The trend of owning an eCommerce store for your brand or product is increasing day by day. With the advancement of technology, making eCommerce stores and managing them is now, everyone’s cup of coffee.!
While wondering how easy could it be to develop and maintain an eCommerce site, I came to the ground level.! Yeah, to the ground level, you can now develop and maintain your eCommerce site by yourself without bothering about even a single line of code.!
WordPress has shown a drastic progress from a blogging platform to now a Content Management System (CMS) and it seems that the external plugins and themes have added a cherry to the cake.! Holidays are near and you can now convert your WordPress site to an eCommerce platform, better known as an online store.
To do this, you can use the third party plugins which help you develop your online store in a couple of hours. Integrating these plugins with your WordPress site, is as easy as eating potato chips..! 🙂
While you look out for some third party plugin, there are a few things that you need to take care of. The plugin should offer easy setup and integration with WordPress. Moreover, the eCommerce store has to be customizable and should allow you to use child theme to apply your own formatting. Also checkout the number of free and paid extensions or themes that integrate with the plugin, this might reduce your budget by a significant amount.
Also see to it what payment methods does the plugin support. Few of the plugins may only support PayPal, AirPay, CCAvenue or other such payment gateways and may require a paid extension for credit/debit card payments. These are the little things that if handled with care may prove to be pocket friendly and hassle free.
Giving a classy user experience has always been the aim to develop every website. To fulfill this aim on to the eCommerce site, you can provide your users a one page checkout facility. Normally there are multiple steps to checkout which proves to be long and time consuming. With few of the plugins available over the Internet like ‘Bootstrap one page WooCommerce checkout’, one page checkout by gplchimp, etc could make it possible within minutes.
Few of the best plugins available out there on the Internet for creating a WordPress eCommerce store are listed below:
WordPress eCommerce Website Plugin #1: WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a third party plugin that helps you sell anything over the Internet using your WordPress site. With endless flexibility and its efficiency to use hundreds of WordPress extensions, as per its official page on WordPress.org it is serving 30% of all online stores on the Internet.
With WooCommerce plugin you can integrate payment options to use all major credit cards, PayPal, Bank transfers and Cash on Delivery (COD) options. Moreover it provides a privilege to the store owner to give free shipments, flat rate shipments and live calculation of shipment costs.
Along with a very attractive website, WooCommerce also supports various taxation controls, managing user accounts, various reports to study your business and a lot more. This is the reason why WooCommerce is preferred over the other available plugins. Moreover it is comparatively easy to find out both free and paid extensions for WooCommerce as compared to others.
Get the WooCommerce plugin from here for free.!
WordPress eCommerce Website Plugin #2: WP-eCommerce
How about selling everything that you feel like.? It could be selling real or virtual products, subscriptions, etc. WP eCommerce plugin supports all these functionalities and could be setup on your WordPress site in minutes.
Along with the functionality of integrating multiple payment gateways, it allows you to customize the design of your online store using your own HTML and CSS. It also supports built-in marketing tools to help you sell more and grow over your competitor. WP eCommerce also helps you ship your products with built-in tools and flexibility to integrate with popular courier services as well.
The plugin is developer friendly as it helps developers to make their websites do anything they wish to with hundreds of available hooks. This is the reason this plugin is preferred by developers. However, a non-codder may not find this functionality too useful.
Get the WP eCommerce plugin from here for free.!
WordPress eCommerce Website Plugin #3: JigoShop
Jigoshop is again one of the few best eCommerce plugins available over the Internet. It is ready to deploy and with this plugin, you can set up your eCommerce store in a few minutes. It allows you to sell any type of product whether virtual or digital i.e. downloadable products.
It is easy to setup products with variations like colors and size that too in a user friendly manner. One of the unique features available here is that you can link your ‘Add to Cart’ button to other sites i.e you can sell affiliate products. This will help you sell more range of products on your site, without any hassle of product management, shipments, etc.
The plugin generates various reports of the sales of your online store and thus helps you grow faster with focussing more on the products that sell more. Moreover, the online store could be customized and modified with hundreds of plugins and extensions available. This will allow you to insert more visible features, more payment gateways, more shipment methods, etc.
Get the JigoShop plugin from here for free.!
This is how easy it is to convert your current WordPress website into an eCommerce website for Holiday Sales. You can set up your online store in a couple of hours and can start selling. The major benefit of the online store is that you can cover up the market from around the globe instead of limiting yourself to your locality.
Every coin has two sides and so does these plugins have. These plugins are good to use if you are just starting an eCommerce store and need to quickly set up the store. This could be viable to test your eCommerce idea or if you do not need a full fledged eCommerce solutions.
WordPress along with the plugins mentioned above gives suitable functionalities for a kick start, however, there are other full fledged carts like Magento or Prestashop as your business grows. With WordPress you can customize your site up to some extent with the help of a WordPress developer. Then after exploring the other platforms may help you serve better.!
For this you need to hire expert developers to help you out with the fully customized and user-friendly eCommerce site. Other than these functionalities there are a lot more functionalities that your developer could set up for you.! For more such posts follow us on Facebook. ?
