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WordPress Ecommerce Plugins, Themes and Tutorials

Posted on November 1, 2009, in Wordpress Tips | 17 comments

WordPress Ecommerce Plugins, Themes and Tutorials
Original image by jvictor

Let’s face it: everybody is turning to selling online, especially these days.

I once saw a quote from Phil Lawler (Hewlett-Packard), and he said something like this:

“Every business that will not become an e-business, will become an ex-business”

But up until recent times, e-commerce solutions were either prohibitively expensive, or they were just too hard to understand and customize for the average user.

Paypal has certainly played a role in enabling more people to sell online, but it’s far from being a full featured e-commerce solution. Also we have Magento which is, in my opinion, the best free platform to start selling online.

But what about WordPress users, that are not willing to switch from their WordPress powered site to a different platform?

This article presents 8 plugins (both free and paid) that will help you sell through your WordPress site, as well as some free e-commerce themes and tutorials for you to get started.

What we’ll be covering:

WordPress Ecommerce Plugins

WordPress e-Commerce

WordPress e-Commerce Plugin By far the most popular ecommerce solution for WordPress – it has over 300,000 downloads so far.

WordPress e-Commerce is a free plugin from Instinct that focuses on aesthetics, web standards and usability. Features include Social Networking, lots of payment options (Paypal, Authorize.net, Google Chekcout etc), one-page checkout and even pre-made modules that fit specific businesses.

Full features list | Download now

WordPress eStore Plugin

WP eStore SPSCP above also has a big brother, called WordPress eStore Plugin. This one is a commercial plugin ($25), but it’s also more advanced than the simple paypal shopping cart plugin.

eStore comes with premium features like instant digital product delivery, integration with WP eMember, Aweber and WordPress Affiliate Software. Best of all, since it’s a paid solution, you also get support with your purchase.

See the full features list and purchase page

Shopp Plugin

Shopp Shopp is a commercial ecommerce plugin. It comes with a truckload of features, including out-of-the-box functionality, theme widgets, many payment processors, shipping calculations and even SEO-ed product pages. Shopp doesn’t focus on just selling digital goods – it goes further and adds a lot of options for creating a true online store within your WordPress intallation.

Full features list | Buy now (from $55)

eShop

eShop is a free WordPress shopping cart plugin created by Rich Pedley that comes with lots of features:

Uses WordPress pages (or posts) to create products
Products can have multiple options
Upload downloadable products
Basic Statistics
Various shipping options
Automatic emails on successful purchase
User configurable email templates.
Various discount options
WPMU compatible.
Several payment options – Authorize.net, Paypal, Payson, eProcessingNetwork, Webtopay and Cash/Cheque!
and much much more

Full features list | Download now

YAK

YAK YAK is an open source eCommerce plugin created by Jason R. Briggs. Products are displayed either through blog pages or through posts.

Basic documentation is provided, but for the advanced one you’ll need to purchase the YAK Handbook (€ 20).

Some features of YAK:

Create products from either posts or pages
Downloadable products
Multiple product types — price per type (i.e. small, medium, large) and quantity per type
Order administration — filtering by date, status and order number
Configurable shipping (either flat rate or by weight unit)
Promotions — percentage or fixed discounts, on shipping or order value
Sales Reports
Support for https (SSL)
Support for multiple shops
Customer interface languages: Japanese, Chinese, Taiwan Chinese, Thai, Slovakian, Czech, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish
Support for WordPress MU (new, but beta)

Full features list | Download now

Simple Paypal Shopping Cart Plugin

This is a simple shopping cart plugin that allows the user to insert an “Add to cart” button anywhere in the blog (pages, posts or even sidebar).

Customers can then view their cart and make modifications (add or remove products). Payments are made through Paypal.

SPSCP Full features | Download

WP Auctions – Auction plugin for WordPress

WP Auctions is a paid WordPress plugin that allows you to host auctions directly on your WordPress powered blog.

Some features of WP Auction:

Place auctions in a posts / pages
Auctions for registered users only
Accept PayPal, wire transfers or checks
Create and manage as many auctions as you like
Upload multiple images for each auction
Compatible with Google Adsense and any other CPC program.

Full features and purchase page

ArtPal – a plugin for artists

ArtPal is a plugin created by Robby Grossman.

It is an open-source WordPress plugin, originally written for Artists, to seamlessly integrate PayPal with their WordPress blogs so that they can sell their work online.

Some features of ArtPal:

Easy PayPal integration
Real-time sales updates
Professionally supported

Full features list | Download now

WordPress Ecommerce Tutorials

Getting set up with the WP e-Commerce plugin: settings and configuration – WordPress.TV
Create an eCommerce Website with WordPress in under 5 minutes – WordPress.TV
WP e-Commerce Review For WordPress – the WP e-Commerce plugin reviewed
How To Open An Online Store With WordPress In Less Than 30 Minutes
How to Build an Online Store With WordPress

This list will be updated as I come across more resources. Feel free to tweet one @themedigital if it’s not listed here

Please share it if you liked it:

8 Comments For This Post

Rufus
November 2nd, 2009 at 13:28

There’s a strategy I recently learned about – onsite comparative pricing from an article about winning consumer loyalty (hence increasing sales) on Retail Touch Points at http://tinyurl.com/kmxf2k using onsite comparative pricing (this strategy has been used by amazon and buy.com for ages).

There’s a free application I found which does this – it’s available from http://www.winbuyercorp.com.
black friday
November 3rd, 2009 at 13:50

Great post. thank for this share. I like tis and agree with you
Andre
November 13th, 2009 at 04:39

We recently switched our website from Shopp to PHPurchase. PHPurchase was much less expensive and since we only sell a few different products we didn’t need all the fancy grid layout features and so forth. We just wanted to build the pages the way we wanted and then sell our headphones. Plus PHPurchase is backed by a nice bunch of developers at PHPoet which made me feel comfortable in case I needed some support. So if you are looking around, you may want to consider checking out http://www.phpurchase.com
Ester Apana
January 9th, 2010 at 10:56

Hello – just a little note to say kudos for this article. Very informative.
Sarah Insco
January 19th, 2010 at 05:34

I care about your website very much. Will read all. Keep up to briliant info on it. Thanks
Sbobet
April 13th, 2010 at 19:19

Hi, Thanks for the plugins! Perfect! This is exactly what I have been looking for.
Lucas
May 18th, 2010 at 21:17

Finally some good stuff! Thank you!
internet marketing wordpress theme
September 1st, 2010 at 15:04

This will improve my wordpress blog a lot. Thx for all those usefull tips and tricks.