Essential Plugins and Add-ons for WordPress eCommerce Sites
Written by Austin Gunter on January 10, 2013
Ecommerce for WordPress has become common enough that it’s often not just enough to have a well-functioning eCommerce site, you’ve also got to incorporate the right plugins and features to increase conversions and functionality on the site.
A few years ago, a large enterprise would have had a hard time building an ecommerce site with WordPress. However, in the last 2 years, WordPress has officially become a complete solution to develop large scale and feature-rich eCommerce sites. Solutions like WooCommerce, WP e-Commerce, and Cart 66 are each well-respected in their own right.
Prior to these apps, using WordPress for ecommerce meant a healthy dose of doing a great deal of customization and hacking together a theme with custom fields to optimize for ecommerce, as well as working for months to build a theme that could stand up to the demands of shoppers on your site, particularly during a rush that arrives during the holidays.
And while eCommerce sites don’t often have as high of traffic as a gossip blog, for example, they are a challenge to build for scale since you cannot cache the unique and dynamically generated pages that must be created for each customer. Things like the “view cart” area can’t be cached. But the longer the site takes to load, the more likely your customer will abandon their cart without making a purchase.
We put together a list of features that have become essential for an ecommerce site, all of which are available either with an individual plugin, or as an add-on to an ecommerce app.
Payment Checkout Solutions
Stripe, Mijireh
Perhaps the *most* important element of your site. You have to be able to take people’s money! An eCommerce theme like WooThemes does not come bundled with PCI compliant servers where you can transact business with your customers.
When you accept payment information, the servers that accept it must meet a set of security standards to protect customer data. The standards are as stringent as you might expect, and while most managed WordPress hosts will have redundant security measures validated by a 3rd party, when you accept payment onto your site, a payment checkout solution is the most secure way to protect the data, and protect your company from liability.
Stripe and Mijireh are both fantastic payment checkout solutions that transport your customers to their PCI-compliant data centers for transactions, keep customer data safe, and also allow you to maintain your company’s branding throughout the entire seamless process. Both are gaining traction over PayPal with their robust features and ease of use.
Analytics
Google Analytics, Clicky, KISSmetrics
Tracking customer behavior is always a lynchpin of every successful website project. As you can view trends of customer behavior, you learn how important actions like adding an item to a cart, viewing similar items are, and adding things to a wish list will be. The data also helps to minimize bounces and increase the likelihood that every visitor will make a purchase on your site.
Google Analytics links your site with Google’s robust analytics platform. Clicky is a killer app that does session-specific tracking rather than group-statistical tracking that Google does. Use Clicky to measure heatmaps, and effectively track all your campaigns. KISSMetrics will also track every user, and their actions on your site historically.
Link Shortener
Pretty Link Pro, Bit.ly
Have you ever shared the full URL of a bestseller on Amazon? The URL can take up several lines of an email, and completely blows out the 140 character limit for Twitter. Long links are a barrier for people who want to share your products on social media. Use a link shortener to generate bite-sized shortlinks that are easy to share anywhere on the web.
CDN
Photon, MaxCDN, W3-Total Cache
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) cache the static content for your site, things like product images, and serve them quickly to your site visitors. Not everything can be cached on an eCommerce site, so you still need to host on an enterprise-grade managed WordPress platform (like WP Engine). You can cache images using Photon, Jetpack’s new image CDN, or cache photos as well as other static elements with MaxCDN and W3-Total Cache. You can’t cache everything on a site, and there are exceptions that your developer can tell you about, but the more you can cache, the faster your site. And the faster your site, the better your Google rankings will be, and the higher your conversions will be too.
Pinterest
Pinterest “Pin It” upon rollover
Pinterest is one of the best things that ever happened to eCommerce sites, particularly those with consumer products. The social network can act as a visual wishlist for the products your customers want to buy when they pin them on Pinterest, creating backlinks to your store in the process. Use this plugin to have a “Pin It” button appear on a product image when a mouse hovers over it. Bonus points if your designer customizes the button with your branding.
Dynamic pricing
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms will allow you to set pricing options for your products and configure discounts that encourage more sales. WooThemes and others have this functionality as add-ons, but Gravity Forms is a powerful way to accomplish the same thing.
Dynamic pricing means that your customers can purchase items in volume to get bulk discounts, and you can add sale discounts, and member discounts as well. Test out discounts to see what affects your customer behavior, but remember that the best customers won’t buy based on a discount, they buy because your product adds something amazing to their lives or their businesses.
Table Rate Shipping
WooCommerce, Cart-66, WP eCommerce
Sometimes people needed to have their order *yesterday,* and they’re willing to pay an arm and a leg to have it shipped. Other times, they’d rather save a few bucks and have their item arrive in a few days. Table Rate Shipping allows you to define shipping rates based on variables like region, weight, and delivery time so that your service can match the needs of individual customers.
I’d love to hear about the eCommerce plugins that you add on your sites. Particularly if you have any hacks or optimizations that you use to add them. And if you’re looking for an excellent consultant that you can trust to build a new eCommerce site for your company, we’ve got a list of WordPress consultants that we’ve worked with and can recommend.
Hope this helps.
Austin W. Gunter
Great article and lots of great plugins. The one thing to note is that if you’re using Stripe, you’ll still need a private IP and SSL to make sure that the data that moves to them is secure.
Another solution, by the same guys behind Mijireh is the WordPress solution Cloudswipe. I wrote about both here: http://chrislema.com/wordpress-e-commerce-developers-remember-compliance/
I think WooCommerce is one of the best WP eCommerce options out there, especially with the upcoming 2.0 release. However, I may be a bit biased because I’ve written a few plugins for it, one being a KISS Metrics integration (http://www.woothemes.com/products/kiss-metrics/) :)
Hi,
Please advice me which is good payment gateway for india. this will work for india also?
Thanks.
I would also recommend a plugin called FoxyShop IF you are a developer. It integrates with Foxycart to give you almost total control of the checkout experience and within the WordPress dashboard.
It’s interesting to see that this article does not mention any services by Shopp – in your eyes is it inferior to Woo Commerce or WP e-commerce? I’d really like to hear opinions on this. I have found Shopp to be very handy (and the support team is quite reliable), though the draw backs of the plugin compared to Woo Commerce are present in terms of user-friendliness, on the other hand credit can to be given to the Shopp developers for including a lot of features out-of-the-box that you would otherwise have to pay for by using Woo Commerce.
To give one example, the table rate shipping is possible in Shopp without buying an extension or add-on (which is the case with Woo Commerce). Also, QuickBooks export option is built in to Shopp, where as it is not with Woo Commerce.
I find that Woo Commerce has a lot of really cool display options, and it is wonderful that the base plugin is free, but once you start adding on shipping options like Table Rate Shipping and accounting features like the QuickBooks export, it can get more expensive. But of course, as you say, it is not price that matters most, but what will deliver for the customer. So for sure, having more options in the way of an extensions marketplace is great, and provides peace of mind that the e-commerce software can grow as a business grows as well. But I do think Shopp deserves credit for building in to their plugin a lot of features Woo Commerce does not come with.
Your disallowed plugins page lists W3-total-cache as disallowed (in the list at the bottom of the page) whilst on this page it is listed as an essential plugin for ecommerce sites. So which is it – is it allowed or not please.
Dear Gail,
I believe the reason Austin said to use W3 total cashe is because he is trying to give a all-around best practices on word press for e-commerce. The fact of the matter is W3 total cachet is already built into every single site hosted by WP engine so you do not have to worry about it and they manage it correctly which believe me is a godsend to a lot of people. When using WordPress having a plug-in like W3 total cash is necessary because WordPress creates dynamic links and W3 total cash make the links static which is better for Google in addition to this the W3 total cash is the method in which to control your CDN if you have one. For instance if you’re on the basic plan you can upgrade for $20 a month I believe to have net DNAs enterprise CDN and WP engine takes care of everything that is a very good price for an enterprise class product like NetDNA’s CDN. When he discussed content delivery networks and listed Max CDN he was a believe referencing somebody using the any plan on any network. Because Net DNA owns Max CDN you can buy the 1st terabyte for $39 this would be something that somebody would do on another network or if they do not have the traffic or the money to pay for the $20 month enterprise-level CDN offered by WP engine.
I own a marketing company and can tell you without a doubt a CDN more than anyone thing it pays to have if you have a e-commerce business there is absolutely no reason that you should not have a content delivery network you need to understand what Google wants and it sounds simple but it is sometimes hard to achieve they want the best user experience for their searcher having a content delivery network on an e-commerce website will speed up the website dramatically giving the user a better experience therefore raising your site in Google in addition to increasing your bottom line through content optimization please do not take my word for it though to Microsoft and Google speaking together (a very rare thing) about this exact issue http://www.techpresentations.org/Performance_Related_Changes_and_their_User_Impact
here’s more information on why you need to be fast if you’re going to make it today with a e-commerce website. I challenge you to think about yourself when you shop online would you wait for very long time for a site to load? Or would you hit the back button?
More info if needed
http://awe.sm/cDUl9
you made the right choice picking the fastest WordPress host on the planet now keep going in the right direction and increase her bottom line. I also want to make it clear I’m not an employee of WP engine I’m simply a customer of theirs that does search engine optimization consulting I work with SEOmoz and distilled.net so I can tell you without a doubt if you have a faster website you will get more customers therefore you’ll make more money.
WP-ECommerce has been hit or miss for me… what hasn’t been is Stripe. After implementing it quickly for a few standalone solutions I’ve been pushing it heavy through my local dev community and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
Their support team has been pretty damn too.
Dynamic pricing is interesting as well, vendor specific pricing is a shortcoming that might force a client of mine to switch from Shopify to WP.
Good article.
I have found Shopp to be very handy (and the support team is quite reliable), though the draw backs of the plugin compared to Woo Commerce are present in terms of user-friendliness, on the other hand credit can to be given to the Shopp developers for including a lot of features out-of-the-box that you would otherwise have to pay for by using Woo Commerce.
Why do you mention a plugin (W3 Total Cache) that isn’t allowed by WPEngine installations?
Because this page is about WP in general, not just WP Engine hosted sites.
Please, it would be great if I get an answer to this;
I have a project to build a website that can be used to track shipped goods only. No online store involved. Was wondering if There was a plugin that tracks shipment of local goods at the ports.
Thanks.