Is WordPress a Viable Alternative to Run as an Ecommerce Platform?

Generally, e-commerce site are open on “Magento”, “Opencart”, “Prestashop” or “Shopify”. And if you question why not use WordPress, the general answer would be “No” because of the following reasons:

1. Its not scalable.
2. It can not handle so much traffic.
3. Doesn’t have a good e-commerce platform, WP is only for blogs!
4. A lot of e-commerce features have to be built in to the WP CMS.
5. Doesn’t have a good back end support for inventory management, sales reports
   Vulnerable to security threats.
6. Doesn’t support ERP integration

“ERP integration” for WordPress users can have a strong answer for all the above questions. With the coming of some awesome WordPress plugins such as WooCommerce, which has revived the e-commerce in WordPress most of this has particularly changed in previous months.

One of the biggest reason why I am asking you to consider WordPress, is because of its Huge community. WordPress is the most popular website platform ever, of all the sites hosted on CMS’s WordPress hosts about 63% which means a huge community and since it is open source you can get answers almost for everything.

Scalable? Cannot handle much traffic?

There is no doubt that WordPress is a scalable platform. The popular websites like Techcrunch, Gizmodo, SmashingMagazine, etc which are handling millions of visitors per day have built their websites on WordPress. It is one of the best CMS ever built for scalability,

Scalable as e-Commerce Platform?

Well! this is one point which yet remains to be proven, I haven’t found any example yet, but I am a firm believer that it is scalable as an e-commerce platform.

5 Best Plug-ins for E-commerce Platform

WooCommerce

WooCommerce, built by talented folks at WooThemes, is widely used free eCommerce plug-in for WordPress. This plug-in empowers you to turn your WordPress site into a multi-million dollar eCommerce store. One of the best things about WooCommerce is its golden collection of free and paid themes and extensions, using which you can tailor your online shop to meet your specific needs.

Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads is a lightweight, feature-rich and simple to setup eCommerce solution for selling digital downloads via WordPress at no cost. Easy Digital Downloads has kept selling digital goods simple and streamlined by providing only most useful features.

WP eCommerce

WP e-Commerce is the second most popular plug-in in the eCommerce space. What’s unique about this fully functioning plug-in is its streamlined checkout process that dramatically increases your store’s conversion rate. In addition, WP e-Commerce integrates perfectly with dozens of payment processors and shippers.

Jigoshop

Jigoshop features an intuitive dashboard through which you’ll have the ability to setup and manage your web store in minutes. You can choose from 30+ fully fledged and highly customizable themes that are suitable for building any kind of online store. Plus there are over one hundreds of powerful extensions offered to take your eStore to the next level.

iThemes Exchange

iThemes Exchange is a simple, intuitive and extremely extendable WordPress eCommerce plug-in developed by iThemes. Having a user-friendly interface, it makes product creation process relatively easier. So that you could easily manage customers by viewing available downloads and products purchased, editing transactions and adding notes to customer information.

WP is only for blogs?

Now, here’s a wakeup call for all those who still think that WP is only for blogs. WP as a CMS has now been a proved fact for about 2-3 years. You can build directories, classified sites and you can also built a social network over WordPress using popular Buddypress and WPMU plugins.

While one may say that since WordPress is an open source platform, it could be hacked easily. But on the other hand WordPress has the largest community, who contribute to WordPress trac, submit bugs and the WordPress core get frequently updated. Updating the core is as simple as a click of a button. Now, every e-commerce system has been built on an open source platform, so is it different from the others.
Now, its not just the above mentioned features which make WP a contender, every ecommerce site wants to include some social aspect, like

1. Users create an account on their site
2. Users participate in reviews.
3. Users share their carts.
4. Users make groups and friends.
5. Users start discussions and forums on products and campaigns.

Plus all that SEO benefit you get from plugins like Yoast SEO and W3Total Cache….think of how much development effort you save.

Author Bio :

Sophia is a renowned WordPress developer by profession. If you’re about to hire WordPress developer , then you can get in touch with her. Sophia already has multiple WordPress-related articles under her name.