WordPress Ecommerce Plugins: Which Plugin Is Best To Build Your Online Store?

The beauty about building an ecommerce store using WordPress is that you incorporate a content management system. This enables you to easily add great articles about your products which results in attracting more traffic from the search engines and getting your visitors to return. You will also have an RSS feed so visitors can subscribe to your content plus they can leave comments on your blog.

Since there are so many Ecommerce WordPress Plugins (free and paid) I’m just going to look at the features of the 3 most popular ones, then install each of them separately to see which one I prefer and why.

The type of plugin you select will depend on what your needs are. For instance if you’re just selling an ebook on your WordPress Website simply open up a PayPal account and insert the html code for a “Buy Now” button image. You even have the option to use your own image. You don’t need to install an ecommerce plugin.

If you’re selling 100s or 1000s of hard goods (in my case it’s gift items for a retail store) you”ll need a more robust solution…a plugin that can easily manage 1000s of products.

Let’s look at the features of 3 popular WordPress Ecommerce Plugins

1. Shopp

WordPress Integration

* Easy to install WordPress plug-in
* Bolt-on e-commerce functionality, just install and activate
* Works out-of-the-box with any theme (quality may vary)
* Focused development to be fast, efficient and play nicely with other plugins
* Dashboard widgets for at-a-glance sales and marketing performance tracking
* Theme widgets for drag-and-drop shopping experience customization
* Shortcode support for placing products and categories in blog posts or pages

Design

* Standards-compliant mark-up output (targeting XHTML 1.0 strict)
* Customizable shopping interface templates (catalog, product page, shopping cart, checkout form)
* Over 200 comprehensive template tags for unparalleled custom template development (no hacking necessary)
* Well documented template tags for quick reference and a small(er) learning curve
* AJAX-capable shopping cart and development API for custom cart behaviors
* Search engine optimized shopping pages
* Built-in smart categories provide easy ways to highlight new or featured products
* RSS feeds for category products (including smart categories)
* Sidebar shopping cart
* Product image galleries with beautifully smooth transitions and Thickbox-zoom support
* Support for custom checkout fields and product inputs
* Fast product search
* Includes usability features like breadcrumbs and customizable product drill-down menus
* Shopper controlled grid and list views or any other custom product layout using templates
* Full support for multi-byte languages such as Japanese

Management

* Easy to install WordPress plug-in
* Bolt-on e-commerce functionality, just install and activate
* Works out-of-the-box with any theme (quality may vary)
* Focused development to be fast, efficient and play nicely with other plugins
* Dashboard widgets for at-a-glance sales and marketing performance tracking
* Theme widgets for drag-and-drop shopping experience customization
* Shortcode support for placing products and categories in blog posts or pages

Payment Gateways

* Supports both remote and on-site checkout systems
* Accept multiple offline payment options (included)
* 2Checkout.com (included)
* PayPal Website Payments Standard (included)
* PayPal Express Checkout (included)
* Google Checkout
* PayPal Website Payments Pro
* PayPal Payflow Pro
* Authorize.net

Shipping Calculations

* Flexible built-in shipping rate calculations
* Domestic and global shipping rates
* Built-in tiered rates based on a flat rate, order quantity, or weight
* UPS Shipping Rates (available add-on)
* FedEx Rates (available add-on)
* US Postal Rates (available add-on)
* Canada Post Rates (available add-on)

Flexible Promotional Toolset

* Provide percentage and flat amount discounts on products in the catalog or items in the shopper’s cart
* Setup free shipping discounts
* Promote overstocked items with buy X get Y free promotions
* Apply any of your discount options using promo/coupon codes
* Restrict your promotions to a date range for limited availability
* Precisely target promotions to products in the catalog or items in the cart based on easy, but flexible, dynamic rules
* Run product and product variation specific sales using sale pricing right in the product editor

To read the whole list of features visit:
http://shopplugin.net/features/

Cost $59.00

Requirements

* WordPress 2.6+
* MySQL 5+
* PHP 5.0+
* PHP cURL Library w/SSL support
* PHP GD 2 Library
* Web Server configured to support SSL with a signed certificate

2. Cart66

* Sell digital products
* Sell physical products
* Sell services
* Manage orders
* Promotions (coupons)
* Tax by state or zip code
* Multiple shipping options
* Custom field for products

* Products on any page or post
* Sell internationally
* Set your currency
* Customizable email receipts
* WordPress Affiliate Platform integration
* Product Variations that change the product price
* Recurring payments & Subscriptions
* Membership access features
* Constant Contact Integration
* Spreedly Integration
* Zendesk Integration
* Gravity Forms Integration
* iDevAffiliate Integration
* MailChimp Integration

* Sales reports
* Inventory tracking
* Live UPS shipping rates
* Support forums
* Support tickets
* E-Book of documentation

* Extra Cart66 goodies
* Payment Gateways
* PayPal Website Payments Standard
* PayPal Express Checkout
* Offline Payments
* PayPal Pro
* Authorize.net (AIM)
* Quantum Gateway
* Eprocessing Network (AIM)

Cost

Cart66 Professional……..$89-$399.00

The Lite version of Cart66 is feature limited and does not have access to the membership benefits and support of the Professional version.

3. WP E-commerce

WordPress Integration

* Easy to install WordPress Plugin
* Works with any standards compliant WordPress theme
* It plays well with other WordPress Plugins
* Supports regular WordPress widgets (as well as a few snazzy ones of our own)
* Utilizes shortcodes and template tags (just like WordPress)
* Works out-of-the-box with WordPress Multisite (using sub domains)

Marketing

* Flexible coupon/discount pricing rules
* Product specific sales
* Quantity discounts
* Free shipping options
* Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts.
* Search Engine Friendly URLs
* New Products widget
* Cross-sells on product pages (in 3.8 this is now available as a Plugin)
* Google Site Map
* Uses the popular “Share This” button for easily promoting your products on popular social networking sites
* Integrates with Facebook Marketplace (Facebook Marketplace API has closed – we’re working on it)
* Integrates with Google Base
* Integrates with Campaign Monitor for advanced email marketing
* Integrates with Intense Debate for shared comments
* Mail Chimp integration coming soon

Search Engine Friendly

* 100% Search Engine Friendly
* Meta-information for products and categories
* RSS feeds for products and categories
* Integrates with Google (XML site maps and Google Merchant Centre)
* Integrates with the WordPress SEO Plugin, and the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress which both offer Google Analytics

International Support

* Multilingual – the first e-Commerce Plugin to fully integrate with GlotPress & WPML
* Support for multiple currencies
* Ability to target specific countries

Shipping

* Integrates with UPS, USPS, Australia Post and Shipwire for real-time shipping rates
* Flexible built-in shipping rate calculators
* Domestic and global shipping rates
* Flat rate shipping
* Table rate shipping
* Weight rate shipping

Payment Options

We do the best we can to ensure that the gateways that ship with the WP e-Commerce Plugin are always up to date and working – if you use one of the following gateways and it does not work for you then let us know – sometimes the gateway will change things on us without notice. We will always act upon broken gateway information as quickly as possible.

* Manual Payment (checks/money orders) (included)
* PayPal Payments Standard (included)
* PayPal Payments Pro (included)
* PayPal Express Checkout (included)
* Google Checkout – Level 2 integration (included)
* Chronopay (included)
* PayPal Payflow Pro (available with Gold Cart)
* Authorize.net (available with Gold Cart)
* FirstData/LinkPoint (available with Gold Cart)
* eWay Payment (available with Gold Cart)
* iDEAL (available with Gold Cart)
* BluePay (available with Gold Cart)
* DPS (available with Gold Cart)
* Paystation (available with Gold Cart)
* SagePay (available with Gold Cart)
* If you still aren’t happy, we provide you with the necessary info to write your payment gateway

Checkout

* One-Page Checkout
* SSL security support for orders on both front-end and back-end
* Checkout without account/Guest Checkout
* Shopping Cart with tax and shipping estimates
* Option to create account at beginning of checkout
* Fully customizable checkout page

Managing Orders

* Admin dashboard for sales overview
* Export orders and customers into CSV formats
* Order history with labels for order processing status
* Email notifications of orders
* Print invoices and packing slips

Catalog Management

* Single-page product data entry
* Ability to duplicate products
* Quickly edit your products from the store front (saving you heaps of time)
* Smart Groups allow you to organize your products with hierarchical categories, as well as by brand.
* Batch import/export of catalog
* Google Base integration
* Product variation management
* Create attributes on the fly
* Downloadable/Digital Products
* Support for donations
* Customer Personalized Products
* Media Manager with automatic image resizing
* Handles multiple product images with easy drag-and-drop sorting
* Support for Special Prices
* Tax rates per location
* Basic inventory control

Catalog Browsing

* Live product search – mmm just like apple.com (available with Gold Cart)
* Cross-sells
* Product listing in list format
* Product listing in grid format (available with Gold Cart)
* Breadcrumbs
* Product Image Zoom-in Capability
* Stock Availability
* Multiple Images Per Product (activated with Gold Cart)
* Product comments
* Filter by Product Tags
* New Products widget
* Features Products widget
* Live updating shopping cart (put it wherever you want)

100% Customizable

* A designers dream – use your own HTML & CSS and have complete control over the look and feel of your site
* Easy to modify template system

Amazing Support

* Thorough online documentation
* Lots of video tutorials
* Guaranteed speedy response through our Premium Forums
* Access to support from thousands of other users through our free community forums

Cost……..Free (however you may need the GoldCart Plugin which is $40.00)
To read about other add-ons visit: http://staging.getshopped.org/extend/premium-upgrades/

Please share your experience about using any of these plugins by leaving your comments below.

Related Articles
Top 7 features To Look For When Choosing an Ecommerce Plugin
How to Create Your Ecommerce Website
How to Set up an Online Store Step by Step

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