Buying products and services online is familiar to all of us, particularly at this time of year. Most e-commerce sites use a secure and well known payment gateway like PayPal and WorldPay, giving the buyer confidence. In this article, we review 3 e-commerce plugins that you may want to consider if planning to sell products or services through your website. We will look at some extensions related to the three main opensource Content Management Systems available on the market:
- WordPress
- Joomla
- Drupal
WordPress with WooCommerce
If you are thinking about upgrading your WordPress website to e-commerce, your first stop could be reading about WooCommerce plugins powered by WooThemes. This plugin counts 1+ million active installations and is a good eCommerce solution. The plugin is very easy to install and we are going to show you the first few steps that you will need to follow in order to make it work with your WordPress site.
Let’s Start! From the WordPress Dashboard page click on Plugins > Add New and then search for the Woocommerce plugin and click on the Install Now button as shown in the image below:
After the installation, click on Activate plugin link.
If everything goes smoothly the system should show you the WooCommerce wizard that will take you through the following steps to finalize the integration of this plugin in your website:
- Welcome Page
- Page Setup
- Store Locale
- Shipping & Tax
- Payments
- Ready!
If you want to know more about this plugin, watch this series of videos on the WooThemes website:
https://docs.woothemes.com/document/woocommerce-101-video-series/
Please note that after the installation you will be able to use this plugin with PayPal by default. If you want to integrate it with other Payment Gateways you will need to install other support plugins available on the WooThemes website .
Joomla e-commerce plugins
There are many e-commerce extensions available on Joomla. However, from our experience the two main ones that we would like to review are:
- VirtueMart
- MijoShop
Both e-commerce applications are quite powerful, flexible and are easy to use. However, MijoShop edges ahead as it supports a bigger number of available extensions thanks to a gigantic eco system such as Opencart, which you may want to consider while deciding which plugins to use for your Joomla website.
Ubercart: One of the best Drupal e-commerce module
Ubercart is a very well-known CMS within the developer community. It’s not quite as easy to use as Joomla and WordPress but should be on your list for consideration if building complex web applications. Recently released, the Drupal 8 version of this CMS now includes the improvements on the theme engine, authoring, multilingual and is now much more mobile friendly.
For ecommerce modules using Drupal 7, we would suggest Ubercart.
Ubercart is a very stable e-commerce platform that bring all the main features that you need from an ecommerce application. There is a user friendly environment where you can add your products and there is an option to integrate PayPal and other payment gateways.
Conclusion
Setting up an e-commerce system is something that requires expert knowledge. So if you need help getting up and running, do get in contact!
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