Once WordPress was just a place to blog. Then came over fourteen thousand plugins. Today WordPress is a highly customizable platform, with everything you need to run your ecommerce business.
Here is a list of 24 plugins to help you run your business on WordPress. These plugins will help you promote and sell your products, manage your customers, and maintain your site.
Shopping Carts
- Cart66. Cart66 has a long list of tools for managing orders, promotions and shipping, including currency and tax calculations, and PayPal gateways. Cart66 has a free version called Cart66 Lite, as well as professional and developer additions. Upgrade features include recurring payments, subscriptions, and membership access features. The professional version supports several integrations, such as Gravity Forms, MailChimp, Spreedly, and Zendesk. Price: Cart66Lite is free; Cart66 Professional ranges from $89 to $399 per year.
- Ecwid. Ecwid is a free shopping cart system that is easy to install and maintain. It is customizable and can be mirrored. Add your store to several sites, and manage it all from one place. Integrates with other social networks, including Facebook and Myspace. Price: Free.
- eShop. eShop is a free shopping cart plugin that has a number of features. It is customizable and provides multiple ways to list products and shipping options. The admin area is simple to use for changing products and descriptions, as well as checking basic stats. It can also calculate sales tax. Price: Free.
- Shopp. Shopp is a shopping cart plugin that adds a feature-rich online store to your WordPress site. Shopp is not free, but with the price comes an extensive list of tools. Manage multiple product images with drag-and-drop sorting, low-stock email alerts, email order notifications, SEO tools, smart categories, shipping and promotional tools. Extensive payment gateways, though many are add-ons. Price: Single domain starts at $55; add-on tools start at $25.
- WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart. This free shopping cart plugin is designed to sell products in one click from your WordPress site. It allows you to add an “Add to Cart” button on any post or page, and display the shopping cart on any post or page or sidebar. The shopping cart shows the user what he or she currently has in the cart and allows the user to remove the items. Integrates with the NextGen Photo Gallery plugin too. Price: Free.
- WP Auctions. WP Auctions is a free plugin that allows you to host auctions on your blog or website. Hold as many auctions are you like with no fees. Use PayPal to accept payments. Edit your auctions, set specific end times, choose from different display styles, and manage auctions from the backend admin area. RSS feed for your auctions. Price: Free; Pro is $49.
- WP e-Commerce. This is another free shopping cart for selling your products and services online. There are a number of features, including multiple payment options, marketing tools, flexible shipping options and integrations for real-time rates, SEO tools, and a variety of themes. Use your own HTML and CSS to customize. Price: Free.
- Zingiri Web Shop. Zingiri Web Shop is a free shopping cart system to sell products and manage content. Features include easy configuration, complete order and customer management module, one page checkout, multilingual support, and payment gateways for PayPal, Google Checkout and others. Price: Free.
Search Engine Optimization
- All in One SEO Pack. Automatically optimizes your WordPress site for Search Engines. Generates meta tags automatically. You can override any title and set any meta description and any meta keywords you want. Price: Basic is free; Pro is $39.
- Google Analyticator. This plugin adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. Eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog. Price: Free.
- Google Analytics for WordPress. The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your WordPress site easily with lots of meta data. It allows usage of custom variables in Google Analytics to track meta data on pages. You can easily connect it to your Google AdSense and Google Analytics accounts. Price: Free.
- Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin generates a special XML sitemap that helps search engines to better index your blog. With a sitemap, crawlers can see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally, it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content. Price: Free.
Ad Management
- AdRotate. This plugin allows you to add and manage ads on your websites to generate revenue. Tie banners to different areas of the website. Easy management from the dashboard allows you to quickly oversee, add and edit banner code; or renew, delete and add new ads. Preview banners while editing them. Receive an email when banners expire, informing you to take action. Price: Free.
- Easy AdSenser. Generate revenue from your blog using Google AdSense. Easy AdSenser manages all aspects of Google AdSense for a blog. Insert ads into posts and sidebar, and add a Google Search box. Control the positioning and display of AdSense blocks in each post or page. Price: Free.
Registration and Order Forms
- Events Manager. Fully featured event registration management, including recurring events, locations management, calendar, Google map integration, and booking management. Price: Basic is free; Pro is $75.
- Gravity Forms. This plugin lets you build and publish contract forms on WordPress. Forms can include shipping and total calculations, conditional fields, and buttons. Integrates with several applications and online services including PayPal, FreshBooks, and MailChimp. Price: $39 to $199 per year.
- S2Member. s2Member is a membership management system. It integrates seamlessly with PayPal. It supports recurring billing, with the ability to track affiliate commissions, custom pages, fields for registration, account access, and more. Upgrades offer additional features and integration. Price: Basic is free; Pro ranges from $60 to $149.
Distribution
- MailChimp List Subscribe Form. This MailChimp plugin allows you to quickly and easily add a signup form for your MailChimp list. Subscribe readers to your newsletter. Also send promotions to subscribers. Build your online presence through email. Price: MailChimp is free for up to 2,000 subscribers; Pricing for upgrades varies.
- Share and Follow. This plugin displays a simple and adaptable social network, creating links to many social networking sites for sharing and following. Add share icons and follow links, such as Facebook Like and Twitter Tweet, and other buttons on your site, in the way you want. Price: Free.
- Sociable. This plugin allows you to automatically add social networking links to your posts, pages and RSS feed. Choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites. Price: Free.
Site Management
- Akismet. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen and receive spam reports. Price: Free for personal sites; $5 to $100 per month for commercial sites, depending on volume of traffic and customization of application.
- BackupBuddy. Backup your entire WordPress install, including the widgets, themes and plugins. Backup to your server, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, or email. Quickly and easily restore your site on the same server or migrate to a new server with a different domain and database. Price: $45 to $150 per year, depending on number of sites.
- IntenseDebate Comments. This plugin enhances and encourages conversation on your site. Integrates with your WordPress admin panel for moderation. Features include comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, and social network integrations. Price: Free.
- WP Super Cache. This is a fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static HTML files. This plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an HTML file is generated, your web server serves the HTML file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Price: Free.