Selling a range of products is one of the most common ways to make money online. It requires you to invest in developing an e-commerce website that replicates your brand. While there are several CMS options to build an online store, WordPress is still the preferred choice for many businesses. There is nothing quite like transforming your existing WordPress site into a fully-functional e-commerce store.

For instance, if you have been running a WordPress based blog for years, you can now launch a product inventory with eBooks and other merchandise as a part of monetization.

An e-commerce site is different from a blog in many ways. It has features that support the sale and purchase of products online. If your preferred choice of CMS is WordPress, you need not invest a lot of money in developing some of the most crucial e-commerce features from scratch. All thanks to the existing repository of WordPress plugins, both paid and free, using which you can build an e-commerce website.

Let us talk about some of the best plugins to build an e-commerce website.

1.WooCommerce

Often referred to as the ‘King of WordPress e-Commerce Plugins’, WooCommerce is a highly popular, open-source plugin built on WordPress. Using this plugin, you can convert a WordPress blog into a full-fledged e-commerce store, hence the name. It has been growing in popularity after Automattic acquired WooThemes in 2015.

To get started with launching a new business or taking an existing brick and mortar store online, activate the free WooCommerce plugin and follow the optional guided tour.

Primary Features:

• Product, cart, checkout and shop pages
• Safe and secure integration of payment gateways
• Configurable shipping options
• Easy integration with Google Analytics, Facebook, and MailChimp
• Fully customizable
• Free and paid extensions to further enhance your store’s features
• Facility to sell both physical and digital goods in all sizes and shapes
• User-friendly dashboard

Download WooCommerce plugin now!

2.Starcat Reviews

Product reviews help buyers in making informed purchase decisions. If you want the customers on your e-commerce store to add genuine product reviews, Starcat Reviews plugin can do wonders for you. It is a popular WooCommerce review plugin to collect user-driven reviews. It also allows you to enable product sorting based on different review criteria.

Think of it as an end-to-end WordPress review plugin for your store that comes with multiple e-commerce-oriented features.

Primary Features:

• Easy to collect user reviews on multiple stats for your products
• Enables users to reply on existing reviews and upvote them
• Enable photo attachment to the reviews
• Integration with reminders and notifications
• Filtering and search of review listing
• Review schema to get more visibility in Google Search
• Pricing starts at $39 a year.

Get Starcat Reviews — Woocommerce Review Plugin now!

3.WooCommerce POS Plugin

Running an online as well as an offline store side by side often creates hurdles with inventory management. As a solution, there are WooCommerce POS plugins that sync these two sides of the business with each other.

A WooCommerce POS plugin gives a front-end interface to be used at physical stores. Alongside, it automatically syncs the orders, inventory, and other related details of the online store. Typically, they rely on WooCommerce REST API for seamless integration at both ends.

Primary Features:

• Easy to create and manage orders, offers, and sale at both ends
• Multiple payment options for the customers
• Simplified stock management
• Split payment facility for the end-users
• Cash flow management
• Compatibility with other WooCommerce extensions

Know more about various WooCommerce POS plugins here.

4. WooCommerce Affiliate Plugin

With an affiliate program, you can easily increase sales as well as traffic to your online store. It is like a form of advertisement that many influencers opt to earn passive income. To set up a reliable and error-free affiliate program, you need a WooCommerce Affiliate plugin.

These plugins tend to track the referral traffic to your website and ensure mutual benefits for yourself and the influencers.

Primary Features:

• Affiliate coupon tracking
• Per product per affiliate rate setting control
• Referral rejection on refund
• Enable or disable specific products from generating referrals
• Shortcodes for affiliate registration
• Detail affiliate reports for each product
• Affiliate management
• Email triggers for various affiliate actions

Find out more about WooCommerce Affiliate plugins here.

5. Elementor Page Builder

Elementor is an intuitive page builder plugin that replaces the inbuilt WordPress editor with a live WYSIWYG editor. It, thus, helps in creating complex layouts visually for website designing without having to switch between editor and preview mode again and again.

Elementor Page Builder offers limitless design possibilities through useful widgets, template library, and a mobile editing toolset. While the core Elementor plugin is free, Elementor Pro is paid and comes with various additional features.

Primary Features of Elementor Pro:

• Simplified user interface
• Impressive code quality with least shortcodes in use
• Mobile responsive
• Video embed capabilities for YouTube, Vimeo, or even self-hosted HTML5 and Dailymotion videos
• Seamless customization and styling features
• Compatible with any WordPress/WooCommerce theme
• 30+ widgets to create a flawless design

Know more about Elementor Pro Plugin here.

6. Helpie FAQ — WordPress FAQ Plugin

FAQs or Frequently Asked Questions is one section of an e-Commerce website that can help reduce the support tickets raised on the platform. At the customer’s end, it provides the answers to some of the most common questions asked about specific products. Using Helpie FAQ plugin, you can create this section without writing code for the same from scratch.

It is a popular WordPress FAQ plugin that integrates well with WooCommerce, Elementor, Gutenberg plugins.

Primary Features:

• Best suited to add product-specific questions on product pages
• Shortcodes available
• Live AJAX search
• Color themes
• Gutenberg block
• Auto ordering based on user engagement metrics
• Users can enter their questions to create dynamic FAQs
• FAQ schema for better SEO and search engine visibility
• Pricing plans available for up to 100 sites

Get Helpie — WordPress and Elementor FAQ plugin now!

7. Helpie KB — WordPress Knowledge Base Plugin

WordPress Knowledge Base plugins help create content in the form of articles or documents that work as the knowledge base for end-users, hence the name. For such needs, Helpie KB is a powerful plugin that you can use to create Wiki, knowledgebase, or documentation sites.

Primary Features:

• Content collaboration via the medium-Esque editor
• Full control over user roles at global, topic, and article levels
• Revision system
• Auto-linking
• Search results based on contextual weightage
• Content prioritization settings
• Password protection for topics and categories
• Automatic in page TOC
• Multiple styling options for hero section and category listing
• Single site license starts at $69 per year.

Get Helpie KB WordPress plugin now!

Conclusion

When you search online for the best plugins you need to build an e-commerce website, you will most likely find a plethora of options. However, the choice of the right set of plugins for your e-commerce website must be based on your business-specific needs. Make sure you consult an expert to help you select suitable plugins without making additional investments.