5 Ways to Sell Things Online With WordPress | EP 789

5 Ways to Sell Things Online With WordPress

1. WooCommerce
2. Easy Digital Downloads 
3. Form Plugins (Gravity Forms, Forminator) 
4. SureCart
5. Solution Specific Checkout (LifterLMS, Events Plugin)

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler:  Hey everyone welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast i’m Tim Strifler, and today we are talking about five ways to sell things online with WordPress. Now it’s no secret that Woocommerce is a pretty big deal. Woocommerce is not just the biggest most popular Ecommerce platform for WordPress it’s actually the most popular e-commerce platform for the entire internet. So there are more websites built on Woocommerce than any other ecommerce platform out there. Even Shopify, Shopify uh gets a lot of buzz um but Woocommerce even trumps Shopify. So i think they have like 35 or something of all uh e-commerce market share which is sends saying something so pretty big deal now with that said Woocommerce is great, but Woocommerce is not the only solution for WordPress. A lot of times people think e-commerce on WordPress is synonymous with Woocommerce um but there’s other ways to sell things on WordPress, and so we’re gonna be talking about five. So the first one is Woocommerce and again Woocommerce is great has a lot of positive things about it integrates with everything it’s crazy popular and so that you can get a lot of help for. So there’s a lot of reasons to use Woocommerce but it is a pretty heavy software and so sometimes you don’t need that. And so we’ll be talking about a couple different methods of selling things online depending on what you’re trying to do. So one somewhat popular way of selling things online with WordPress is using Easy Digital Downloads. Now David and i both love Easy Digital Downloads, we both run our stores on Easy Digital Downloads and we also use it on wpgears.com to sell our courses and it’s great it is designed for digital products, it’s in the name and so uh it’s fantastic. The one downside is there’s no built-in styling so you have to use custom css for just about everything where Woocommerce most themes that you use or page builders have Woocommerce styling built in which makes it really easy. That’s not the case with EDD and so you do have to write a lot of custom css to make it look the way you want, but besides that it’s fantastic it’s lightweight, if you get the all-access pass it’s very affordable and you get all of the extensions that you would need. So highly highly highly recommend Easy Digital Downloads. Now that’s not the only thing there are other even simpler ways of selling things online and so one i want to talk about is forms. So you can use a premium form plug-in such as Gravity Forms which we talk about a lot on the show, Gravity Forms is awesome, you can actually use a free plugin too like Forminator and you can sell things online using the form plug-in integrating with Stripe or Paypal, and you can sell things online which is crazy using nothing more than a form plug-in. And so that is a really easy simple clean way to sell things without having to spend a lot of money to get it, going so that’s that’s awesome. Um so form plugins are great. Now another method of selling things online with WordPress that i want to talk about is a brand new e-commerce solution. It’s by my friend Adam Preiser. Adam is the one behind Cart Flows which is a Woocommerce add-on for creating sales funnels. Adam also is behind Presto Players so he’s done a lot of really great products and has a very popular youtube channel as well, and he’s just a really great guy too. So him and his partner created um sure cart sure cart is like the next generation e-commerce for WordPress. Now when i say next generation some of the things that you think of work of Woocommerce as being downsides they’ve completely corrected. So for example Woocommerce is bloated right there’s no matter if you’re selling one product or a hundred thousand products there’s a lot of code being added to your site there’s a lot of database queries happening and it’s a pretty heavy loaded piece of software. And so shirt cart fixes that by having headless design. So headless meaning the bulk of the um functionality is actually happening on their servers not within WordPress not within the database. So it’s not going back and forth to the database like Woocommerce is where Woocommerce is storing all that data there, and so uh it’s it’s correcting that by by being headless. So Sure Cart is awesome, it’s super fast and um it’s modern, and you should definitely check it out. Oh and it is free! There’s a free version i don’t think they’ve even launched the paid version yet, so there’s nothing even to buy at this point. So definitely go and check out Sure Cart you will definitely love it. Adam and his his partner and the team behind it are a top-notch team in the WordPress space and so uh very very high quality stuff. So that is number four on how to sell things online with WordPress. So first was Woocommerce second is uh form plugins um or no no second was uh EDD third was form plugins, fourth is Sure Card, now the fifth way is to actually use excuse me the fifth way is to use a like platform specific uh e-commerce store. So for example or i guess a solution specific, so for example if you are selling an online course, Lifter Lms, Learn Dash they have a cart and checkout built in. Right, so you don’t have to add anything else to it to be able to sell your online courses same thing with like events calendars if you’re using an events plugin and you want to be able to sell tickets well you don’t have to go and install Woocommerce, you can actually use their built-in checkout. And so if all you’re planning on doing is selling a course or an event ticket or whatever it may be and and the platform you’re using has a built-in, there’s no reason to add in additional e-commerce functionality, even if it’s a lightweight functionality. And so that’s kind of a e-commerce solution that people forget about because in their minds it has to be Woocommerce it has to be this that when if you’re using Learndash or you’re using Lifterlms and all your sites doing is is selling an online course, well then you don’t need to over complicate and overload it with adding ecommerce. Additional ecommerce functionality on top of it. So that is it for this episode, hopefully you found it helpful. Let me know in the comments if there’s a sixth or seventh way to sell things online with WordPress that you have used and has been really effective. So uh tomorrow we’re gonna be talking about our biggest mistakes we made when we are new to web design. It’s gonna be an awesome episode, don’t miss it, we have an add-on uh part of this as well that we’re gonna point you to so you can even take the learning further. So tune in to episode tomorrow until then take care bye.