5 WordPress eCommerce Plugins for Bloggers and Freelancers

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If you’re a blogger or a creative freelancer, the rise in eCommerce transactions offers a great opportunity to monetize your blog and take advantage of your creative skills. If you have an established blog with a loyal audience, you can sell different products related to your niche directly to your readers. If you’re a freelancer, you can sell your creative work in the form of eBooks, video tutorials and premium services. The possibilities are just endless.
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If you’re a blogger or a creative freelancer, the rise in eCommerce transactions offers a great opportunity to monetize your blog and take advantage of your creative skills. If you have an established blog with a loyal audience, you can sell different products related to your niche directly to your readers. If you’re a freelancer, you can sell your creative work in the form of eBooks, video tutorials and premium services. The possibilities are just endless.

Thanks to WordPress, adding eCommerce features to your website or setting up an online store has become very simple. There are dozens of feature rich WordPress eCommerce plugins that you can easily configure to turn your blog into an eCommerce website.

But to make the task even simpler for you, here are five of the most versatile and user friendly WordPress eCommerce plugins.

Note: Setting up an eCommerce site in WordPress is very simple. But just in case you’re looking for solutions outside WordPress, here’s a useful comparison of different self-hosted eCommerce solutions.

1. Selz

selzwp

Selz is an easy to use ecommerce plugin for selling physical, digital products or services directly from your WordPress blog. The striking feature of Selz is the ease with which you can sell individual products or set up a complete ecommerce store. It offers powerful features such as shopping cart, bundled product sales, social selling features (Facebook store etc.) and automatic version updates to digital products.

If you’re a creative freelancer, Selz has a dedicated video selling feature that allows your customers to purchase your video tutorials and download or stream them directly from your website. If you’re selling physical products, you can use the Store Pro app by Selz to embed a fully functional online store.

Selz is built on mobile first design and provides excellent user experience to mobile and smartphone users. But it also adjusts dimensions for desktop users.

selz7

how-to-cook-that

Buyers can pay for your products using Master Card, Visa, PayPal and several other gateways as paid add-ons. You can get paid either through PayPal or by direct deposit to your US bank account, so it can also be used as a PayPal alternative. The checkout process uses JavaScript and completes in the same window without any redirections. You can also integrate your MailChimp and AWeber accounts with Selz to collect buyer emails for list building.

Selz does not charge you anything on store set up or product listing. You’ll only be charged 5% of the sales price + 25 cents on every purchase.

2. Ecwid Shopping Cart

ecwidwordpress plugin

Ecwid is another WordPress ecommerce plugin that comprehensively covers digital and physical product selling. You can set up individual product widgets or embed a complete online store on your website. The product listings and individual product pages are easy to configure and customize.

ecwid products

ecwid product page

It also has detailed shipping options for stores selling physical products. You can create discount coupons and product codes for special offers as well. The basic version of Ecwid accepts PayPal and MasterCard payments.

The pricing on Ecwid depends on the number of products you’re selling. The free version allows up to 10 products. For small/medium sized businesses, Ecwid recommends a $29.5/month plan that includes 2500 products and offers the best value for money.

In general, however, it is more suited to physical product selling. If you currently offer a limited number of products, or sell digital products only, EDD and Selz seem to be better options.

3. WooCommerce

woocomerce

If you’re looking to establish a fully functional ecommerce website for selling and shipping physical products, WooCommerce can be a great choice. It is one of the most famous WordPress plugins and enjoys wide support from different WordPress themes and payment processors. In fact, most WordPress ecommerce themes come with WooCommerce integration. There are also a wide range of WooCommerce extensions available to add new features and functionalities to it.

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WooCommerce has detailed shipping and pricing options. You can choose from a wide range of shipping services and calculate the shipping costs with a built-in functionality. You can use payment processors like PayPal, Stripe and MasterCard or accept cash on delivery.

The plugin is free to use but the overall pricing will depend on your payment processor and add-ons.

4. Wp eCommerce

wpecomerce

With almost 3 million downloads, Wp eCommerce is by far the most popular WordPress ecommerce plugin. Apart from being ideal for setting up a full-fledge ecommerce shop, Wp eCommerce is a highly customizable plugin. If you are proficient with HTML and CSS you can modify the look and feel of your Wp eCommerce online store.

wc7

But just like Woo Commerce, Wp eCommerce is more suited for selling physical product, although it has digital product selling features as well. It includes details shipping, costing, stock management and discount options. It also supports a wide range of payment options including PayPal Standard, PayPal Pro, PayPal Express and Chronopay.

However, it is not as easy to configure or as user friendly as some of the newer ecommerce solutions like Ecwid and Selz. If you’re familiar with the standard WordPress options and features, and can tinker a bit with the code, you won’t have much problem using it. For newer or less technical users, though, it may not be as easy to use.

Still, it’s a powerful and feature rich ecommerce plugin that can turn your website into an online store.

5. eShop

eshop wp

eShop is a powerful WordPress ecommerce and shopping cart plugin, designed for large ecommerce websites selling physical products. It has multiple types of product listings, tax and shipping calculations and several payment gateways, which are easy to configure and use. With over 500,000 downloads and an average rating of 3.8/5.0 on WordPress.org, it’s one of the most popular eCommerce plugins.

eshop product

eshop product1

For advanced users, eShop offers a lot of space for customization. However, it has its limitations when it comes to payment gateways. As of now, you can receive payments using PayPal and Cheque/Cash only. Previously, it supported options like Authorize.net, Payson, eProcessing Network, Webtopay, iDEAL but they are no longer supported.

eShop is a free plugin to use, but you will need to configure the payment gateway and bear its expenses.

Wrapping It Up

WordPress offers a lot of flexibility and ease of use when it comes to setting up an ecommerce website. Each of these plugins offers complete ecommerce features that are enough for you to start selling online. However, the plugins that offer better features for digital selling are generally better suited for bloggers and freelancers, since most of them sell digital products like eBooks, tutorials and online services. Ultimately, though, the choice of your ecommerce plugin will come down to the nature of your blog and the kind of products you’re selling.

If you want something a little different, it’s also worth checking out the BigCommerce WordPress integration.

So, have you used any of these plugins? Or is there any useful plugin I’ve missed? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Alyona Galea

Alyona is a WordPress enthusiast, focused on sharing interesting things she comes across during her work with this great CMS. She loves exploring new destinations and maintains a travel blog at www.alyonatravels.com

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4 Responses

  1. Great list — Since WordPress has become such a popular platform there surely are a lot of e-commerce extensions for it. WooCommerce is by far our favorite one and has been for years. It is very flexible and easy to add extended functionality to it as needed with some projects.

  2. Really nice compilation of eCommerce plugins. I would also recommend Product Enquiry Pro by WisdmLabs. This plugin enables a potential customer to make an enquiry before adding the product to the cart and the product owner can reply back to the customer. This feature can convert your potential visitor into a sale!
    You can take a look at the plugin here:

    1. Hey Julius,

      WooCommerce is a great choice. I also love using Selz and Ecwid.

      Glad you liked the post 🙂

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