Every year, more and more people are jumping at the opportunity to make their store available online or open a store that works exclusively on the Internet. With platforms like WordPress and the very powerful ecommerce plugins that can be downloaded with ease, this is made simple for everyone who wants to jump at the selling business world.
The ecommerce world is today one of the most promising ways to make money on the Internet, and all those plugins that help sellers make it more effective than ever.
However, while setting up an eCommerce site on WordPress is a piece of cake, how do you pick the perfect plugins that will get the job done? The efficacy of setting up an online store lies in what you’ll use and what decisions you’ll make.
That’s what this article is all about – to help you choose the best WordPress plugins for your ecommerce business.
How to Decide on Which WordPress Plugin to Use
There are over 55,000 different WordPress plugins available in the directory at the moment. This means that you have endless choices in terms of what to choose. Downloading many of them is not an option if you want your site to run smoothly and if you don’t want to spend a fortune on this.
To help you make the smarter decision, we’ve come up with some criteria that will help you decide what to use.
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Consider Headless eCommerce
Before you choose a plugin, you need to decide how you’ll create and manage your WordPress store. One trend that you should consider is headless commerce, a buzzword in this industry today. If you decide to opt for this modern way of setting up your store, you can instantly eliminate many of the plugin options used for traditional ecommerce stores.
What is headless ecommerce, you wonder?
Nowadays, consumers are making purchases through different touch points. They do this from their web apps and their IoT devices, which makes it harder for sellers to keep up with the demands. Nowadays, customers use Amazon Dash buttons, in-store interfaces, and even smart voice assistants to make their purchases and decisions.
Some brands are moving forward with the IoT trends and have found a simpler option – headless commerce. This gives them the option of managing a successful online store without having to build back-end solutions from nothing or invent an IoT device.
To put it simply, headless commerce is a solution that stores, delivers, and manages content but without the use of a front-end delivery layer. The front end in these platforms is removed, which leaves only the backend.
Trending tools like VueStoreFront, which also integrates with WordPress, use APIs to deliver blog posts, products, and customer reviews to different screens. This gives front-end developers more time and flexibility to work on how they’ll present the content, not to mention unlimited choices of frameworks to do this.
The fact that tools like VueStorefront use headless architecture allows the tool to connect with any eCommerce platform such as WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Shopify.
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Check SSL Certification Options
An ecommerce business will most likely receive payments from customers. It will also receive some personal information such as names, addresses, and contact data. If you don’t want your business’ reputation to suffer and if you want to avoid legal troubles, make sure that your website is as secure as it can be.
So, when looking for things to integrate with WordPress, look for an SSL certification for your site. Keep in mind that some hosting services already provide such certifications.
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Decide on What You’ll Be Selling
Let’s say that you’ve completed your ecommerce site setup and now want to download some helpful plugins. To make this choice, you need to ask yourself the question – what will you sell? Will you sell downloadable products or physical products – or maybe both?
This can determine your choice of a plugin. Some plugins for ecommerce limit you to selling only physical products. Others will only support you selling digital goods, such as for example, Easy Digital Downloads.
Deciding on what you’ll sell will be your starting point – you can eliminate many choices based on this.
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Plan How You’ll Receive Money from Customers
Having an ecommerce store means that you’ll sell something and receive payments for it. Have you decided how you want this to happen? Most plugins for WordPress have default payment gateways pre-installed in them. They’ll have options like Stripe and Authorize and PayPal already set in place.
However, depending on where your customers are and what they are using to make payments, you need to decide what options you want to give them for making purchases. For example, a popular Dutch payment option today is iDeal, so if you have customers from the Netherlands, you need a plugin that supports this method.
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Make a List of Features You Want for Your Store
What exactly do you want to have in your WordPress store? Make a list of features you want to include in it. This should help you find the plugins you actually need. For example, if you want your customers to be able to put something in a ‘WishList’, this means that you are looking for a plugin with that capability.
Think of every detail about your store. Do you want to display the images for your products in a list or a slideshow? Based on your choice, scour the plugins that offer it.
Chances are, this list will be very long, possibly even too big for your budget to support it. If this is the case, put those add-ons in different categories ranging from absolutely necessary to not immediately necessary. This way, you’ll know what you must invest in now – and what you can invest in later on.
Wrapping Up
With so many plugins for WordPress available today, it’s no wonder that you are struggling with making this important choice. This is why it is very important to take your time and consider many options. Some plugins can cover more of your needs at once, some are more affordable than others, and some of your choices might not be necessary right now.
These things cost little separately, but when you add them all together, they cost a small fortune. Hopefully, this list helped you decide what the best ecommerce plugins to use are.