10 Best Free WordPress plugins for eCommerce

While WordPress started off as a blogging platform, it has now gone onto be a total solution for creating and maintaining websites. The entire architecture of WordPress is built upon plugins and there are many good ones for e-commerce. Here are some of them-

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a top e-commerce plugin for the WordPress platform. This plugin has a number of useful features which can help you turn a WordPress site into a fully-featured e-commerce store. It is estimated that about 37% of all the e-commerce sites are powered by this plugin. It is used by top brands including Botanik, Subtype and Prana Chai. Even some e-commerce builders use this plugin for online stores of their clients. Here are its key features:

• Support for both flat rate and free shipping
• Support for payments using PayPal and credit cards. It also supports Cash on delivery and BACS.
• It provides support for all top payment gateways such as Authorize.net, First Data, and Amazon Payments
• The plugin supports automatic calculations for tax based on billing, store or shipping addresses. It also provides support for configuration of levels and tax settings

Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads is a feature-rich plugin that can be used for selling digital downloads. It is designed for the WordPress platform and is easy to setup. Here are its features:

• Complete shopping cart-related functionality including Add to Cart, Buy Now, guest checkout, registered user check out and pre-purchase agreement to terms
• Provides customer management functionality including customer account creation, record management, tracking of lifetime customer activity and payment history
• Provides comprehensive support for discount codes including percentage based discounts, flat rates, discounted campaign date settings, value comparisons from cart for discounts and limit setting
• Complete reporting capability including filtering by tax collections, product, monitoring of sales, data export to CSV, earnings reporting by range and category, downloads and API request logs
• Provides additional support for access control and download logs
• Provides integration with affiliate systems, payment gateways, external file storage and mailing lists as required

WP e-Commerce

WP e-Commerce is one of the top e-commerce plugins available in the market. Whatever be your need with regards to selling – physical products, digital inventory, subscriptions or memberships, this plugin can enable it.

• This plugin can be customized with several HTML and CSS customizations
• The plugin integrates with scores of payment gateways such as Stripe payments, USA ePay, Authorize.net and Transfirst
• SSL and secure checkouts are supported
• There are a number of tools available to manage your catalogs and orders
• There are also several tools available to support integration with couriers and shipping
• There are several additional modules available including Members and subscriptions, Amazon S3 cloud integration and Gold Cart

Ecwid

One notable feature of Ecwid is that one can take their currently existing site and integrate the Ecwid application into it very easily. Supporting over a million sellers around the world, it is the top e-commerce application being used in over 40K stores. Its notable features are listed below:

• Integrates with more than 40 payment solutions
• It is a sell anywhere solution that permits you to sell on websites, marketplaces, mobile phones and social sites. It permits you to easily add stores to Facebook pages or sites like Tumblr.
• It provides support for promotional pricing, discount coupons, volume discounts, carriers and shipping rates
• Ecwid is a cloud-hosted service which means that you need not have to bother about any software installations or downtime.
• Site mirroring is supported, including on Facebook

Jigoshop

Jigoshop is a cutting-edge e-commerce solution which comes optimally designed for easy migration options and search engines. Here are the notable aspects of Jigoshop:

• Jigoshop ships with advanced tools and powerful SEO related features
• A small, snappy dashboard which can help you setup a shop within a few minutes
• Support for marketing tools for gifts, vouchers, coupons, and shipping
• Support for more than 70 themes to enable you to go for a store live with an excellent interface
• Complete store management capabilities and reporting including stock reporting and sales graphs
• Support for several types of extensions including CSV export and credit card payments

MarketPress

MarketPress is one of the top WordPress e-commerce solutions. It provides a solution for a range of capabilities ranging from physical goods to digital products. Prominent features include several features coming built in and a rapid setup wizard that help you get a store operational in a matter of minutes. Here are a few of its prominent features:

• Support for adaptive design which ensures that the plugin can work with any WordPress theme which has been built to the recommended standards. Shortcodes and widgets permit you to show elements in any part of the websites.
• Support for several inbuilt themes that can help you easily build stores
• Support for various payment gateways such as Stripe, Authorize.net, and PayPal
• The plugin provides support for PDF invoicing and coupons through add-ons
• Support for VAT calculations, tax, and major currencies
• Total integration with Google Analytics

iThemes Exchange

A simple, extendable plugin, this plugin employs WordPress’s user system in order to add customer information. Here are some of its notable features:

• Support for PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net with regards to payment gateways
• There is a membership add-on that allows you to create a number of membership levels with particular rules associated. The same add-on also provides the ability to have content organized for weekly, daily and monthly courses as per need
• Support for umbrella membership in order to offer group membership requirements
• Support for an additional add-on called Gravity Forms Checkout Pro which would allow you to build full custom purchase forms for any product
• Support for table rate shipping, commissions, bulk discounts and invoice generation
• Tax support includes EU VAT, US sales taxes, and Canadian GST

Cart66 Lite

Cart66 Lite is a solution for WordPress shopping. These are some of its notable features-

• Billing engine which provides support for 50+ payment gateways
• Support for membership related functions that permit you to require membership prerequisites in order to reach certain pages or post categories
• Support for drop content related functions which permit you to provide delayed access to member only content for a certain number of days
• Support for timed e-mail functionality that allows you to enable emails to be sent out at particular intervals.
• Support for email receipts in HTML which are customizable and order notifications
• Support for promotions, taxes, coupons and order variations
• Manual tax rates are supported
• Support for weight and price based shipping. Also, provides support for address verification and printing address labels
• Quotes in real-time for shipping from USPS, UPS, and FedEx.
• Support for multiple integrations inclusive of Facebook, iDev affiliates, and Google Analytics

Shopp

Shopp is a high-performance plugin for WordPress. It offers secure cart functionality and a product showcase. Here are some of its noteworthy features:

• Shopp supports vulnerability scanning for PCI
• Supports integration with 50+ payment gateways such as 2Checkout, PayPal, and offline payment processors
• Provides support for promo codes and rules, tax and shipping estimates
• Related products related functionality comes built-in. This aids customers in finding products in the catalog that match current selection.

Table rate shipping for WooCommerce

Table rate shipping is a high-end shipping solution for WooCommerce. In terms of compatibility, the plugin works fine with WooCommerce 2.1 and later. These are its key capabilities:

• Creation of an unlimited count of shipping zones based on country, state or postal code. It also supports an unlimited count of country groups
• Base rates can be set without limit based on quantity, price, weight, and dimensions
• Supports handling fees and volumetric shipping
• The plugin supports premium features including advanced tax, VAT support, delivery options and various shipping classes for multiple products

There are a number of e-commerce plugins for WordPress available. The exact plugin you choose depends on whether you require advanced functionality or a more basic plugin will do.