The Creative Director at my full-time job @Pay, Chad Person, and I presented at Albuquerque WordCamp 2013. Our talk was titled Clean Ecommerce Solutions For The Responsive Web and you can view it here. We did a feature comparison of the top five best e-commerce plugins for WordPress, including demos, descriptions, and personal experiences. We also included a comparison of the top 5 small e-commerce WordPress plugins for smaller stores such as Stripe and PayPal. Those aren’t full-fledged stores like the ones below.
We ended with showing off a beta version of @Pay’s plugin, which integrates the @Pay Two-Click Checkout for Email + Web API to included in an online store. This is almost finished and coming out soon. I’ll keep you posted… it’s kind of a big deal.
Before You Choose An E-commerce Plugin
Today, I’d like to share with you which ones we chose including the features that stood out to us, as well as a link to preview the full slideshow. But before we get into the plugins, you have to evaluate your needs. Here are a few questions you should consider:
- Are you shipping products? Are you serving digital goods?
- Do you need to charge tax?
- How are you going to accept payments (payment gateway)?
- What does your storefront look like? Are you going to get a custom design or buy a premium theme? Does this theme play well with e-commerce plugins?
- Do you need customer feedback or product reviews?
- Can you create coupons and promos easily?
- Will mobile buyers have a good experience on your website?
- Do you have to manage inventory?
- Have you thought about security? You will need an SSL Certificate.
Research Your Tools
After asking yourself those questions, it is time to look at some of the best and most popular plugins for your e-commerce website. These plugins all have some of the same basic features including:
- widgets and shortcodes
- order management within the back-end of WordPress
- the ability to sell physical and digital goods
- a predefined page structure, guest purchases
- subscriptions with a premium add-on
- lots of documentation
One huge turn off for me is that none of these allow you to bulk edit your products. However, Jigoshop is currently working on implementing this into their product. This, I cannot wait for!
Shopp
Shopp is a usable, fully flexible, e-commerce framework. It starts at $55 for a single-site license and $299 for a developer license. Some key features are:
- hundreds of free and premium add-ons
- resumeable downloads, which is awesome
- keep private (admin only) notes on customers’ orders to keep your team on the same page or to keep reminders for yourself
WP E-commerce
WP e-Commerce makes it easy to sell to your customers. It is a free download and you can get started selling products on your website right away. Some key features are:
- integrates well with WordPress SEO and All-in-One SEO
- multilingual out-of-the-box
- built in product duplication
- customer accounts for records and past orders
- hundreds of free and premium add-ons
Website | Demo not available | Showcase not available
Cart66
Cart66 claims to be everything you want and everything you need in an e-commerce plugin for WordPress. When looking over the plugin, it sounded really neat and possibly very true. I have yet to try this one, but really want to one of these days. It is based in the cloud and uses their server to complete the checkout process. Your theme ‘skins’ the page so you don’t really have to worry about anything. Check them out if you a budget to work with! Their product and services are $199 annually and they also offer a $25 monthly plan. Some key features are:
- built in recurring billing
- no need for an SSL certificate
- memberships and subscriptions are included
- sell on Facebook, Twitter, and Email with ‘Buy Now’ buttons
- saves credit cards for easy repeat checkout
Website | Demo not available | Showcase
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a WordPress e-commerce toolkit that helps you sell anything. It is one of the most highly recommended e-commerce plugins for WordPress. This is also a free plugin and you can get started right away. They pretty much took Jigoshop’s code, added some options, changed some styling, and called it WooCommerce. Some key features are:
- full security audited by Sucuri, a web monitoring and malware clean up service
- intricate tax and shipping options
- ability to run complex coupon campaigns
- built in social sharing, you can even share your cart
The only con I know of is that their add-ons are pretty expensive.
Website | Demo not available | Showcase not available
Jigoshop
Jigoshop is a WordPress e-Commerce plugin that works. This is personally my favorite e-commerce plugin for WordPress at the moment. I use it on all of my e-commerce websites and have been featured in their showcase before. If you are looking for the best plugin, I would recommend Jigoshop. I’ll let you know if I find something better, but I doubt that will happen. Some of Jigoshop’s key features are:
- code is lightweight
- cheap premium add-ons
- free support is fast (from experience) and premium support is avialable
- Lots of shortcodes, widgets
- filterable products and one-page checkout
Website | Basic Demo | My Client Site Showcase
Checkout the WordCamp Albuquerque 2013 E-commerce plugin presentation!
What plugin do you use for your stores?
Do you have a personal favorite or one that you would recommend? Have you had good or bad experiences with any of the above? Let us know!
Tagged with: e-commerce
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I gotta agree with Jigoshop being the best. You can even get discuss custom development options with them.