E-commerce with WordPress: Plugins, Addons, Tips

A few years ago, the creation of an online store was a long, laborious and costly process. But with the advent of WordPress, the situation has changed radically. Now from the “box” you can get not only a personal site or blog, but also an online store. It is no secret that E-commerce industry is extremely promising. If in the beginning there were only single WordPress themes and plug-ins for e-commerce, now there are entire sites where you can buy add-ons and themes for the creation of online stores based on WordPress (we will talk about them later).

Advantages of e-commerce with WordPress

E-commerce on the basis of WordPress-site is a powerful enterprise with many advantages, For those who only begins to try themselves in this sphere it is important that WordPress-shop is free and it is easy to create. We install the necessary plug-ins, connect the necessary payment gateways, add products and you now have your own store!

If you want to improve your store, for example, to add other payment gateways, the function “gift wrap” or coupons, then all you need to do is to find and install the appropriate extensions.

WooCommerce

There are not so many tabs in the admin panel, but each one has a wide range of functionality. Let’s take a look at it in order.

Orders. It will store all the orders made, to which you can add the status (completed, canceled, returned, waiting for payment, etc.), the amount of payment, delivery address, discount. Taxes can be automatically calculated here;

Coupons. Here you can form coupons, on which your customers can receive discounts. In Woocommerce discounts can be grouped by coupon type, size, product group, time of action, as well as set free delivery on the coupon;

Reports. There are three tabs in this section – orders, clients and stock. And accordingly, in each of them, there are reports on the current status. Here you can see the total amount of all orders with delivery and taxes, the number of clients, the number of goods in stock, as well as other reports on sales and goods;

Settings. The name of this section speaks for itself, and here we see the settings of everything you can: goods, taxes, payment, delivery, accounts, e-mail newsletters, as well as basic settings – location, countries, currency;

System status. Here you will find information about WordPress version, server and database. Also here you can find tools to clean the cache, delete data or reset settings;

Addons. You can install extensions and add-ons for WooCommerce directly from the admin part. The WooCoommerce plugin has a lot of extensions – by my count about 350. Most of them are paid – from $13 to $399, but among the free ones you can find some pretty good ones. With the help of addons you can change different Woocommerce settings – number of items on the page, payment gateways, connect social networks and much more.

Goods. The most important part of the online store – product management. Here you can add and edit products and product categories, add product labels, as well as attributes that define the color and size of goods.

Conclusion: WooCommerce gives the impression that it can do everything and a little more. And if you look at the number of additional extensions to this plugin, the confidence that nothing is impossible with WooCommerce, only strengthened. Of course, a plugin with such functionality will by definition create quite a heavy load on the server. Therefore, you may need VPS-hosting instead of the usual shared hosting. When choosing to host an important factor will be the number of products and site attendance – usually at the start of enough to use virtual hosting.

eCommerce

This store plugin for WordPress was once very popular. But since WooCommerce came along, it’s been surrendering. WooCommerce is basically an extended version of eCommerce. 

By activating eCommerce plugin on your WordPress, you will have an additional tab on the left panel – “Goods”. Inside it contains:

Goods. All the products available on the site are displayed here, you can immediately go to their editing;

Add. Tab for adding new products and adjusting their visualization;

Tags for products. Here you can add the names of products to be displayed in the URL, as well as SEO descriptions of products;

Categories. Functions for adding and editing product categories. Here you can create categories, customize them according to SEO requirements, and then group products into them;

Variations. This section allows you to add several variations of the same product. For example, if you sell clothes, you can add different sizes and different colors for the same item;

Coupons. You can create discount coupons and customize their work: how much will work, to which products, etc.;

Extensions. Here you can add different plugins directly from the interface. The price of extensions for eCommerce is from $12 to $199. 

Conclusion: the eCommerce plugin is not bad, but for beginners, it is likely to be a serious problem to find any useful information about it. And this is quite strange, considering the number of active installations of the plugin. The functionality is not bad, but compared to WooCommerce, it loses.

eShop

Orders. Here you will see all incoming orders by categories “pending”, “pending payment”, “active”, “delivered”, “failed”, “deleted”. Customers can also see the status of their order;

Delivery. Here you can add the delivery methods you need and calculate their optimal cost;

Goods. All added products are displayed as a summary table;

Option sets. Here you can add options for displaying the goods. If you have a lot of product categories, and each of them needs to be displayed in a different way (for example, a drop-down list, text, or show multiple choices), then this feature is very useful for you;

Downloads. These are all the files that you uploaded to the site;

Discount codes. It’s easy to generate discount coupons that you can send to your customers. You can choose the type of discount: percentage for buying an item (limited by use and/or date) or free shipping (limited by use and/or date);

Base. In this section you can view and download the xml version of the site;

E-mails. Here you will find ready-made templates of emails sent to customers. You can edit them, add tags (customer name, order status, address, etc.);

About. Here you’ll find instructions for installing and working with eShop. 

Extensions to the eShop plugin can be installed from the “Plug-ins” tab in the admin part of WordPress (ie. the same way you install any plugin for WordPress) or from the official website. There are not many addons for eShop in total – about 25, but they are all free.

Conclusion: the paradox is that the eShop plugin seems to be used by a lot of people, but there is no active discussion on forums or blogs. If there is a question with configuration or something does not work the way you want, you will have to ask a question to the English support on the official website or read the English documentation again. The plugin has standard functionality – it seems to have everything, but at the same time something is missing. There is a feeling that a large online store on WordPress or booking system like reservations.com eShop plugin will not pull.

Jigoshop

On the official website of the plugin in the Documentation section there is a good instruction for working with Jigoshop in English. 

Functionality.

Jigoshop adds this tab to the admin panel:

And what we have inside:

The console of the store. The console of the store is decorated in a pleasant design, different from all the other appearance of WordPress. There are various useful things here: the contents of the store (how many products, categories, etc.), the latest orders, monthly report as a graph, links to useful pages on the official Jigoshop website. All blocks can be moved the way you want to use them;

Reports. Jigoshop reports are very similar to WooCommerce reports. You can see reports on orders, sales and profits as charts;

Coupons. There is a lot left in English, but overall the principle of adding coupons is the same as in other plugins. Specify the promo code, the amount of discount, the time of action, which goods are covered – and with the coupon can start working;

Emails. By default, several email templates have already been added – for example, sending an invoice, an order pending payment, etc. You can add your templates and edit them;

Settings. You can configure countries, currencies, company information, page, catalog, image settings, and many other settings;

Extensions. This opens a list of available extensions for Jigoshop that can be downloaded directly from the admin. In total, approximately 310 extensions can be found on the official Jigoshop website. There are also free extensions, but mostly the average price is $30-40;

About the system. We don’t configure anything here, just look at the information about the system. 

Conclusion: Jigoshop is a plugin that can compete with WooCommerce and other most popular solutions in this niche. The plugin is updated quite often. Of the disadvantages – only paid topics (on average $35).