Just because your business has a physical store or retail front, doesn’t mean it’s convenient for your customers to shop there. We are all leading busy lives, with fulltime work schedules and fulltime home schedules. Perhaps the easiest way for your customers to buy from you, is via your website.
Wordpress has built up its reputation, as being a user-friendly, update-yourself, SEO-friendly content management system. And now you can take all these benefits, and introduce online shopping to your customers as well.
There are a range of plugins to choose from, and picking the right one may be a bit difficult. So here 10 options to get you started:
1. WPStoreCart
From the Creator: wpStoreCart is a free, open source, and full featured e-commerce platform built atop of WordPress. It is easy to use, lightweight, heavily supported and constantly updated with new features.
Feedback: This plugin is so new it was difficult to find recent independent reviews on the web. But so far 2 people had voted on the WordPress site, giving it 4 out of 5 stars. I would love to hear some real independent feedback on this. 5,061 downloads.
For more information visit The Official wpStoreCart Website or The wpStoreCart Page on WordPress
2. WP E-Commerce
From the Creator: The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.
Feedback: “The WP e-Commerce is my favorite e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is by far the most complete and powerful e-commerce plugin you will find for WordPress. This plugin is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind.” (Jasmine from Rinf.com). Rated 3 out of 5 on WordPress with 922,095 downloads.
For more information please visit The Official WP E-Commerce Website or The WP E-Commerce Page on WordPress.
3. eShop
From the Creator: eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features. Including:
- Utilises WordPress pages or posts, and custom post types, to create products
- enhanced for WP3.0 users – customers can sign up to your site (settable option)
- Various methods available for listing products
- Products can have multiple options
- Upload downloadable products
- Basic Statistics, and a lot more…..
Feedback: “Overall eShop has a lot of pros and can benefit a first time user allowing them to sell some of their products online. An important aspect that I believe they need to improve on is to offer more payment gateway options.” (Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com). Rated 4.25 out of 5 on WordPress with 199,672 downloads.
For more information please visit The Eshop Creators Website or The Eshop Page on WordPress.
4. TheCartPress
From the Creator: E-Commerce plugin to create professional stores with WordPress. TheCartPress in an e-commerce plugin natively integrated into WordPress. Design and look of your store whith native WordPress ability to manage themes and templates. You can create new WordPress plugins to extend the functionality and fit your needs.
Feedback: Currently rated nearly 4 out of 5 on WordPress, with 815 downloads.
For more information please visit The Cart Press Website or The Cart Press Page on WordPress.
5. Image Store
From the Creator: This plugin was created because there was a need in the WordPress community to have an images store that did not required the installation of multiple plugins.
Comment: This type of store is a great option for anyone selling art, photos, pictures, or anything similar with a very strong visual requirement. Rated 4.5 on WordPress, with 4,916 downloads.
For more information please visit The Image Store Website or The Image Store Page on WordPress.
6. Zingiri Web Shop
From the Creator: Zingiri Web Shop is a WordPress plugin that brings together a great content management system with the fantastic FreeWebShop ecommerce solution.
Feedback: Currently rated 4 out of 5 on WordPress, and 34,478 downloads.
For more information please visit The Zingiri Website or The Zingiri Page on WordPress.
7. DukaPress
From the Creator: DukaPress is open source software that can be used to build online shops quickly and easily. DukaPress is built on top of WordPress, a world class content management system. DukaPress is built to be both simple and elegant yet powerful and scalable.
Feedback: Currently rated on WordPress nearly 5/5, with 7,043 downloads.
For more information please visit The DukaPress Website or The DukaPress Page on WordPress.
8. Quick Shop
From the Creator: Quick Shop supports any WordPress that has the Sidebar Widgets installed, really. It adds a SideBar widget that shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to remove the items, not to mention a TinyMCE button to easily allow you to add products to your posts/pages.
Feedback: Rated on WordPress nearly 4 out of 5, with 57,581 downloads.
For more information please visit The Quick Shop Creator’s Website or The QuickShop Page on WordPress.
9. YAK for WordPress
From the Creator: YAK is an open source shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It associates products with weblog entries (in other words, posts), so the post ID also becomes the product code. It supports both pages and posts as products, handles different types of product through categorisation, and provides customisable purchase options (cheque or deposit, basic credit card form, basic Google Checkout integration, standard PayPal integration, PayPal Payments Pro, and Authorize.net).
Feedback: Currently rated 2.5 out of 5, with 33,847 downloads.
For more information please visit The YAK for WordPress Website or The YAK for WordPress page on WordPress.
10. PhPurchase
From the Creator: WordPress Shopping Cart
- Sell digital and physical products
- Memberships, subscriptions, payment plans
- Track inventory
- Real-time UPS shipping rates
- Use PayPal, Authorize.net and more
- The most customizable WP Ecommerce plugin
- Great documentation and support
Feedback: Not available on WordPress plugin site, due to cost required. “The first thing that I noticed about PHPurchase is that it’s really easy to use. You simply upload it to your wp-plugins folder, activate it from the Plugins dashboard, and start adding products to sell.” (Cosmin from ThemeDigital)
Pricing from $49. For more information please visit The PHPurchase Website.
Any Others?
I’d love to hear your feedback. Have you used these Shopping Carts on your WordPress site? Do you know of any other good ones?
Twitter: melaniekissell
January 27, 2011 at 9:24 pm | Permalink
You’ve done it again, Fiona — provided your readers with a plethora of choices and much-appreciated details about these e-commerce plugins!
I’ll be bookmarking this post, for sure.
I’ve been researching “affiliate marketing” plugins for WordPress, specifically those that will allow me to set up niche sites for Amazon. If you have any recommendations, please let me know.
Excellent post!
Melanie Kissell´s last [type] ..My RSS was a Mess – Michelle Shaeffer Saved the Day!
Twitter: fionamceachran
January 28, 2011 at 11:54 pm | Permalink
@Melanie Kissell, Thanks Melanie. I was surprised just how many options there are to convert WordPress to an online shop. Some of these are quite “heavy” and almost need to come with an instruction manual, since operating a job, and juggling all the bits and pieces is quite a handful.
I’m not too familiar with Affiliate Marketing plugins for WordPress, but I’m sure I will look into it…
This is one loaded post! I have not heard of some of these and I am definitely going to keep this list. You really go the extra nine yards in your blog posts. I can always count on learning something when I visit. Thanks!
Twitter: fionamceachran
January 28, 2011 at 11:56 pm | Permalink
@Martha Giffen, Thanks Martha. Your feedback means a lot to me.
I thought it was about time to look into the best online shopping management options for businesses, and whether it was necessary to go for a paid version, or a free version. Since these are not ordinary plugins, and technical support may be needed.
Still, the ones I found look very promising…
PHPurchase is my favorite. Been using their plugin for over 2 years and worked like a charm.
I had many calls to them for various custom work and every time, they not only did it, but also implemented the changes for all users.
adspedia´s last [type] ..You’re only 4 and we need you alive!
Twitter: fionamceachran
January 28, 2011 at 11:59 pm | Permalink
@adspedia, Hi Ads, Thanks for your feedback on PHPurchase. I was wondering if a paid option was necessary, but I guess, sometimes you do get what you pay for. And support can be a great and helpful thing
Twitter: Ileane
January 29, 2011 at 2:35 am | Permalink
Fiona, nicely done, this is a great list. I’d love to know how WordPress plugins compare to a complete ecommerce solution like Volusion. My daughter is using Volusion for her online clothing store, but I wonder if she could save a few bucks with one of these solutions. Thanks for the doing the homework!
Ileane´s last [type] ..Help Me Win the Credit Cards Canada Guest Post Contest
Twitter: fionamceachran
February 27, 2011 at 12:34 pm | Permalink
@Ileane, Hi Ileane,
Thanks for your comment. I’d never heard of Volusion before. Does your daughter like it, as an eCommerce solution? I think paying for eCommerce functionality is fine, as long as you get good support, features and value from it.
Twitter: Ileane
February 28, 2011 at 7:31 pm | Permalink
@Fiona Bosticky, Fiona, she started out with Shopify but she didn’t like the interface. Volusion does a better job with tracking also. You really don’t need Google Analytics if you just want to look at outcomes (of course you still need it for everything else).
Ileane´s last [type] ..Market Samurai – Great for Keyword Research and More!
WP e-Commerce was a horrible experience for me! It just had too many bugs and many of them had to be fixed manually by going through lines of PHP codes and editing them for certain functionalities to work. Just run a search on Google for reviews of the plugin and you’ll see what I mean.
Twitter: fionamceachran
February 27, 2011 at 12:36 pm | Permalink
@Syed, Hi Syed,
Thank you for sharing your experience. Were you using the latest version? Or was it an older version?
I think when shop owners want the functionality of a plugin in their WordPress site, they really don’t need to be sorting through code and making amends. I hope they rectifiy the issues quickly.
Thank you so much for writing about DukaPress!
kelvin´s last [type] ..DukaPress Images Not Working
Twitter: fionamceachran
February 27, 2011 at 12:36 pm | Permalink
@kelvin, Hi Kelvin, Thanks for taking the time to stop by our blog
With the rise of e-commerce, buyers are not satisfied to just go to the mall and check the products that they wish to buy. They want options to check the product’s availability online and have the product shipped to their homes. I know I do. I would agree that this article is amazing. What I like most about it is actually the feedback/scores. Making it easy to determine which one would better suit my needs. Thanks.
Ayden @ Look At BigCommerce´s last [type] ..BigCommerce Knows How To Satisfy Their Customers
Twitter: fionamceachran
April 20, 2011 at 8:14 pm | Permalink
@Ayden @ Look At BigCommerce, Hi Ayden
Thank you for your comment. Yes, you are right, shoppers are buying more and more online for SO many reasons – saves time, makes comparison shopping easy, etc… And with the options for setting up an online shop, there is no excuse any more for a business with products NOT to offer them online.
Thank you for mentioning PHPurchase. I am one of the developers for PHPurchase and wanted to let you know that we had to rename it to Cart66. Along with the renaming, we’ve added some great new features and also released a free version in the official WordPress repository.
You can find Cart66 here: http://cart66.com
Or download Cart66 Lite for free here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cart66-lite/
Thanks again!
Lee´s last [type] ..Setup PayPal Pro or Express Checkout
Twitter: fionamceachran
June 21, 2011 at 3:11 pm | Permalink
Thank you Lee for taking the time to stop by and update us on the changes with PHPurchase. The new name is more catchy too.
I’ve checked lots of wp e-commerce plugins, and of the above, none prove to be worth my while.
Checkouts are messy, order stats are in the menu. Login systems are inconsistent.
I tried:
wp e-commerce
wpStoreCart
zingiri
jigoshop (which is not mentioned here yet) (checkout was horrible)
eShop, completely useless
I’m in the dutch market, none provide support for Netherlands… sometimes a language file, but there are often hard codes texts in text fields which stay engish.
If I would run a wp site, and a shop I still had to go for 2 separate systems.
Please prove me wrong!
Hi all,
Just to let you know we completed a deal with Ocean Design and Exchequer Dynamics to develop our E-Commerce website that seamlessly integrate with Exchequer. The results are fantastic. Our E-commerce website has been up and running for the past 2 months.
Very good write-up. I definitely love this website. Continue the good work! Also I can advise eGoodMarket to sell downloads. They promote the products on several places automatically. And most importantly the system is free and simple. They have very good distribution channels with facebook, twitter and 3 or 4 blogs. You need to check it out.