Having your own website is a dream come true. You like WordPress and because it’s cheap, you’ve used it to set up your website. The entire process was simple and easy and your website is ready to go in under a week. You are happy with how it looks and how fast the website loads and its appearance. You can finally upload your products for sale and you can’t wait to see how much business you can make. But wait, before all this happens, don’t you have to select an ecommerce plug-in for your WordPress site?

Yes, You Do Need an Ecommerce Plug-in
The website Web-savvy-marketing states that most storeowners know very little about ecommerce solutions except that they are expensive and difficult to use. In fact, after a quick search through Google, you realize that you are out of your depth. There are thousands of e-commerce solutions online and most of them are complicated, downright impossible to handle by a person with minimal technical skills. So what do you do? Before you start worrying, you should know that you have one major advantage. You have a WordPress site and WordPress is kind to its patrons. The company offers a huge range of simple, and affordable WordPress e-commerce plugins that are super easy to work with. Most of these solutions are literally plugged in after downloading, and you can add products, link catalogs, change prices, add deals and so on; all by yourself. However, you are again a little confused as there are so many different plug-ins and solutions. Which one should you choose for your website and why?

Let’s Find Out
An ecommerce or shopping cart solution is designed to help the website owner upload products to the website, manage the products and price them in the correct range, connect them to the payment gateway, display the products according to the categorization and product searches, place the products in the shopping cart, and then check out the products after payment is confirmed by the payment gateway. Along the way, the shopping cart solution will also add or remove discounts, coupon code deals, freebies, shipping and handling costs, warranties and returns policies, and so on. Website Sarkemedia states that WordPress plug-ins are expressly designed to do all this and much more, but as quickly as possible. The most common e-commerce designs like WooCommerce are cheap, scalable and simple to use and will fit easily into any industry and product category. However, it still means you have to choose a system, download it and install it on your site before it goes live.

Choosing Your E-commerce Solution: What You Need to Know
The Internet is filled with resources and teaching aids that will tell you exactly how to download and install the plug-in on your website. The website Shivarweb recommends that once you have a rough idea of how the process works, you should go through the different plug-ins available online and evaluate them individually for the following criteria.

Type of product – Some websites offer tangible products like clothes and accessories but others may offer intangible services. The e-commerce solution should be able to support these products and bill them correctly. For example, a good e-commerce solution should be scalable to include digital downloads, physical products and intangible services. Intangible services may include memberships and subscriptions, reservations, tickets, license keys, vouchers and donations as well.

Product Display and Processing – Most e-commerce solutions will allow the user to sort products by price and popularity and by customer ratings. It should also allow the website owner to load additional products, change prices, add catalog pages, change display arrangements etc. on the website. The customer should be allowed to check out items from anywhere on the website to complete sales quickly. For example, some solutions will also allow you to add a cart directly from the catalog and customers can immediately pay for the product and finish the deal. Make sure you go through the entire ecommerce solution and assess just how the shopping cart integrates with product display and checkout before you add it to your website.

Payment Integration – Having as many payment gateways as possible is important as customers from all over the world buy your products. Use universal gateways like credit cards and PayPal but the shopping cart should also provide alternate payment methods like Bitcoin, COD or cash on delivery, EMI or easy monthly installments and so on.

Website entrepreneur Damien states that almost all WordPress plug-ins are simple but a few can be tricky to use. Free versions in particular may promise the world but may require serious skills to operate and leave you and your website hanging in the wind. He recommends that you go through customer reviews before you download and install anything, free or paid, on your website. It’s not unusual for your website to freeze up when you install the plug-in for the first time but teething problems usually resolve themselves if you have done your legwork correctly.