WordPress platform was created in 2003, and the number of WordPress websites has grown up to 59 million a couple of years ago. Thousands of blogs and forums are discussing its user-friendly interface and great options for website creating. WordPress popularity is increasing exponentially because it gives an opportunity not only to make a blog, but to create a well-designed online store. Sincerely speaking, the best plugins for e-Commerce are WooCommerce and EDD. Let’s talk about them in more detail.
WooCommerce
If you are looking for a plugin, that perfectly meets all needs of online store, then WooCommerce is a great choice. WooCommerce is a free e-Commerce plugin that allows you to sell everything. Its localization settings bring an opportunity to choose the most appropriate language for admin dashboard. The developers claim that 30% of all WordPress online stores have chosen WooCommerce as the basis. And this is more than on any other platform.
There is also English-speaking support service. Most likely, you will find the answer to any question in existing topics. But if not, you can ask support for help.
The admin dashboard consists of a sufficient number of tabs, but each of them allows to use a wide range of functions. Let’s sort them out.
Orders. All orders will be saved here, to which you can add status (executed, canceled, returned, waiting for payment, etc.), payment amount, delivery address, discount. Taxes can be automatically calculated in this section.
Coupons. This section bring an opportunity to create various coupons according to which your customers receive discounts. With WooCommerce plugin, discounts can be grouped due to the type of coupon, its size, the group of goods, the validity period, and also you can propose free delivery to your customers.
Reports. There are three tabs (orders, customers and stock) in this section. So in each of them, status reports are currently available. Here you can see the total amount of all orders with delivery and taxes, the number of customers, goods in stock, as well as other reports on sales and goods.
Setting. The title of this section speaks for itself, and we see the settings of everything: goods, taxes, payment, delivery, accounts, email newsletters, and basic settings – location, countries, currency.
Status. Here you will find full information about the WordPress version, the server, and the database. Still here are tools for cleaning the cache, deleting data or resetting the settings.
Product and Checkout Add-ons. You can change various settings Woocommerce: the number of products on the page, payment gateways, sharing social networks and much more.
Goods. The most important part of the online store is the management of goods. Here you may add or edit products and product categories, add product labels, and also attributes that determine the color and size of the goods.
Short Conclusion: WooCommerce is the most popular e-Commerce plugin because with its help you can do everything and a little more. And if you look at the number of additional extensions to this plugin, then the confidence, that everything is possible with WooCommerce, only gets stronger. Of course, a plugin with such functionality will create a pretty heavy load on the server. Therefore, you may need VPS hosting instead of the usual virtual hosting. While choosing a hosting, an important factor will be the number of products and the attendance of the site. If you are going to have a small online shop, virtual hosting is quite enough.
Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads, known as EDD, is another e-Commerce plugin for WordPress. It is also widespread so you will find a lot of extensions for it. As WooCommerce do, the main plugin can be downloaded for free, and there are already commercial options among the additional tools.
Despite the success of WooCommerce, EDD also managed to find its place in WordPress. The main difference between these two plugins is that WooCommerce is more suitable for selling goods, and EDD is for selling digital products. But with the correct extensions, both of them can be used for selling products and services of any type.
Some of the commercial Add-ons for EDD can be purchased as packages. These packages are usually created to perform specific functions. This approach facilitates the process of finding the necessary tools for a specific task and at the same time, it helps to save money.
Short Conclusion: Currently, EDD has more than 1,500,000 installations and a remarkable rating of 4.9 out of 5, so we can say that Easy Digital Downloads is another successful free plugin that can bring a second breath to your business.
Instead of Conclusion
Creating of WordPress online store is easier than you may think. WooCommerce is the most popular plugin, because of its functionality (with additional extensions), that will allow you to create almost everything with your online store. But this plugin is more suitable for large, multibrand stores with a large number of commodity items. But remember that the hosting resources needed by WooCommerce are large. If your goal is creating a small store, a normal virtual hosting (not VPS) is enough, so it’s better to use EDD.
Note that choosing the appropriate WordPress theme is an important factor. We are confident that our themes are compatible with WooCommerce and EDD. If you have the opportunity to buy a premium theme, then you should do this, since paid version always provides “tasty” features that are not available in a free theme. We know that our themes work flawlessly, so we do not have the slightest doubt about its functionality. SEOsight and Utouch perfectly match the requirements for online shop. See on the image below how stylish your shop card will be.
But if you choose another theme, focus on other customers` reviews to examine the quality of theme. We advise you to wisely select the theme and e-Commerce plugins and choose the best one.