At times, some people have had issues with WooCommerce. For one, the product has been acquired by Automattic. Some just don’t like one of their solutions belonging to the company that runs WordPress.com.
That being said, it is still a great platform. I can remember in my early WordPress days using Jigoshop. That was the biggest eCommerce plugin on the market before WooCommerce emerged.
Coming under the umbrella of Automattic means that WooCommerce will have a long life.
Nevertheless, if you are looking for an alternative to WooCommerce, today we are going to look at three.
WP Easy Cart
One of the top shopping cart & eCommerce solutions for WordPress is WP Easy Cart.
Matt Corely and Josh Jones of Level Four Development founded WP Easy Cart. The two have over thirty years of programming experience.
“The WordPress Shopping Cart by WP EasyCart evolved as a product of necessity. Developing projects, eCommerce, and online shops for our customers, we soon felt there was a need for a solution that could get customers running quickly, with predesigned templates, yet offer flexibility in design if necessary.”
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WP EasyCart is designed to get up quickly and easily.
It has a wealth of features out of the box using the free plugin. One thing I noticed is that it creates its own nested dashboard within the WordPress dashboard. It feels like it hijacks the WordPress experience. I will say, I like the ability to change the color of the WP EasyCart dashboard.
You will need a premium account to sell a digital product.
When you install the plugin, you have a Setup Wizard to walk you through the process. Wizards are always good for helping non-developers.
The interface is very user friendly despite the nested dashboard.
Premium licenses start at $69 per year, which is very reasonable. The team has created a ton of features, many that are free.
All in all, it is a very good solution for selling a variety of products.
You can see a showcase on their website here.
WP EasyCart is a very robust solution. If you are launching an eCommerce store on WordPress and do not want to use WooCommerce, this product is worth a serious look.
Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart
Ecwid has been around since 2009. However, the roots go back to the early days of eCommerce.
“Our CEO, Ruslan Fazlyev, co-founded X-Cart, the world’s first PHP e-commerce platform in 2000. While X-Cart was very successful, it didn’t take him long to realize that lots of small business owners around the world already had websites, and simply wanted to be able to sell online. Ruslan decided to satisfy this need for small businesses and Ecwid was born in 2009.”
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It is an impressive array of functions for running an online store that integrates into your WordPress dashboard.
Ecwid also includes a store dashboard in your WordPress panel, but, unlike WP EasyCart, the dashboard is not nested. This makes it cleaner, in my opinion.
When you use Ecwid, you set up an online store that integrates with your WordPress website. The online store can be handy as it handles the bandwidth for you. If you want to control every aspect of your store, including the data, it might not be the best solution for you.
There are a ton of features, including helping you market with Google and Facebook ads to drive traffic to your store. There are even other channels, including Instagram, Facebook Messanger, Google Shopping, and more.
You can create coupons, re-engage with an abandoned carts feature, and more.
You can customize the design of your store and layouts. Payment options include Stripe, Square, Paypal, and manual payments (what?). Additionally, there are several options for payment gateways.
The application has a place to set up shipping rates even and including local delivery.
Ecwid has the feel of a Shopify to me with direct integration into your WordPress install.
The drawback is if you don’t want to put your data and customer information on another server. The company told me that they use Amazon Web Services to store the data. Customer credit card data is handled by one of the payment gateways.
For a detailed comparison with Shopify, see this article at Website Builders.
If you would like to see a showcase of Ecwid stores, you can find them here.
Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads is the product of Sandhills Development, which was founded eleven years ago by developer Pippen Williamson.
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is all about selling downloadable digital products. If you are you only selling digital products, then a full eCommerce solution is more than you need.
According to a contact who works for Sandhills, you can also use the plugin to create productized services. Many of us are looking for ways to generate additional revenue streams, and productized services can help with doing that.
Using the Downloads as a Service extension, you can easily sell productized services.
There are so many ways you can use EDD to sell products. You can see some of the showcase sites they have listed on the EDD website.
If you want a robust eCommerce experience for digital download products, EDD is a fantastic option.
The product has loads of extensions that allow you to do almost anything any eCommerce store can do.
EDD gives you want you to need to get started selling a product or two. It can be downloaded for free from the WordPress repository. For more features, you can choose one of the three purchase options.
To take advantage of Stripe, you will need the extension or at least the Extended Pass.
You can see an in-depth review of EDD in this article at Winning WP.
Wrapping it up
If you are selling physical products, there is no doubt that Ecwid Ecommerce and WP EasyCart are the way to go. Ecwid runs from a third-party platform, like Shopify, so that is something you will need to keep in mind.
WP EasyCart is an actual plugin that hosts the products on your WordPress website. So, if you are looking for an alternative that is not hosted somewhere else, this is worth a look.
If you are looking for ease and a company that handles much of the resource load, Ecwid is a solid solution with some really nice features.
If you are selling digital products, Easy Digital Downloads is your solution. Certainly, you can sell digital products with WooCommerce, Ecwid, or WP Easy Cart, but they are not designed just for selling digital products.
EDD is the standard-bearer for digital products.
What do you use for your eCommerce solution?
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