free WordPress plugins for eCommerce comes to its conclusion. As you can see, there are many free WordPress plugins available that you can use to transform your regular site into a full-fledged eCommerce store, and that too without having to spend lots of money.
If you want your business to start selling over the digital medium, we highly recommend you take the plugins mentioned above into consideration. Not only are these plugins free, but they’re also packed with the necessary features you need to make your online store a massive success.
With the right plugins installed on your website, you can take your online store to the next level by streamlining and automating many of its key processes that determine profitability. However, as always, this will depend on the quality of the plugin you use.
So, are there any other free WordPress plugins for eCommerce you use? What do you think about the plugins we described above? Is there anything you’d like to add? Please, let us know in the comment section below. We’d love to hear from you!
Mark is a serial entrepreneur and editor of www.aawebmasters.com. He loves web design, online marketing, social media, and e-commerce. He enjoys working with a variety of web professionals on many projects.