The ability to sell your own products online is a great way to make money. In fact, 23% of all retail sales are made online. With so many technological advances and wide access to online resources, almost anyone can build an e-commerce business. However, that’s not to say that success is a given.
E-commerce business owners still have plenty of challenges to overcome, including heavy competition, so building the right framework for their online store is a must. Choosing the right e-commerce platform is the first step to success.
There are hundreds of options when it comes to shopping cart plugins for WordPress. Making a choice is a bit overwhelming. Not every shopping cart plugin is made equal. There are endless options at prices ranging from free to expensive.
No matter what you sell, it’s possible to get your store up and running in just minutes with most of the shopping cart plugins we’ll talk about below. However, not all of them offer the same features, performance, integrations, and user-friendliness. So, how do you choose the one that is best to start selling your physical or digital products online?
We’ve created a list of the most popular shopping cart plugins for WordPress. In it, we outline their features, ideal use cases, as well as their advantages and disadvantages. As you’ll see, some of these options are catered to selling one type of product over another.
So without further ado, let’s take a look at the best WordPress shopping cart plugin options.
But first, why choose WordPress for eCommerce?
WordPress is among the best choices for creating an e-commerce site for many reasons, including its great flexibility. Being self-hosted and completely customizable, you’ll have a wide range of design and functionality customization options, allowing you to create a unique and tailored online store that matches your brand’s look and feel.
Additionally, with the right hosting and optimization, WordPress can handle large and complex e-commerce sites and grow alongside your business. And because WordPress itself is open-source and free to use, you’ll find that growing your business in WordPress can prove more cost-effective than using an SaaS ecommerce platform. While you may need to invest in themes, plugins, and hosting, the overall cost can be more budget-friendly compared to some other e-commerce platforms.
Even when it comes to eCommerce features themselves, online store owners have a wide variety of choices when it comes to WordPress, since many powerful e-commerce plugins are built for this platform. We’ll take a look at the most popular ones out there later in this article.
What is a WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin?
A WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin is software that allows your customers to buy products or services on your website. The plugin itself turns any WordPress site into an online store by adding a system to handle product listings, customer orders, inventory, and processing payments.
Some key features provided by most shopping cart plugins include:
- Product Management: You can add, edit, and organize product listings, including product images, descriptions, prices, and inventory levels.
- Shopping Cart: Shoppers can add products to their virtual shopping carts, review the items they’ve selected, and make changes before proceeding to checkout.
- Checkout: A streamlined and secure checkout process where customers provide shipping information and payment details to complete their purchase.
- Shipping Options: The ability to set up different shipping methods and calculate shipping costs based on various factors such as location and package weight.
- Order Management: Keep track of customer orders, view order history, and manage order statuses (e.g., processing, shipped, delivered).
The best shopping cart plugins allow users to move easily through the checkout process. When choosing an e-commerce solution, retailers should look for tools that make the process of setting up their e-commerce site easier, allow them to showcase their products in an attractive way, and simplify order and account management. As a result, you can streamline a buyer’s experience and improve your sales.
Focus on your business – We’ll handle your website’s speed, security, uptime, and updates.
The Best WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin
1. WooCommerce
This free open-source plugin transforms your WordPress into a fully functional eCommerce store. It works for selling both physical and digital products. Plus, it also supports memberships, subscriptions, B2B eCommerce, and even lets you sell event tickets online.
WooCommerce offers plenty of payment gateways, including Stripe, Square, PayPal, and Apple Pay.
Not only is this WordPress shopping cart plugin free, no matter how many products you have. There are also a handful of other reasons why it’s the best option. One big advantage of using WooCommerce is having access to support through its large community of active users. There are also thousands of free and paid extensions available to help you customize your online store. Extensions provide extra features like discounts, upselling, abandoned cart recovery, and more.
Plus, it has the ability to integrate with tons of third-party apps and services.
Furthermore, WooCommerce is open source. This makes it easy for you to change the platform on your own or with the help of a WooCommerce development agency.
Due to its popularity, WooCommerce developers across all price ranges and expertise levels abound. Finding someone to tailor your site to your needs is also easy to do.
WooCommerce is one of the best solutions for creating an e-commerce store. It is cost-effective and provides scalability, optimal selling solutions, and tons of features.
WooCommerce Pros
- It is easy to install & configure
- You can create an unlimited number of products and process countless orders.
- Everything from your storefront to checkout flow can be configured or customized according to your needs.
- It gives your customers access to many payment options due to its compatibility with most payment gateways
- Design-wise, you have hundreds of themes to choose from, both free and paid
WooCommerce Cons
- Since the platform has many features and extensions, it can have a slightly higher learning curve.
2. Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)
Easy Digital Downloads is a WordPress shopping cart plugin designed for digital goods. This means it is ideal for selling ebooks, courses, photographs, templates, plugins, and more.
This easy-to-use system works with the most popular payment systems, including PayPal and Stripe. Like WooCommerce, the plugin is available for free. Yet, they also offer different access passes, including better support options and extensions.
There are many benefits to using EDD, such as:
- Users have the ability to access their purchases through their history so they can access the files whenever.
- An easy-to-read dashboard filled with extensive stats on earnings and sales.
- Recurring payment options for subscriptions and memberships,
- Password-protected content
However, there are limited options when it comes to extensions. Making it difficult to find solutions to meet your expectations. Nonetheless, you can get the features you seek through custom development.
Easy Digital Downloads Pros
- It is quick and easy to set up.
- It works with all major payment gateways
- Store owners have access to good customer support and a user-friendly experience
Easy Digital Downloads Cons
- While it can also support physical products, since EDD is best for digital products, it’s not the best option for this purpose.
3. Ecwid Shopping Cart
Ecwid shopping cart is a WordPress plugin that integrates with Ecwid’s servers. Like with BigCommerce, your Ecwid site is separate from your WordPress site. Once you connect them using the plugin, you can manage everything from your WordPress dashboard.
Ecwide gives you the ability to sell both digital and physical products and offer discounts/coupons. It also allows you to accept payments through Apple Pay, Google Pay, or PayPal.
Keep in mind, though, that you’ll have to pay a monthly fee to get access to some of the features.
Ecwid Pros
- Offers both free & paid plans
- No charge for using the PayPal gateway for payments
- Tax rates apply automatically
- Great for selling on Facebook
Ecwid Cons
- Limited customer service support with paid plans
- Mobile is only available for iOS
- Not able to change product URLs or create redirects
4. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a standalone eCommerce platform, but it can link with WordPress. BigCommerce for WordPress allows you to sell both physical and digital products on a self-hosted site.
As a software-as-a-service or SaaS, you pay a monthly fee to use BigCommerce. Because of this, BigCommerce runs on its own servers. This means e-commerce operations take place off-site, by Bigcommerce. One of the biggest benefits of this is that it allows you to free up space and speed up your site.
While this option comes with a comprehensive set of features, you also pay for what you are getting. The monthly fee starts at $30 and goes up to $200 per month. Some of the features include:
- Sell unlimited products
- Unlimited bandwidth and storage
- Ability to create unlimited staff accounts
- Real-time shipping quotations
- Gift cards and discount codes
- Functionalities for product reviews and ratings
BigCommerce Pros
- Easy-to-use interface
- Ability to generate gift cards and coupon codes
- No transaction fees
- A headless eCommerce model reduces strain on your servers
BigCommerce Cons
- Limited options with themes
- Plans can become costly due to the use of features
5. FluentCart
FluentCart is a modern WordPress shopping cart plugin built for performance, scalability, and flexibility. It is designed for both digital and physical product sellers who want a lightweight yet powerful eCommerce solution without relying on bloated external platforms.
Unlike traditional solutions, FluentCart stores shop data in separate database tables, helping stores stay fast even with large product catalogs and high order volumes.
Some of the features include:
- Faster order processing and optimized server resource usage
- Support for both digital and physical products
- Product variations, bundles, and smart product recommendations
- Automatic inventory management and invoice generation
- AWS S3-powered digital file delivery
- Subscription billing, memberships, and software licensing support
FluentCart is also fully open-source, giving developers complete control to customize workflows, create integrations, and scale stores without platform restrictions or transaction fees.
One of its biggest advantages is that it combines subscriptions, licensing, payments, analytics, and physical product management into one clean dashboard. This removes the need for multiple plugins and helps businesses manage everything from a single platform.
FluentCart Pros
- Extremely lightweight and performance-focused
- Works for both digital and physical products
- Built-in subscriptions, licensing, analytics, and tax handling
- No platform transaction fees or vendor lock-ins
- Developer-friendly APIs and headless support
- Highly customizable checkout and storefront experience
FluentCart Cons
- Since it is newer compared to WooCommerce, its extension ecosystem is still growing
- Advanced customization may require developer knowledge for larger stores
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What is the Best Shopping Cart plugin for WordPress?
When choosing an e-commerce shopping cart, you must understand what you are looking to do with your online store. Whether you’re a complete beginner or looking to scale your current business, there’s one solution to suit your needs.
You can narrow down your options based on what you are selling – digital or physical products. Order management options, user-friendliness, and opportunities for customization are also important.
You should select the platform that makes it easier for you to run your business while delivering a good customer experience.
Choosing the Right E-commerce Platform
Finding the solution that doesn’t cause you to sacrifice functionality and will grow as you grow is essential.
There are some things that you’ll want to look for when choosing a WordPress shopping cart plugin:
- An easy-to-use interface that allows your customers to navigate.
- It’s mobile-friendly! Most people shop from their phones.
- Provides compatible themes and an easy-to-use page builder.
- Supports many payment gateways.
- Customizable to suit your specific needs.
- Won’t break the bank.
- Scalable to grow with your business.
When it comes to scalability, cost efficiency, and ease of use interface, WooCommerce is a clear winner. It is one of the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugins and is great for both beginners and advanced users. Other benefits include:
- A wide range of payment options
- Hundreds of themes to choose from;
- Endless options of extensions with additional features for your site;
- Extremely flexible for customization with many WooCommerce development service options.
How to configure WooCommerce?
Download and Install WooCommerce
Visit WordPress.org to download the free WooCommerce plugin. Once it’s downloaded, you’ll need to install and activate the plugin. Once you activate the plugin, it’ll prompt you to launch the setup wizard.
The wizard will help you set up the basics for your stores, such as checkout, payment, and shipping.
General Settings
Go to “WooCommerce” > “Settings.” Review and configure the general settings, including your store’s address, currency, and default unit of weight and dimensions. You can configure the Payment Gateways at this time, directly from the Payments tab. Just enable the payment methods you want to offer and configure their settings. Common options include PayPal, Stripe, and credit card payments.
You should also configure the Shipment tab to set shipping zones and methods based on your shipping needs, including flat rate, free shipping, or real-time shipping rates, and the Checkout tab to set up pages for the cart, checkout, and terms and conditions.
Add Products
Now, you can begin adding your products to WooCommerce.
Go to Products → Add New.
For each product, you’ll need to add a title and description, create a category, add tags, and upload images. Plus, you’ll need to configure product-specific settings in the Product data box. This information includes pricing, inventory, and shipping details.
If your products have different variations, you can set up the attributes in this section. Variations include different sizes or colors, and set the prices for each variation.
Final Details
Explore other settings in WooCommerce to fine-tune your store’s behavior, such as product reviews, account settings, and advanced options. WooCommerce offers many extensions to add additional features to your store. You can browse and install these extensions from the WooCommerce settings or the WordPress plugin repository.
Conclusion
The best shopping cart plugin is the one with the features that best fit your needs. Yet, costs, possibilities for customization, user-friendliness, and scalability are also important.
We understand the importance of setting yourself up with the right tools to build a successful online business. If you go for WooCommerce, working with a WooCommerce development expert can be of great help when configuring your WooCommerce store or obtaining custom WooCommerce solutions.
FAQs
1. What is the best WordPress shopping cart plugin for beginners?
For beginners, WooCommerce is widely considered the best option. It is free, easy to set up, and offers a user-friendly interface with extensive documentation and community support. It also provides scalability, making it suitable for both small and growing online stores.
2. Can I sell both physical and digital products with WordPress shopping cart plugins?
Yes, most WordPress shopping cart plugins like WooCommerce, WP EasyCart, and BigCommerce allow you to sell both physical and digital products. However, plugins like Easy Digital Downloads are specifically optimized for selling digital goods such as eBooks, software, and courses.
3. Do WordPress shopping cart plugins support multiple payment gateways?
Yes, most modern shopping cart plugins support multiple payment gateways. Popular options include PayPal, Stripe, Square, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. This flexibility allows store owners to offer customers a variety of secure payment options.
4. How do I choose the right shopping cart plugin for my WordPress store?
To choose the right plugin, consider factors such as the type of products you sell (physical or digital), ease of use, customization options, scalability, pricing, and available integrations. It’s important to select a solution that aligns with your business goals and can grow with your store over time.
