Sell online

WooCommerce

Featured

Free

WooCommerce turns a WordPress site into a store without moving it to another platform. The core plugin is free and handles products (simple, variable, grouped, downloadable), orders, stock, coupons, taxes, shipping zones and a checkout that can run on blocks. Payments come through extensions or provider plugins; Stripe and PayPal are first-party. What makes WooCommerce significant is the surrounding ecosystem — subscriptions, memberships, bookings, multilingual stores and accounting integrations all exist as plugins that share the same data model. That openness is also the cost: performance and checkout behaviour depend on what you install, and a large catalogue needs hosting that can handle it. It suits businesses that want ownership of their storefront and are willing to maintain it.

Easy Digital Downloads

Freemium

Easy Digital Downloads is built for selling files rather than physical stock. Instead of shipping zones and weight tables you get secure download links, file access controls, discount codes and a cart that can be turned off entirely for single-product sites. The extension library covers the parts digital sellers actually need: software licensing with activation limits, recurring subscriptions, Stripe and PayPal gateways, email marketing hooks and invoice generation. Because it does not carry WooCommerce's physical-product overhead, its admin is smaller and its checkout is quicker to configure. The free core is genuinely usable for a first product; the paid bundles matter once you add licensing or subscriptions. It is the default answer for theme shops, plugin authors and anyone selling courses or assets directly.

MemberPress

MemberPress sells memberships rather than products: you define plans, connect a payment gateway and then decide which content each plan unlocks. Rules can target posts, pages, categories, custom post types or uploaded files, so a course library, a paid newsletter and a client portal can coexist on one site. It handles recurring billing, proration, coupons, trials and dunning for failed cards, which is the part most home-grown membership setups get wrong. Integrations cover Stripe, PayPal, Mailchimp and a handful of LMS plugins. It is a commercial plugin with annual licensing, and the price reflects that it replaces several smaller tools. The trade-off is scope: if you only need to hide a few pages, a simpler access plugin will do, and MemberPress will feel heavy.