WordPress eCommerce Plugins Compared: 7 Worth Installing
Install WooCommerce unless you have a specific reason not to. It is free, it is on more than 7 million sites, and every developer you might hire already knows it. Selling digital files only? Easy Digital Downloads is the tighter fit. Want a modern checkout without WooCommerce’s add-on bill? SureCart. Selling memberships or courses? MemberPress. Everything below sets out who each one actually suits, and names three plugins you will still see recommended that you should leave alone.
Also read: Must-have WooCommerce plugins for your store
WooCommerce is the default answer, and being the default is most of its value. It runs on more than 7 million sites, holds a 4.5 out of 5 rating across 4,821 reviews on WordPress.org, and is developed by Automattic.
Worth being precise about that, because it is often stated wrongly: Automattic is not the company behind WordPress. WordPress is open-source software built by a worldwide community of contributors and released under the GPL, with no company owning it. Automattic is a separate business that runs WordPress.com and develops WooCommerce. It is a well-resourced maintainer, which is a good thing for a plugin you are about to build a shop on, but it is not the WordPress project.
The core plugin is free and handles physical goods, digital products, subscriptions, bookings and memberships. You keep your own store data. The honest catch is the add-on bill: the free core covers the basics, and the specific things your shop needs, such as advanced shipping rules or a particular payment gateway, are often paid extensions. Budget for that before you commit.
Choose it if you sell physical products, expect the shop to grow, or ever want to hand the site to a developer.
Easy Digital Downloads does one job. It sells files, and because it never has to think about weight, stock or shipping, its admin is far simpler than a general cart set up for the same task. It is on 40,000 or more sites with a 4.7 out of 5 rating across 590 reviews on WordPress.org.
The core plugin is free. It covers a shopping cart, discount codes, refund tracking and reporting, and it works with almost any theme. Extensions add email marketing, recurring payments and software licensing.
Choose it if your catalogue is ebooks, templates, presets, music, photography or software, and nothing ever needs posting.
Ecwid, now owned by Lightspeed, is a hosted store you embed in WordPress rather than a cart that lives inside it. The same catalogue can appear on your WordPress site, on Instagram, on Facebook and in a physical till, all synced, which is the reason to pick it over anything else here.
Being clear about the cost, because this one has changed: there is no free plan. Starter is $5 a month and caps you at 10 products. Venture is $35 a month, or $29 a month paid annually, and takes you to 100 products plus digital goods and social selling. Business is $65 a month, or $49 annually, for 2,500 products. Unlimited is $149 a month, or $119 annually. Ecwid charges no transaction fees of its own on any plan. Prices checked September 2026, from Ecwid’s pricing page.
The WordPress plugin sits on 20,000 or more sites at 4.5 out of 5 across 228 reviews.
Choose it if you sell in more than one place and want one catalogue behind all of them. Skip it if WordPress is the only shopfront, because you would be paying a monthly fee for portability you never use.
MemberPress sells access rather than objects. It locks content behind membership levels, handles recurring billing, and includes a course builder, so it covers memberships and online courses in one plugin instead of two.
It is paid only. Launch is $199.50 a year but takes 4.9% of each payment and supports Stripe alone. Growth is $349.50 a year, removes the transaction fee entirely and adds PayPal and Square. Scale is $499.50 a year and adds Authorize.net. There is a 14-day money-back guarantee. Prices checked September 2026, from MemberPress pricing.
Do the arithmetic on that transaction fee before you buy the cheap plan. At $2,000 a month in memberships, the 4.9% on Launch costs about $1,176 a year, so Growth works out cheaper despite the higher licence.
Choose it if you are selling recurring access or courses. It is the wrong tool for a product catalogue.
Shopify is not a WordPress plugin in the way the others are. It is a full hosted commerce platform, and its WordPress plugin lets you add Shopify products to WordPress pages from the block editor while the store, payments and shipping stay on Shopify’s side.
That split is the point. Shopify handles the parts that are tedious to run yourself, including payments, fraud checks, tax and shipping labels, and WordPress handles the content and the SEO. It starts at $1 a month for the first three months and there is a three-day free trial, after which you pay Shopify’s standard monthly rate plus its transaction charges.
Choose it if you want a shop you do not have to maintain, and you are content that your product data lives on someone else’s platform.
WP EasyCart aims at the small shop owner who does not want to learn a platform. It is on 3,000 or more sites at 4.5 out of 5 across 206 reviews on WordPress.org, so it is a much smaller community than WooCommerce, and that matters when you need help.
The free edition allows unlimited products and orders with PayPal, Square and Stripe, and takes 2% of each sale on top of your payment processor’s fee. The Professional edition removes that 2% and adds live shipping rates, coupons, subscriptions, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Premium adds integrations such as ShipStation and QuickBooks.
It has also absorbed Cart66, so if you arrived looking for Cart66, this is where it went.
Choose it if your catalogue is small, you want to start with no monthly fee, and 2% of a modest turnover is less than the cost of your time learning WooCommerce.
Pick by what you are selling
- Physical products: WooCommerce.
- Digital downloads, ebooks, software: Easy Digital Downloads.
- A handful of products with the least setup: SureCart, or Ecwid if you also sell on Instagram and Facebook.
- Memberships, subscriptions, online courses: MemberPress.
- You already run a Shopify store: Shopify’s own WordPress plugin, and keep the store where it is.
- Tiny catalogue, no monthly fee: WP EasyCart’s free edition, accepting the 2% cut it takes.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the default answer, and being the default is most of its value. It runs on more than 7 million sites, holds a 4.5 out of 5 rating across 4,821 reviews on WordPress.org, and is developed by Automattic.
Worth being precise about that, because it is often stated wrongly: Automattic is not the company behind WordPress. WordPress is open-source software built by a worldwide community of contributors and released under the GPL, with no company owning it. Automattic is a separate business that runs WordPress.com and develops WooCommerce. It is a well-resourced maintainer, which is a good thing for a plugin you are about to build a shop on, but it is not the WordPress project.
The core plugin is free and handles physical goods, digital products, subscriptions, bookings and memberships. You keep your own store data. The honest catch is the add-on bill: the free core covers the basics, and the specific things your shop needs, such as advanced shipping rules or a particular payment gateway, are often paid extensions. Budget for that before you commit.
Choose it if you sell physical products, expect the shop to grow, or ever want to hand the site to a developer.
Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads does one job. It sells files, and because it never has to think about weight, stock or shipping, its admin is far simpler than a general cart set up for the same task. It is on 40,000 or more sites with a 4.7 out of 5 rating across 590 reviews on WordPress.org.
The core plugin is free. It covers a shopping cart, discount codes, refund tracking and reporting, and it works with almost any theme. Extensions add email marketing, recurring payments and software licensing.
Choose it if your catalogue is ebooks, templates, presets, music, photography or software, and nothing ever needs posting.
SureCart
SureCart is the newest name on this list and the one most people have not tried. It puts the checkout, payments, subscriptions and tax handling on a hosted service and keeps a light plugin on your WordPress site, which is why it stays fast without a stack of extensions behind it. It is on 80,000 or more sites with a 4.8 out of 5 rating across 282 reviews on WordPress.org, the highest rating of anything here. There is a genuinely usable free plan with unlimited products. The Launch plan takes a 1.9% cut of each transaction on top of what Stripe or PayPal charge, and higher plans remove it. Choose it if you want a modern checkout on a small catalogue and would rather pay a percentage than assemble six WooCommerce extensions.Ecwid by Lightspeed
Ecwid, now owned by Lightspeed, is a hosted store you embed in WordPress rather than a cart that lives inside it. The same catalogue can appear on your WordPress site, on Instagram, on Facebook and in a physical till, all synced, which is the reason to pick it over anything else here.
Being clear about the cost, because this one has changed: there is no free plan. Starter is $5 a month and caps you at 10 products. Venture is $35 a month, or $29 a month paid annually, and takes you to 100 products plus digital goods and social selling. Business is $65 a month, or $49 annually, for 2,500 products. Unlimited is $149 a month, or $119 annually. Ecwid charges no transaction fees of its own on any plan. Prices checked September 2026, from Ecwid’s pricing page.
The WordPress plugin sits on 20,000 or more sites at 4.5 out of 5 across 228 reviews.
Choose it if you sell in more than one place and want one catalogue behind all of them. Skip it if WordPress is the only shopfront, because you would be paying a monthly fee for portability you never use.
MemberPress
MemberPress sells access rather than objects. It locks content behind membership levels, handles recurring billing, and includes a course builder, so it covers memberships and online courses in one plugin instead of two.
It is paid only. Launch is $199.50 a year but takes 4.9% of each payment and supports Stripe alone. Growth is $349.50 a year, removes the transaction fee entirely and adds PayPal and Square. Scale is $499.50 a year and adds Authorize.net. There is a 14-day money-back guarantee. Prices checked September 2026, from MemberPress pricing.
Do the arithmetic on that transaction fee before you buy the cheap plan. At $2,000 a month in memberships, the 4.9% on Launch costs about $1,176 a year, so Growth works out cheaper despite the higher licence.
Choose it if you are selling recurring access or courses. It is the wrong tool for a product catalogue.
Shopify
Shopify is not a WordPress plugin in the way the others are. It is a full hosted commerce platform, and its WordPress plugin lets you add Shopify products to WordPress pages from the block editor while the store, payments and shipping stay on Shopify’s side.
That split is the point. Shopify handles the parts that are tedious to run yourself, including payments, fraud checks, tax and shipping labels, and WordPress handles the content and the SEO. It starts at $1 a month for the first three months and there is a three-day free trial, after which you pay Shopify’s standard monthly rate plus its transaction charges.
Choose it if you want a shop you do not have to maintain, and you are content that your product data lives on someone else’s platform.
WP EasyCart
WP EasyCart aims at the small shop owner who does not want to learn a platform. It is on 3,000 or more sites at 4.5 out of 5 across 206 reviews on WordPress.org, so it is a much smaller community than WooCommerce, and that matters when you need help.
The free edition allows unlimited products and orders with PayPal, Square and Stripe, and takes 2% of each sale on top of your payment processor’s fee. The Professional edition removes that 2% and adds live shipping rates, coupons, subscriptions, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Premium adds integrations such as ShipStation and QuickBooks.
It has also absorbed Cart66, so if you arrived looking for Cart66, this is where it went.
Choose it if your catalogue is small, you want to start with no monthly fee, and 2% of a modest turnover is less than the cost of your time learning WooCommerce.
Three you should not install
These three still appear on plugin round-ups. Do not put any of them on a site you care about. WP eCommerce. The oldest eCommerce plugin for WordPress, and now closed. Its WordPress.org listing records that it was closed on 16 February 2024 for a security issue, and it cannot be downloaded. Its last release was six years ago. If you are running it, migrating to WooCommerce is urgent rather than optional. BigCommerce for WordPress. Still downloadable, but its listing carries WordPress.org’s warning that it has not been tested with the latest three major releases and may no longer be maintained. It was last updated two years ago and sits on around 200 active installs. BigCommerce as a platform is fine; this bridge into WordPress is not being looked after. Cart66. No longer a product. Its own site now points visitors to WP EasyCart, which acquired it.
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Nicely crafted content and I appreciate your effort to make this useful list of WordPress eCommerce Plug-ins. I think Dokan multi-vendor marketplace solution plugin will be a nice addition to your list. It is one of the best plugins to creat a multi-vendor marketplace on WooCommerce.