How to Choose the Best eCommerce Plugins to Boost Sales and Build Business

Choosing the right plugins for your eCommerce site is crucial to your success and essential if you want your business to grow.

Unfortunately, there are a ton of eCommerce plugins to choose from, all with different functionalities. This makes knowing which ones to use in your online shop challenging. And don’t think that just using the most popular plugins in the market will help. You’re going to need to evaluate your individual needs and do a little research if you want to make the most of your eCommerce plugins.

To help you out, I am here to share with you what to look for in an eCommerce plugin, as well as some of the best solutions in the market to date.

1. Product Category Specialization

Everyone who runs an eCommerce shop has a specific product or service in mind they want to sell. Luckily, WordPress makes it easy for online shop owners to sell anything they want, including physical products, digital goods, or services to clients.

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For example, Easy Digital Downloads specializes in giving online store owners an easy and simple way to sell nothing but digital goods to customers. In fact, you can sell software, digital photos, eBooks, and more using EDD.

2. Speed and Performance

Any time you add a new plugin to your site, you risk straining your resources, slowing your page loading times, and affecting the user experience, all of which can hurt your sales.

That’s why in addition to regularly monitoring your site’s speed and performance and using a reliable web host, you should focus on picking lightweight eCommerce plugins to extend the functionality of your online store.

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One of the strongest and yet mobile-friendliest eCommerce plugins around is BigCommerce for WordPress. To start, BigCommerce’s native website builder is AMP-enabled for faster mobile experiences on product and category pages, and the platform’s commerce engine, which powers all of its channel integrations, has an average uptime of 99.99%, so you never have to worry about lost sales opportunities.

What’s more, BigCommerce’s WordPress plugin is compatible with the official AMP plugin for WordPress, so you’re always just a few shortcodes away from ensuring your eCommerce storefront is as friendly to mobile searchers as possible.

3. Site Encryption

If you want to gain the trust of your customers, you have to prove to them your site is secure. After all, people want to know that their personal and financial information is safe when they make a purchase from your online shop.

One of the easiest ways to secure your eCommerce site is to install an SSL certificate on your site to change your website URL from HTTP to HTTPS.

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SSL certificates encrypt your website’s information when it passes between your server and the customer’s browser. In other words, it ensures that no one can steal the information that is passing between the customer’s computer and your server. This leads to better site security, higher search rankings, and peace of mind for you. Plus, it instills a sense of trust in every customer that arrives on your website.

Really Simple SSL is a free plugin that helps you add your SSL certificate to your website and enable it with one click.

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Just remember, you’ll need to have your SSL certificate ready to go. This means getting it through your web host (if this is a service they offer) or buying it from a third-party company.

4. Product Page Enhancement

There are many ways to enhance your eCommerce site’s product pages so more people finalize their purchases. However, one of the most convincing ways is integrating user-generated visuals from Instagram right onto your site’s product pages.

After all, people want to know that the products they’re about to buy are just as great in real-life. Showcasing actual customers enjoying what you have to offer is a great form of social proof and can help boost sales.

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With Yotpo’s Product Gallery feature, you can easily create a photo gallery widget and customize it to match the look of your online shop. Plus, you can even give site visitors a way to upload their photos right on your site so you don’t have to do all the work.

5. Product Recommendations

Recommending other products in your eCommerce shop to customers already showing interest is a great way to secure more sales, increase your customer lifetime value (the average amount of money your customers will spend on your business over the entire life of your relationship), and encourage upsells and cross sells.

If this sounds like something you want to do, be sure to check out the Shopify eCommerce platform.

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They have tons of free and premium apps that will let you do things like:

• Display items that are frequently bought together
• Create pricing tables for product and feature comparisons
• Show related accessories
• Give people personalized product recommendations

6. Wishlist Functionality

If you want to boost conversions and increase sales, give people an easy way to create wishlists on your eCommerce site, just in case they aren’t ready to buy quite yet, but want to come back later.

To do this, you can use the WordPress Wishlist Collection & Bookmark plugin, so customers can create and manage their own wishlists, keep them private or public, and even share them with others if they want.

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This is a great way to keep people coming back to your site – and sending others your way, in order to buy gifts for the wishlist sharer.

7. Performance Tracking

Understanding your audience and their behavior while visiting your online shop is important for making better data-driven decisions and securing more sales.

Of course, you can just use the free Google Analytics tool and track all sorts of website data. But to make things easier, try a plugin for bringing Google Analytics data into WordPress, like MonsterInsights.

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This plugin makes eCommerce data tracking and monitoring a cinch. And the best part is, you can track your metrics right from the WordPress dashboard.

Conclusion

There are many ways you can enhance your online shop to grow your customer base, increase sales, and boost customer satisfaction.

That’s why researching the available options and evaluating what you want to sell, how big you plan to grow, and what kinds of things your customers need is so important – before you make a final decision.