Although online shopping was already on the rise prior to 2020, the worldwide pandemic made our reliance on it grow exponentially. Even after life returned to normal, the convenience of e-commerce sites has continued to attract consumers away from brick-and-mortar stores, directing them instead to the plethora of online options available.
As of 2024, more than 26.6 million e-commerce websites selling everything from cars to household items and food exist worldwide. For those entering the online market with a website of their own, competing against established sites may be difficult, and balancing costs and income needs to be done carefully.
Fortunately, WordPress websites offer various e-commerce options that make setting up an online store cheap and efficient. And the vast range of plugins available makes building a store even easier. Some of these plugins come at a cost, but those below are well worth it.
WooCommerce Subscriptions
Any online store that provides a particular service or product-of-the-month offering needs an easy way to invoice and bill consumers on a recurring basis. The WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin fulfills this need, with WooCommerce being one of the most popular e-commerce agents online.
Allowing consumers to subscribe to a particular item, WooCommerce Subscriptions automatically rebills a customer each time an invoice is due. It also features a completely flexible billing calendar, meaning you and your customers can set up billing whenever you choose to.
The plugin, made by developer Automatic (the same as WooCommerce), integrates with more than 25 payment gateways and provides in-depth reporting structures. Despite costing around $23.25 per month (billed annually at $279), this plugin is essential for any store needing repeat payments without the hassle.
Advanced Custom Fields Pro
Developed by Elliot Condon, Advanced Custom Fields Pro (ACF) puts you in control of exactly how your site looks and what content is displayed. The intuitive block builder comes with numerous pre-build blocks and gives access to thousands of user-generated options, making placing a new field on your site quick and easy.
Some of the best block options available through a paid license to ACF include repeater fields, clone field tools, and option page formats. These and other options allow you to display large quantities of content or products easily and organized while ensuring that your site theme is consistent throughout.
However, one of the best reasons to get ACF to help manage your site content is because it offers various payment options for Pro licenses. Those wanting it for a single website can get it for $49 a year, while those looking to utilize it on various e-commerce sites can get unlimited access for $249 annually.
OptinMonster
One of the most used plugins among large companies like McAfee, Patreon, Experian, and Pinterest is OptinMonster. This plugin can help any e-commerce website with lead generation, customer tracking, and marketing, even if you don’t have any prior experience in these areas.
The plugin, created by Retyp, can create multiple attention-grabbing subscription opportunities to encourage visitors to register for email lists. These include lightbox popups, floating bars, and gamified wheels. It also offers advanced features like geolocation targeting and exit intent detection.
Offering analytics on each marketing campaign you run, OptinMonster also comes with hundreds of existing templates to choose from and allows you to collaborate with others to ensure your site’s marketing is set up. All this is available through tiered plans that range from $7 to $49 per month.
Yoast SEO Premium
Ensuring people can find your site is almost as crucial as selling something customers want. This is because most people do a general internet search for what they’re looking for, whether where to find the best casino apps or the best sale on leather boots. Yoast SEO Premium can help your site stand out.
Alongside the ability to optimize pages with up to five keywords, Yoast has, like many other industries, embraced AI (artificial intelligence) to help speed things up. Because of this, you can use Yoast’s generative AI to create unique and captivating SEO titles and meta descriptions automatically.
Other unbeatable premium features include 24/7 support, access to the Yoast SEO academy, the ability to identify orphaned content, and enhanced analytics and site statistics to see what people are shopping for most on your site. Access to all this ranges between $99 and $229 annually.
LiveChat
One of the most significant drawbacks to shopping online is the inability to touch, feel, and look at the product before purchase. Asking a sales representative questions is also inefficient, as getting email responses usually takes some time. LiveChat allows you to remove this frustration for your customers by giving them quick access to your product knowledge.
LiveChat enables a chat widget on each website page that gives customers direct access to a sales representative or customer support agent. The best part is that, in many cases, the built-in AI will handle queries for you, referring customers to you only when asked.
LiveChat also has deep analytics that can show you what products customers have been looking at before contacting you and how many sales you’ve made. Integrating with more than 200 types of e-commerce platforms, plans start from $20 per month and go as high as $59. All prices are charged on a per-user basis.
Wordfence Security Premium
Staying secure is often at the forefront of any customer’s mind, particularly if they’re shopping with you for the first time. Ensuring your site is safe should, therefore, be one of the most essential things on your to-do list. Wordfence Security Premium does this for you so that you can spend more time worrying about making sales.
Featuring advanced detection methods and algorithms, Wordfence Security scans your website and ensures that there is no trace of malware or viruses. While doing this, the security suite holds up a solid firewall to stop incoming attacks and automatically blocks blacklisted IP addresses from its continuously updated list of more than 25,000 addresses.
Premium features cost only $119 annually, a small price considering cyberattacks occur almost every 39 seconds. Larger websites can also opt for the Wordfence Security Response, which costs $950 annually but includes a one-hour response team for any emergency.
Price Disclaimer
All prices above were correct at the time of writing. Prices are sourced directly from developer websites and may or may not reflect current specials or deals.