What are the best Free WordPress E-commerce plugins? Seeing that about 19% of existing websites around the world get to run on WordPress, it becomes essential to help users navigate their way around the use of WordPress and help you see how to maximize the engine in the achievement of your set business goals.
WordPress hosts different websites, from personal to freelance, blogging, and professional websites. The flexible and easy-to-use website is suited to meet the different peculiar needs of website owners.
To improve flexibility and scale the customizability of the website, a large market of plugins is available to enhance the functionality of your website.
These plugins differ in the scope of function, usage, price, and applicability. This piece will, therefore, hinge on the several WordPress plugin options that concentrate on aiding the e-commerce functionality of a website. And not just any eCommerce plugin but free plugins that stand out among the rest.
Running an e-commerce business had never been easier. With the right e-commerce solution in place and features like shipping support, checkout, cataloging, and a long list of others catered for, E-commerce on WordPress has become child’s play.
An important note is that not all WordPress e-commerce plugins are right for you; not all the best options will turn out best for your website. The high level of customization with WordPress makes it difficult for one plugin to rank best for all users.
What this means is that you have to consider the particular features of your website, know your exact need and reach out for a free e-commerce WordPress plugin whose performance stands out in the area of your needed part.
It’s also a good idea to know how to find a WordPress developer – in case you need something completely custom or want to customize a particular aspect of your chosen e-commerce plugin. Not every plugin is perfect for everyone, and tailoring them to your needs might improve how they fit within your website.
Below, check out our 15 best free E-commerce WordPress plugins.
Best Free e-commerce WordPress Plugins
Our selection of these seven best free E-commerce WordPress plugins results from thoroughly conducted research.
And our research revealed the following seven free E-commerce plugins as the best:
- WooCommerce
- Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)
- HubSpot
- Dokan
- BigCommerce for WordPress
- WP EasyCart
- ECommerce Product Catalog
- SendinBlue
- Cart66 Cloud
- WP e-commerce
-
WP Simple Pay
-
MemberPress
-
WC Marketplace
-
Ecwid E-commerce Shopping Cart
-
Selz WordPress E-commerce
While the WooCommerce plugin stood out on all grounds, especially for its excellent integration tools and beautiful potential layouts, our other six selected options stood out from the rest in some particular features.
EDD, for instance, came second for the superiority of its digital goods management tools and HubSpot for its marketing power.
Please sit back, read through, and from our list, pick the option that suits the peculiarity of your E-commerce website the most.
WooCommerce
The WooCommerce plugin is a free WordPress plugin that integrates with both new and existing WordPress installs. The plugin runs on WordPress and doesn’t integrate with anything besides WordPress. It is easy to use, one-click e-commerce installation. The fact that it is an open-source digital platform is another thing that stands out. There is continuous development and an active support community, with developers continuously making all sorts of extensions and themes that integrate with the plugin.
The plugin deals with physical products, digital, and subscription products. And it is one of the few plugins that allow you to scale up quickly as your company grows. Along with several marketing extensions (email marketing and social media,) dozens of the top payment gateways, and excellent product pages with variants, groups, and affiliates, the feature-set defeats all other offerings from free e-commerce plugins.
The WooCommerce plugin comes with five installed payment gateways. Additional free and paid extensions for options like Amazon Payments, Stripe, Authorize.Net, PayPal Pro/Advanced/Express, FirstData, and Braintree are available. You can also improve the number of payment methods accepted because Apple Pay is accepted through WooCommerce.
Another fantastic feature of WooCommerce that I should mention is the shipping and tax calculator tool. The digital company just launched a feature for WooCommerce extension to allow for the quick creation of sponsored Facebook ads.
With the tool, you can keep track of shipping details and reveal multiple shipping methods in the shopping cart. The tax calculator provides custom tax calculations for you and the customer considering geo-location disparity and how it affects tax.
Related: WooCommerce vs. Shopify in 2023: Who Comes Out On Top?
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)
EDD is second on the list. It is a suite of several sets of extensions. Like WooCommerce, the plugin strictly integrates with only WordPress and can not be used on other hosting platforms.
Easy Digital Downloads is a bang-up of various primary and advanced extensions. It is best suited for selling digital products, although it is not limited to selling just digital products. The only itch is that the extension required for the sales of physical products is not free. It comes at a price.
The extension library of the plugin also stands it out. The plugin offers extensions for discounts, codes, and virtually everything needed to get e-commerce running smoothly. The plugin is just beyond basic. It offers so much more beyond basic core features. Its interface is handy and user-friendly, making it suitable for beginners. Below is a list of some of its enabling extensions:
- Secured payment gateways
The plugin integrates with highly secured processing payments. So by default, it generally cuts out security issues tied to income and transactions. EDD integrates with Stripe. Braintree, Authorize.net, PayPal, Bitpay, and a host of others.
- Advanced Selling features
EDD offers features that set you above the competition. For instance, extensions that enable your customers or visitors to make wishlists, save a cart, or even create a profile. What this does is collect relevant information that will boost your customer service and aid customer experience too.
- Marketing tools
EDD also offers tools for marketing your products via email marketing and affiliate methods. Extension options like MailChimp and AWeber for newsletter distribution and even more for social media marketing, SEO, and landing pages are available to increase visibility and marketing rewards.
- Customer management
Customer management becomes an easy cake with EDD. With EDD, each customer has a separate file with information on past purchases, preferences, and other necessary details for decision-making. It becomes easier to make decisions concerning your customers with EDD in place.
- Shipping and tax calculators
Get your shipping and tax figures right with EDD’s shipping extension. With it, you can understand your shipping processes and determine your charges for shipping costs.
HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing plugin from the HubSpot Digital platform. The tool is a growth catalyst. It maximizes the means of marketing in effecting business growth. Over 500,000+ businesses use HubSpot to attract, engage, and delight their prospects and customers. The WordPress e-commerce plugin improves sales, marketing, and services. It is integrated with over 200 tools, including Shopify, Stripe, Zapier, and sign forms and email marketing software.
The plugin aids engagement tracking as you receive notifications whenever your email is visited or clicks hit your link. Hubspot plugin offers features that make site-building easy and fast. With its drag-and-drop builder feature, you can build and add beautiful forms and popups to your website in no time.
It also aids CRM with its autos segmentation feature that categorizes contacts into lists and sees each interaction they’ve had with your website. The plugin also provides live chat and automated chatbot features for timely responses to your visitors’ questions. Automated emails are not left out when someone fills out a form or sends you a live chat message, allowing you to converse constantly with your potential customers. All emails get automatically logged into your CRM.
The built-in analytics help you improve your overall marketing efforts.
Dokan
Dokan is one of the best WordPress multivendor plugins found on the WordPress marketplace, and the most exciting part is that it is entirely free.
You can quickly build marketplaces like Amazon, Shopify, and eBay and earn commissions on sales from unlimited vendors and not just limited to a few.
You can also provide unique URLs, branding, and independent stores for different vendors, and there is no limit to that.
Apart from that, this plugin lets vendors create various physical, variable, bookable, downloadable, and even auctionable products.
Vendors can also condition shipping methods and delivery options along with the ability to set shipping rates and track shipments as well.
BigCommerce for WordPress
BigCommerce for WordPress is another one of the best WordPress plugins for e-commerce, and it does even more than that.
The best part about this BigCommerce plugin is that it lets you create online stores based on WordPress with the help of fully hosted eCommerce platforms.
BigCommerce also offers shipment and invoice tracking, keeps track of your online transactions, auto-creates sign-in, and adds items to the cart.
You can also select from more than 65 international payments, and it does not charge anything for this, making it highly convenient for customers and vendors.
WP EasyCart
WP EasyCart is one of the most versatile e-commerce WordPress plugins, as it lets you install e-commerce stores on an existing WordPress site and build a new one.
And it goes without saying that WP EasyCart is also free to use on WordPress and available on the WordPress store.
You can add subscriptions to your existing WordPress site with WP EasyCart and accept gift cards or donations.
WP EasyCart supports PayPal Express, Square, and Stripe as payment gateways, so you don’t need to worry about the payment part.
eCommerce Product Catalog
ECommerce Product Catalog is an easy-to-use, free plugin for WordPress e-commerce. Although free, the plugin comes in both free and paid versions. It integrates with any theme and works well with most WordPress plugins. It is known for its high customizability and simplicity. The plugin option offers full WordPress e-commerce functionality for creating online shops and stores. It organizes products into multi-level categories, tags, and multiple product catalogs to aid product searches and improve customer experience.
The CSS feature of the plugin makes for high-quality code and beautiful designs. It offers two different product page models- simple and tabular templates. The plugin provides a catalog feature for an unlimited number of products. So the catalog can display over 100,000 products without performing the site’s performance enhancement or speed.
The SEO feature of the plugin gives WordPress site visibility with search engines. The plugin has several extensions for Product Reviews, Product Gallery Advanced extension, Quote Form, Order Form, Shopping Cart, Upload PDF, and many others.
SendinBlue
SendinBlue made a list on account of its dashboard layout and Reporting feature.
SendinBlue helps you improve your customer-centric capacity. Its effect is felt more in connecting with your clients.
Truthfully, the SendinBlue e-commerce plugin doesn’t seem like the regular WordPress e-commerce plugin. It lacks inventory management and other essential features generic to other WordPress e-commerce plugins.
Still, nonetheless, it is instrumental in the running of your store. You’ll soon find out how.
It is your best bet if you aim to build long-lasting relationships with your target audience and improve the rate of returning customers and regular sales.
Its highlight features include improved user experience, real-time reports, and the creation of custom subscription forms. Its segmentation feature is also top-notch. It segments customers according to personas to enhance unique experiences, send automated newsletters, improves presence on the search engine result pages, and many other tools that enhance the customer experience.
The drag-and-drop tool for WordPress comes at no cost until and unless you send more than 300 emails daily, after which it attracts a reasonable price of around $10 per month for 20,000 emails per month.
It offers up to a million transactional emails per month, costing you around $500 every month, so if you have a huge eCommerce store, then that part is also covered by SendInBlue.
Cart66 Cloud
If your need for a WordPress e-commerce plugin is to accept donations or publish digital magazines, then Cart66 is your go-to.
The plugin supports the sale of both digital and physical products and comes with over 100 built-in payment gateways. Cart66 is what you will call a composite plugin. It has an in-build of all the necessary features needed to sell online. So, with Cart66, you do not need extra plugins like Automattic and other e-commerce business tools.
The WordPress E-commerce plugin doesn’t cause too much weight to your site, so if the issue of site weight is a concern, Cart66 should help. It keeps the site lightweight and straightforward. It offers excellent customer support features that make launching relatively more accessible than it would be.
Although the plugin is free, it has a paid version; the premium version comes at a $49 price per month.
WP eCommerce
WP eCommerce was the original eCommerce plugin for WordPress. They have been around for a long time and have unrivaled experience in open-source e-commerce business management. The plugin features tools that configure taxes and shipping details, manage and update product catalogs, monitor sales, and reporting, provide reliable customer support, and integrate with several industry-leading payment gateways. Over 36,186 stores worldwide depend on the plugin for optimized e-commerce business earnings.
Unlike many other WordPress e-commerce platforms, WP eCommerce is not product-limited. It allows for selling just about any product, digital goods, physical goods, or a combination.
The plugin ensures secure payment with accessible gateways such as ProPay and WorldPay. It also offers premium payment gateways such as Stripe, Authorize.net, and others.
Talking about its tax management feature, it is bliss. WP e-commerce has one of the most advanced eCommerce platform tax management systems.
The plugin offers multiple tax classes, exclusions, and tax bands. Its reporting system is another highlight feature. You can print packing slips and invoices and update your order statuses. The management of your entire inventory online becomes seamless with WP eCommerce.
The easy-to-setup plugin runs an automated marketing feature. Its integration with Google Base, Google Analytics, Share This, and other extensions make marketing quite simple.
WP eCommerce is famous for its excellent customer support service. On this feature, it even beats our overall best: Woocommerce. The plugin has an extensive and rich store of information in the form of articles and how-to videos to help users get started and seamlessly run their site. Asides from the free support, the plugin offers 30-day paid access to premium support at a $49 cost and $499 for annual access to premium support.
Considering the dashboard interface, and even the pricing plan, you will conclude that WP E-commerce is a very similar product to Woocommerce; for some people, both plugins are direct substitutes.
For instance, the only difference with the pricing plan of both plugins is WPecommerce’s Gold cart extension- its Premium version. Given their striking similarities, for most people, it becomes challenging to choose between both WordPress plugins.
Although this shouldn’t be a problem, the choice of plugins for your website should generally depend on the need that the plugin is to meet.
WP Simple Pay
WP Simple Pay is one of your WordPress’s most renowned payment plugins. It allows you to accept recurring and single-time payments on the WordPress website easily. In addition, you do not need to set up any complicated shopping cart system.
It is the perfect tool that you can use to sell single items, collect payments for your services, or accept donations. It comes with in-built support facilitating payments through credit cards. In addition, ACH debit payments, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and others are supported.
The drag-and-drop builder allows you to create payment forms with ease. You can select from fields such as coupon code, custom amount entry, total amount label, subscription plan selection, and other custom fields.
Several display types are available to display the payment forms on your website. A lot of things are there that facilitate the easy use of WordPress. Even technical and non-technical users may make use of this theme.
MemberPress
With MemberPress, you can sell subscription-based digital services and products on your eCommerce website. Apart from being one of the best eCommerce plugins for WordPress, it is also considered one of the most potent memberships WordPress plugins.
Drastically, the economy based on subscriptions is becoming the eCommerce sector’s norm. And this is one of the best ways to make recurring income from the digital store online.
Here, MemberPress comes to use. This featured WordPress plugin lets you start charging users to access your digital goods.
Also, this plugin lets you integrate your site with WooCommerce, enabling you to enhance your online store’s function. With the MemberPress plugin, you can easily manage your members by revoking and granting access to digital goods. This allows you to have more control over your inventory.
It supports a lot of payment gateways and integrates with some of the most famous email marketing services. Also, it allows you to establish social communities and forums with all the necessary extensions on the online store.
WC Marketplace
WC Marketplace is one of the best WordPress plugins that allow business owners to make and customize purpose-oriented online stores easily.
By making use of this powerful plugin, both digital and physical products can be sold. Also, with this plugin, you can make a membership website based on your need. The plugin can also be customized if you are comfortable with CSS and HTML coding.
Additionally, WC Marketplace allows you to manage your catalogs and orders on your website by using powerful built-in tools. Besides, it is integrated with several payment gateways, has readymade marketing tools, and built-in shopping tools are integrated with the most renowned couriers and facilitates secure checkout with SSL.
Ecwid E-commerce Shopping Cart
Ecwid E-commerce Shopping Cart plugin makes everything easy to set up a professional-looking digital online store easily and quickly. There is no need to learn any programming language for creating or customizing your eCommerce store.
This plugin is user-friendly and even empowers non-technical individuals to sell products quickly. $0 international payment options are there. The real-time shipping integration makes this plugin popular across the world.
Besides, it is integrated with popular carriers to calculate shipping taxes automatically. Moreover, e-commerce websites can be added to eCommerce to sell your services and products to targeted Facebook users.
Selz WordPress E-commerce
Selz WordPress E-commerce is a powerful eCommerce plugin and a secure shopping cart with the potential to run 1000s of online stores quickly.
Although it was initially introduced as a premium plug-in, it can be used for free. It is crafted and modified by a professional community of volunteers possessing expertise in making top-notch eCommerce solutions across the globe.
Use this plugin to build your order processing labels by clicking some buttons. Also, the orders can be moved automatically or manually.
This WordPress plugin is intuitive and straightforward, secure and safe, easy to customize, facilitates a powerful support system, and offers complete flexibility and many more things under one roof.
The needed functionality on your WordPress site should inform your decision on the plugin. Although Woocommerce and WP e-commerce are similar in interface and pricing, their functionality differs significantly. So, that should be an excellent point to note.
A noticeable difference between both plugins is the product review feature. On Woocommerce, the product review feature is complimentary, while WP eCommerce requires that you pay for an add-on to enable the feature. Another difference in functionality is the advanced shipping feature on WP eCommerce. For WP E-commerce, the shipping feature is developed and accessible, while it comes as a paid add-on on WooCommerce.
As I mentioned, not all ‘best’ plugins will turn out best for you. For instance, some of these plugins work better if you sell digital downloads. (Like in the case of WooCommerce and EDD. WooCommerce is a better option for companies that sell both physical and digital products, while if the company deals strictly with Digital products, EDD stands as a better option.) And for some others, the highlight of their service is their easy setup.
So basically, know your need, then go on to sieve through available options and find the one that suits the particular need of your website.
All listed WordPress e-commerce plugins integrate with the existing WordPress site. So just in case your site is not new, and you are only looking to convert an existing website into an E-commerce website, then you have no worries; each of these plugins will suffice.
That there is one of the benefits of using WordPress with these Best Free WordPress E-commerce plugins. There is room for expansion and transformation of website features and functions. With WordPress being an open-source community, there is always a tool for every need, from third-party themes to plugins that expand the functionality of your site.