5 WooCommerce Alternatives That You Should Consider

If you visit WordPress ecommerce website, most likely it is using WooCommerce.  WooCommerce is by far the most popular ecommerce solution for WordPress sites.  But that doesn’t mean that it’s the only game in town.  There are numerous reasons why someone chooses not to use WooCommerce.  If an alternate to WooCommerce is the best option, we will show you what the alternatives are.

Easy Digital Download

1. Easy Digital Download

WooCommerce allows you to sell physical and digital merchandises.  Easy Digital Download is another option that was made within digital merchandise in mind. There are add-ons sold for it that provide frontend submissions, software licensing, and payment gateways.  If you are planning on selling just digital items, then this is a great alternative.

Memberpress

2. Memberpress

Memberpress is a WordPress plugin that allows you to sell paid memberships subscriptions.  Memberpress can easily provide multiple payment gateways, pricing tables and many other tools to help manage your subscription services.  WooCommerce has extensions that provide subscription services, but you will need additional addons to add on things like affiliate programs, pricing pages and others.  Memberpress doesn’t have the ability to act as a traditional cart.  If you need to sell any kind of product you would need to use it alongside of WooCommerce.

Ecwid Ecommerce

3. Ecwid Ecommerce

Ecwid Ecommerce is similar to WooCommerce, but the biggest difference is that it is a ecommerce platform that can integrate into other places beside wordpress.  It allows you to sell your products on other places like Ebay, Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram.  With Ecwid, you are able to choose from over 30 different payment processing options and has shipping carriers integrated.  Ecwid Ecommerce does come with a free version, but you are only able to sell 10 items and there are a lot of options that are not available to you.  To get more products to sell and access to some of the other features you would need to choose from one of their other options that range from $15 to $99 a month.

WP eCommerce

4. WP eCommerce

WP eCommerce is very much similar to WooCommerce.  It’s a free plugin that provide WordPress sites an ecommerce solution.  You can purchase additional addons and extensions to add additional features like payment gateways, coupon management, subscription management and more.  The biggest draw for WP eCommerce is the ability to be able to edit the HTML and CSS code.  This allows you customize the layout to fit your own vision.

Shopify

5. Shopify

Unlike WooCommerce and all the other alternatives mentioned, Shopify does not need WordPress.  Shopify is an ecommerce hosting solution.  Everything needed to have an online store is provided by Shopify. You don’t have to worry about security, updates, or hosting, Shopify take care of it all.  One of the drawbacks to Shopify is that you don’t have as much control of the website as you would with WooCommerce. You are also charge transaction fees which could add up if you have a lot of sales.

WordPress Roles and Capabilities

Wordress has six built in roles that come with preset abilities.  If you have a website that has multiple users and you want to be able to assign different levels of capabilities, then you can use the six roles.  The predefined roles are super admin, administrator, editor, author, contributor,

Summary of Roles

Super Admin somebody with access to the site network administration features and all other features.
Administrator somebody who has access to all the administration features within a single site.
Editor somebody who can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users.
Author somebody who can publish and manage their own posts.
Contributor somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them.
Subscriber somebody who can only manage their profile.

A user with the administrator role is automatically created during the installation of WordPress.  The default role for new users can be set at Administration Screens > Settings > General.

Each roles has a set of task that it is allowed to complete.  Th following sections list the default task that each role can perform.

Super Admin

Multisite Super Admins have, by default, all capabilities. The following Multisite-only capabilities are therefore only available to Super Admins:

In the case of single site WordPress installation, Administrators are, in effect, Super Admins. As such, they are the only ones to have access to additional admin capabilities.

Administrator

The capabilities of Administrators differs between single site and Multisite WordPress installations. All administrators have the following capabilities:

Additional Admin Capabilities

Only Administrators of single site installations have the following capabilities. In Multisite, only the Super Admin has these abilities:

Editor

Author

Contributor

Subscriber

These are the default roles that come with every WordPress installation.  There is the ability to create custom roles by adding new code to the function.php file.  There are plugins like Members and User Role Editor that give you the ability to create custom roles and also edit the default roles.