Hello, my name is Chrissy Ray, and in these lessons, I will show you how to add e-commerce functionality to your WordPress website. We'll start off talking about some of the things to consider when it comes to selecting the e-commerce plugin or plugins that you'll use. So the first thing you really need to think about when it comes to e-commerce is what are you selling? Are you selling physical products? Are you selling memberships? Digital products? Tickets to events? Courses? Or some combination of those? And we will take a look at several different e-commerce plugins that you can use to do all of the above. And some of them will do multiple things. Some of them will do one thing really well. So I want you to first start off by writing down what exactly you're going to sell, who you're going to sell it to, how you want to sell it, and really think about what you need for your e-commerce and think about your requirements for that. So we'll take a look at a few different plugins that you can use, and I will talk about what each of those plugins would be good for. So the first one is going to be WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a free plugin that you can install in WordPress, and it has a lot of free and premium extensions that you can also install. So WooCommerce is really good if you've got physical products, or even if you're selling digital products, it also has extensions that would allow you to add memberships. And right now I'm in the extensions marketplace for it. So we can see here that, for example, if I wanted to sell, let's go down here a little bit subscriptions. So if I wanted to sell memberships, I could add subscriptions to it. You can see that I can sell the subscriptions. And if I go into there, we'll see that you would have to pay $199 per year to add subscriptions to a WooCommerce site. So again, the WooCommerce plugin is free, but then add-ons like the subscription plugin are $199. And this is just going to add subscriptions. So you can add weekly, monthly, annual, or however different period you wanted, you can add those to your subscription. You can also add a membership. So let me search for the membership plugin here. So we've got WooCommerce memberships, and we can see that's also $199. So if you wanted to have a subscription and a membership, so you wanted to have a membership that may be renewed every month or every year or anything like that, you would need both of those plugins. So you'd pay $199 times two. And then if you also wanted to sell digital downloads, and actually the functionality for digital downloads is included for free within WooCommerce, but if you wanted to do licenses for your digital downloads, there's a software add-on that you can install. That's $129 per year. And there are other plugins that can do other things. And you can use a lot of different payment processors with WooCommerce. So if I search for under extensions, if I search for payments, you can see that I've got lots of payment processors and gateways. So if you can't use Stripe in your country and you can see you can search by country, so if you can only use the stuff that's in the United States, or if you're in another country, then you can see which processors are available within your country. You can't use Stripe in every country. You can't use PayPal in every country. So you want to find a e-commerce solution that's going to allow you to use the payment gateway that's going to work for your purposes. Now another plugin that you can use for selling software, so you can use WooCommerce for selling digital downloads and software licenses. Another one is easy digital downloads. And they do have a free version. It's very basic. But if you wanted to do things like software licensing, or you wanted to sell e-books or anything like that, then you could use easy digital downloads. So you can see there is a free version. The pricing for this though, if we go into the pricing page, they've got several different packages. So you could start with as little as $99.50 a year right now. It says it's normally $199 up to $4.99.50, or $9.99, which is the normal price. So you've got a pretty wide range there. And each of those different packages has different functionality. So you can see here, this one does many different payment methods. It's got the e-commerce features. If you wanted to do subscriptions, you would need to use the second tier. So we can do subscriptions in automatic billing, free trials, and things like that. And if you wanted to do things like recommended products, wish lists, and other features, if you wanted to ship physical items with your download, then you would need to have the next level up. So you really need to kind of think about what extensions you need for your easy digital downloads. So again, that is a free one, but there is a premium version that's going to give you more functionality. And this is really good for downloadable content, downloadable products. Another one that you can do is member press, and member press is really good if the thing that you're selling is memberships or courses or memberships with courses or downloads. And you can see that it handles all of those things. So this is a really good one, again, for members only content. So if you wanted to have a course and you wanted to sell membership to that course, then you could use member press for that. It's not free. You actually have to pay for it. There is no free version of it. And if you take a look at the pricing, then you'll see that it starts at 179.50 a year. All of these have these limited time offers, these 50% limited time offers. And you can see that it's normally 359. And that's going to give you some really basic functionality. But it does include their course builder. So it's a pretty good deal for that. Another thing that you could sell would be courses. So if you just wanted to sell courses, then you could use a plugin like LearnDash. And LearnDash is not the only course plugin out there. There are other ones. There's LifterLMS. There's a bunch of other ones out there. You can do a little bit of research on that. But if you're just selling courses, then something like LearnDash might be a good solution. And it's not free. This is another one that you only have premium or above. They do have a cloud version, which is a hosted version that one's $24 a month. And if you wanted to host it yourself, it starts at 199 per year. And this is a plugin that I've used on several websites. It's a really good learning management system. And you can see that there are several, let me go into the solutions, we've got several integrations. So it can work with other plugins. So you can see here it can work with WooCommerce. So you could install WooCommerce and sell the subscriptions through WooCommerce. And another thing that it can integrate with is this other plugin called the events calendar, which I'm going to talk about in just a minute. But you've got lots of integrations here and also add-ons that you can use to make a really good membership and course website. So the last one I want to talk about is event tickets from the events calendar. And this is an e-commerce solution if you're just selling events. So if the solution that you're trying to make is for selling tickets to live events or online events or anything like that, then you might use the events calendar. It does have a free version for the event tickets. You'd probably want to also add their calendar, which they have a free version for that. You can upgrade to the pro version, which is going to give you some additional functionality. Another thing that they do have is a virtual events add-on. And that's really good if you want to have virtual or hybrid events on your website and have it so that it will automatically allow people that purchase a ticket to access the event on your website. So they can log into the website and then see the event on there and access the Zoom or WebEx or whatever virtual meeting you're using for that website. So again, you really need to think about what your requirements are for your website to really sort of hone in on which of these solutions is going to be the best for you. And it may be in the case that there's some combination of multiple different plugins for this. So for example, on one of my websites, I have a combination of WooCommerce with subscriptions and memberships. And then I've also got the events calendar and I'm selling tickets for live events on there. And then I'm using LearnDash and I'm selling courses within LearnDash using WooCommerce. I've got another plugin there that allows me to sell live Zoom events, one-to-one Zoom events with individuals. So it's a whole bunch of different plugins that I'm using together. So this is something that does require some research. So take a look at all of your options. And thanks for watching. Stay tuned for the next lesson where I will show you how to choose a payment processor.
