Is WordPress Good Ecommerce Solution?
Fast development of wordpress makes everything possible. While the wordpress was solely used for blog purpose, now you can fully customize it for any website purpose like CMS, Forum and even Ecommerce by various themes and plugins! Is it good idea to use wordpress for ecommerce store? How and what would be the limitation in doing so? This article clears out all your doubts and give your guidance on how to setup ecommerce store in right direction.
Why WordPress for Ecommerce?
Wordpress started as simple and powerful blog platform. Over 10 years development, most functions are greatly improved but its operation panel still ramins the same. It's quite rare from all existing software projects. You might find lots of good reasons to convert a wordpress site to ecommerce store such as
- Simple Setup. Most of the time you just need to add plugins for shopping cart setup.
- Easy management. You don't have to deal with lots of tech stuff from its simple admin panel. Products/clients and payments can be handled quickly from list view.
- SEO friendly. Your product page can be fully setup by following seo guidance with friendly urls. Products uploading is the same process in publishing blog posts.
In a word, it's simple and easy to setup your shopping cart via wordpress based its user friendly admin panel and powerful plugin galleries. Especially when you have very basic requirements for simple store setup such as paid downloading or donation like site, wordpress simplely provides the best solution.
Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugin
There're multiple well rated plugins for wordpress cart site creation, however most of them are commercially provided and actually not cheap to get. We highly suggest check out the WP e-commerce solution which comes with free version to work with. You can pay for premium support and additional fuctions such as payment gateways, spam filters and shipping plugins etc.
Generally speaking, you have to get various plugins in order to setup a full functional ecommerce site with wordpress and almost each plugin is commercial product. The final costs will be pretty high while its started for free.
Best Shopping Cart Solution
As read from above explanation, you finally have to pay for a full functional cart site. Unless you really have to use wordpress for ecommerce site setup, we highly suggest check out the leading shopping cart solutions that're dedicated for ecommerce purpose. Many of them are provided free and addon services are pretty affordable to get. What most important is there're lots of online help resources to check with incase you need guidance for setup as well as for trouble shooting. If you need a professional cart site and keep it in safe hands, a dedicated ecommerce platform is highly recommended. We list out the most popular choice below by editors for your reference
Open Cart(www.opencart.com). Leading open source shopping cart software with php/mysql scripting. Open cart is supported by thousands of communities in different languages. The simple and powerful navigation help with your store setup in few minutes. You can add various free or paid modules to setup a powerful online store. More details can be found on this open cart page.
VirtueMart(virtuemart.net). It's a module of joomla for ecommerce purpose. Although its developed as a module, it has all popular functions included in its design and full functional as a dedicated software. The big advantage using virtuemart is you can make full use of all available joomla features such as content management, user management and newsletter management etc. You can also add blog/forum features to your store for news update and user interaction. More details about this product can be found on this article posting.
Nopcommerce(www.nopcommerce.com). The best open sourced asp.net shopping cart solution. It's programmed by .net and sql server technologies on windows IIS platform. Comparing to other .net cart softwares, nopcommerce is some part new but it got good growth in the past few years in co-operating with leading sponsors and communities. Nopcommerce has frequent updates and new version release based user experience. If you're asp.net developer, you can fully customize it or even create your own products based its core structures. Learn more about from this nopcommerce hosting article.
From side by side comparison, wordpress can not reach the art of above dedicated ecommerce solutions. It might be good for simple store purpose, but once your site grows up, you will have to swtich to other platform. For long term business purpose, we highly recommend above solutions instead wordpress just because of simplity.
