Best Free eCommerce WordPress Plugins

Posted by Lindsay Pietroluongo, in Ecommerce Plugins

Running an e-commerce store means keeping a lot of plates spinning at once. Luckily, there are a lot of WordPress plugins to help you attract customers, capture their information, encourage them to buy and then follow up with them after they’ve made a purchase.

These are the top free ecommerce WordPress plugins for everything from offering coupons and creating forms to enhancing security and selling overseas.

18 Best Free Ecommerce WordPress Plugins

While many of these free ecommerce WordPress plugins have optional upgrades for more functionality, they still offer lots of value right out of the box.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress, bar none. That’s no surprise since it’s made by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.

This open-source e-commerce plugin has lots of features, including:

• Themes to create a storefront for your brand.
• Customizable product pages.
• Shopping carts with conversion features.
• Multiple payment and shipping options.

WooCommerce supports pretty much anything you can sell, from physical goods and affiliate products to digital downloads and products with variations.

WooCommerce also has a lot of extensions that will enhance its functionality — we’ll get into some of them in this article.

Dokan

The Dokan plugin works with WooCommerce to help you build and control a marketplace similar to Amazon or eBay.

In addition to sales, you can earn commission from digital and physical products; offer service bookings to visitors; auction products; and sell subscriptions.

Other features include:

• Responsive e-commerce theme
• Widgets for customization
• Flexible shipping methods
• Over 100 payment integrations
• Coupons with restrictions

The customizable Dokan dashboard can be used to design the front-end shopping experience, while the back-end remains available only to admins.

If you want to upgrade to the pro version, you can get features like delivery management, real-time order tracking and setting multiple merchants for single products.

Mailchimp for WooCommerce

Mailchimp is one of the top email marketing platforms out there, and it has a dedicated plugin to work with WooCommerce for WordPress sites.

The plugin syncs WooCommerce customer and purchase data with your Mailchimp account. This allows you to segment customers so you can send targeted email campaigns.

You can also send auto-mailers to follow up after a purchase, recommend a related item or — possibly most helpfully — recover an abandoned cart.

WooCommerce Multilingual & Multicurrency with WPML

If you use WooCommerce and you want to sell to an international audience, the WooCommerce Multilingual & Multicurrency with WPML plugin can help.

You can set multiple currencies for your products, and the correct currency will display for the visitor based on their location. You can also put a currency switcher on your site so visitors can decide which currency they want to view.

To ensure you’re getting paid the right amount for your products, you can either connect with an exchange-rate service or set your own. And prices and shipping rates are customizable in different currencies in case you need to set different pricing based on location.

With the WPML upgrade, you can also translate your entire shop into different languages, including URLs, categories and checkout pages.

BigCommerce

The BigCommerce plugin frees up server resources that tend to get bogged down with things like payment processing and product catalogs. It does this by storing catalog items as custom post types and building pages for tasks like checkout, shipping, order history, etc.

You don’t need extra extensions to do this — everything is handled through the one plugin. There are also custom and advanced e-commerce features like:

• Compliance and security
• Global payment gateways
• Shipping calculations
• Support for complex catalogs

According to BigCommerce, running your store this way won’t impact the speed and uptime of your website, allowing you to scale faster than before.

Easy Digital Downloads

For sellers who offer digital downloads instead of physical products, Easy Digital Downloads is a leader among free ecommerce WordPress plugins.

Create and sell an unlimited number of products without paying for unexpected listing fees. Supported media files include:

• Documents
• Ebooks
• Graphics
• Music
• Photography
• Software
• Spreadsheets
• Videos

Customers can check out via a traditional shopping cart or they can opt for a quicker experience with “Buy Now” buttons. Checkout happens right on your web page, no redirection to a third-party page necessary.

With file protection, you can keep unauthorized visitors from accessing a file without paying for it first.

Everything you’d expect from free commerce WordPress plugins is included, too, like customer management, discount codes and purchase history.

Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart

The Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart plugin lets you add an e-commerce store to your WordPress site using the drag-and-drop Gutenberg editor.

You can also set up social media selling on Facebook and Instagram, and you can add your shop to marketplaces like Amazon to sell in multiple places at once.

Other features include:

• Support for 45 languages
• Automatic shipping and tax calculations thanks to integrations with carriers like FedEx, USPS and UPS
• A mobile app that lets you keep an eye on your store and sales on the go

Your store data will be hosted on Ecwid’s servers instead of your own, and Ecwid offers automatic updates, regular backups and unlimited storage.

Everest Forms

Everest Forms is a WordPress form builder to create application forms, contact forms, polls and surveys. There are also form templates if you don’t want to design yours from scratch.

When a person submits a form, their information goes into the Entries area, which you can access through the WordPress dashboard. You can also set forms to automatically convert into PDFs, which may be easier for storage and sharing.

Additional features include:

• Drag-and-drop form builder
• Customize the style of the form to match your branding
• Captcha verification
• All forms are 100% responsive
• Real-time notifications upon submission

The forms also allow for conditional logic, which means that certain fields can show up based on the entries in other fields.

There are also premium features if you’re interested in upgrading. They include email marketing integration, form progress bars, and user registration.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform with tools for customer service, marketing and sales. The HubSpot WordPress plugin has features for managing contacts, building email marketing campaigns, engaging users and more.

To get the full scope of how a user has interacted with your shop, you can view a timeline of their page views and communication with your brand.

More HubSpot plugin features include:

• A/B testing
• Chatbots and live chat
• Forms and pop-ups
• Integrations
• Lead-capturing
• Reporting

Whether you currently use HubSpot or you’re looking for a way to track customer interactions with your WordPress shop, this is one of the best CRM plugins you could choose.

Jetpack

The Jetpack plugin has features for everything from design and marketing to performance and security, and it’s a standard amongst WordPress website owners, e-commerce and otherwise.

Essentially, Jetpack monitors and guards your site around the clock via backups, malware scans and spam protection. It also monitors downtime and uptime, sending you alerts if a problem is found.

The plugin does much more, too, including:

• Custom website search (especially useful for e-commerce sites)
• Image optimization to improve load times
• Related posts prompts
• Social media integration
• Subscriptions to new WordPress content

There’s also an AI tool from Jetpack if you need help writing blog posts or page content.

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, and it has a lot of uses if you’re running an e-commerce store.

The Pro version of the plugin has e-commerce tracking that’s compatible with services like Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce and more. MonsterInsights also has an E-commerce Report that shows you stats like average order value, conversion rate, total revenue and top referral sources.

There’s also enhanced tracking for e-commerce stores that lets you see what users do from the time they land on your site and view a product through the post-checkout stage.

Rank Math SEO

Rank Math is an SEO plugin for WordPress that’s great for all types of sites, including e-commerce. Every website needs SEO, and Rank Math can help you get more traffic and, in effect, more sales.

In addition to setting a target keyword and finding out how to optimize for it, Rank Math SEO also has features like:

• AI to write content
• Link suggestions
• Related keywords
• Rich snippets configuration
• Google Search Console integration

Rank Math is also a good match for e-commerce shop owners who aren’t well-versed in SEO. There’s a lot it can do for you, like auto-configure settings and suggest keywords.

SureCart

SureCart for WordPress is a shopping cart plugin that’s primarily for selling digital goods and other non-physical items, such as:

• Digital downloads
• Event tickets
• Memberships
• Online courses
• Services
• Subscriptions

It can also process donations, and its subscription payment system allows for prorated charging, so users can upgrade mid-cycle and only pay the balance of what they owe.

SureCart connects to a separate platform to remove load from your site, which means it won’t bloat or slow down your website. SureCart also handles backups, security and storage.

SureTriggers

SureTriggers is a plugin for automating tasks across your other WordPress apps, plugins and websites, including third-party tools.

So much of running an e-commerce store is repetitive, but you don’t always have to carry out those repeat, mundane tasks manually. And with so many different platforms to juggle, it’s not easy remembering every step to take whenever something happens with your business.

An automation tool like SureTriggers can “talk” to all of your business tools so information is synced automatically and tasks are handled right away. For example, let’s say you add a new customer to your CRM because they make a purchase. SureTriggers can sync their information with your accounting tool, upload the invoice to Google Drive and then send a “thank you” email to the customer.

User Registration

The User Registration plugin is a drag-and-drop form builder for creating custom registration forms for your WordPress site — without needing to know how to code. Each form and field has customization options, and you can add premium features for additional functionality, like payment processing and log-in via a social media account.

Other features of User Registration include:

• Pre-designed templates that you can customize.
• Send email notifications to users once they register.
• Automatic creation of WordPress profiles when users register.
• Spam protection against fake registrations and submissions.

Also, if you run several websites, you don’t need to recreate your forms for each one. Instead, you can export your forms and then import them to your other sites.

weMail

The weMail WordPress plugin is an email marketing solution for collecting leads, organizing lists, managing subscribers, automating emails and sending newsletters. Plus, everything can be done within the WordPress dashboard, limiting how many third-party tools you have to go off-site to use.

weMail integrates with free ecommerce WordPress plugins like WooCommerce, and you can use it to send transactional emails, like when someone makes a purchase. The plugin will also collect subscribers when someone registers on your website or opts in via the blog comments section or after submitting a form.

With advanced e-commerce segmentation, you can target your audience based on their order amount, order frequency or the product they purchased.

WP EasyCart

The WP EasyCart plugin allows e-commerce shop owners to sell digital downloads, gift cards, products, services and subscriptions, and it can also process donations.

With the base edition, you can set up unlimited products and process unlimited orders for free. The available payment gateways are PayPal, Square and Stripe.

There are also two premium extension options that you can upgrade to if you want to sell on Facebook and Instagram, create coupons and run promotions, offer more payment options, and more.

The plugin installs three WordPress pages for your account, cart and store, all of which can be customized. There are also sidebar widgets for showing off your products and increasing sales.

Wrapping Up

The best way to decide on which free ecommerce WordPress plugins to use is to figure out what’s slowing you down or what you need help with. This is a better method than installing any and every e-commerce plugin you think sounds helpful.

The goal is to have the free ecommerce WordPress plugins you choose help you run your shop and automate processes that would slow you down otherwise. If you overload your site, though, you could end up affecting load time without actually improving your workflow.

You may also be interested in these 11 WooCommerce plugins for tracking and improving your rankings.