8 points to help you choose the right WordPress e-Commerce solution

WordPress is a very versatile solution for e-commerce. There are many ways you can integrate or setup e-commerce with WordPress allowing you to sell goods and services at the same time as blogging or promoting them.

Most of the available options are just plugins, a quick scan of the WordPress plugin repo will show there are plenty of options from donation buttons for PayPal to integrations with Magento.

What WordPress E-Commerce Solutions are there?

A very good e-commerce solution should include a plugin and ‘work well’ with your theme. There are some very good ecommerce solutions for WordPress including:

• WooCommerce - Free plugin and has a number premium extentions like table rate shipping, payment gateways and themes - Sth African parent company with 30+ ecommerce extensions and 90+ WP themes

• Jigoshop - Free plugin and WooCommerce was forked from this - UK based company who have experience in Magento and WordPress

• WordPress ecommerce by Get Shopped is one of the best known and oldest options around. It has a free plugin and premium versions which include features like table rate shipping and other payment gateways - NZ based company

• WPMU - has an annual premium membership site which includes many e-commerce and membership type options - AUS based company.

How to choose the best WordPress E-Commerce Plugin

Personally I think choice comes down to other factors (besides themes and plugins):

1. Payment gateways (who they want to use for payment and is there an extension for them.
2. Payment options & subscriptions (one off, monthly recurring)
3. How technical / skilled is your customer for setting up and managing an e-commerce shop.
4. What other marketing / sales promotions will they want (like cross linking / upselling content)
5. Do you need to manage variations of the same product (by colour or size / weight / length)
6. Delivery options / couriers - eg Royal Mail here in the UK, has a plugin for WooCommerce
7. Will you need to develop extra bits to integrate it with your theme?
8. What type of SSL and security do you need?

I can say it is likely that GetShopped or WooCommerce can do all of these so it will be a matter of adding up the cost of the premium fee and extension plugins along side your SSL and other server costs.

There are plenty of other WordPress ecommerce solutions, but many of them will not meet all 8 of these requirements

Remember Magento?

Dare I say it - you should always compare this to Magento which is also a LAMP stack / PHP / Apache / SQL based ecommerce solution.

Linkage

This originally appeared as answer of mine on Stack Exchange

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.
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