WooCommerce is undisputedly one of the first plugins you would see on any list of best plugins for setting up an eCommerce store in WordPress.
This has nothing to do with being biased or trying to accept the opinion of many eCommerce enthusiasts. WooCommerce is simply built to support the online sale of all types of products/services, and most importantly, vendors can seamlessly manage very large online stores using several of its features.
However, these various WooCommerce features could be overwhelmingly bulky to comprehend if you are selling just one product. Because to set up a store using WooCommerce, you must understand even the unnecessary features.
In a nutshell, there is a need to properly understand how WooCommerce works before you can efficiently use the platform to sell your single product.
Most times, this compels vendors to hire experts to do the setup. Now the question is: are there any simple plugins you can use to sell products without WooCommerce? The answer is yes!
The Forminator payment plugin is a perfect substitute for WooCommerce if you have only a few products or services to sell. This article will explain the reasons why and will also provide easy steps on how you could set up your store using this simple plugin.
The Forminator payment plugin
Forminator is an advanced WordPress form builder plugin that’s completely free to use and quite easy to create any type of form with. From contact forms to feedback widgets, registration forms, quizzes, interactive polls with real-time results, the Forminator payment plugin makes creating all of it super simple through a user-friendly interface.
Also, it has payment options for online product sales that include PayPal and Stripe.
With its drag and drop visual builder feature, it makes it really easy to create and set up anything within your WordPress dashboard.
Using Forminator’s interactive forms, you can easily collect information from your website visitors, calculate their bills, and process their payment swiftly.
What makes the Forminator a perfect WooCommerce alternative
Productivity is the sole aim of every business effort; on and off the web. And oftentimes, the route to being more productive could mean finding more efficient ways of performing obligatory routines.
The Forminator payment plugin could be useful in managing several routines on a small eCommerce store while still being so simple and user-friendly.
Here are a few reasons why you should use Forminator over WooCommerce for single product sales.
Simple and requires no developer skills
Part of the expenditure list for setting up an eCommerce store in WordPress is the cost of hiring experts for complicated processes. On many occasions, this doesn’t allow merchants to fully manage their stores since they cannot eventually effect simple changes at their desired intervals.
This is one of the big disadvantages of WooCommerce. Merchants are required to learn the complex system in order to efficiently use the platform in their store or they have to continuously hire experts which may not bring the best input.
The Forminator payment plugin is as simple as a form builder that anyone can use by dragging and dropping elements wherever they want to place them. There is no need for special skills to implement the payment system or to build your product forms.
Light-weight and multipurpose
Nearly all websites need forms, and of course, eCommerce stores cannot do without forms.
Aside from using the Forminator for product sales and payments, the plugin is also handy for creating all types of forms for your eCommerce store.
Instead of installing a different form builder plugin alongside WooCommerce, which requires time to learn, the user-friendly Forminator payment plugin would provide both services, and still take up a little memory on your website. This is very much ideal because too many plugins slow down your website.
The WooCommerce plugin itself is the major reason why many eCommerce stores are slow; it’s quite bulky. This is why you should leverage a simple and light-weight Forminator payment plugin to sell your single product instead of dwelling on ways to fix a slow WooCommerce site.
WooCommerce is the main target for hackers
Every security breach takes effort and careful evaluation of the risk outcome. And with WooCommerce being the most popular WordPress plugin for setting up eCommerce stores, hackers have turned to WooCommerce stores to steal credit card information.
These hackers are only interested in the platform because WooCommerce-powered stores host a large number of consumers.
However, while website security is a different subject for eCommerce store owners, you could easily avoid this hack invite by selling your products without WooCommerce.
This is where the Forminator payment plugin becomes another great WooCommerce alternative for single product sales.
Expensive WooCommerce extensions
WooCommerce is a free and open-source eCommerce plugin but to access some of its exceptional features, you need to purchase the extension plugins, which are not cheap by any means.
Though you may not require these features for your single product sales, there’s a need to understand the fees that could be involved if you are planning to use WooCommerce’s more advanced functionalities.
These are not free but quite expensive to lay hands on. However, the Forminator payment plugin includes all the features you would require to conveniently run a single product store.
Features of the Forminator payment plugin
Forminator can efficiently handle all types of forms, calculations, quizzes, surveys, polls, and more. Also, using this plugin you can generate leads, take orders, and also engage your visitors.
It allows you to create custom forms with fields of your choice, as well as interactive polls with dynamic settings and options.
The calculations feature will allow you to collect information like the price total (this will be demonstrated in the latter part of this article). And the payment feature will include integrations with PayPal and Stripe.
To give you a better idea of the power of this plugin, here are some of the plugin’s features.
SCA compliant payment options
The Forminator payment system complies with the new European regulatory requirement which requires additional authentication in the checkout flow: Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) regulations under PSD2.
Forminator does not manage the payment processing instead it works with Stripe and PayPal through built-in integrations.
Third-party integrations
Forminator also supports third-party integrations to help you better manage your consumer information and access many other functionalities such as marketing campaigns and online project management.
These integrations include Zapier; a third-party app that lets you connect to over 1000 apps, MailChimp, Slack, Trello, Google Sheets, ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, AWeber, etc.
Developer-friendly
In addition to supporting third-party integrations, Forminator is free and open to developers who want to use its API to build their custom integrations.
In other words, anyone could create their own custom integrations or add new functionalities by hiring a developer. Although for integrations, it would be ideal to add just Zapier and take up other integrations from there.
Google reCAPTCHA
For good control of the emails heading to your inbox, the Forminator plugin allows you to include Google reCAPTCHA, which is completely free.
This allows you to stop spamming from bots and improves your website’s user experience by not asking users to type in random hard-to-read words just to prove they are humans.
Custom login & registration forms
Forminator doesn’t just allow you to make all types of forms but it also includes features for creating custom login and registration forms. With it, you can create advanced L&R forms for a single site or multisite using several form fields, styling, behavior, and custom settings.
Also, Forminator’s import wizard allows you to import forms from CF7. This is great if you have already created your forms using the contact form 7 plugin.
Drag and drop form blocks
The drag and drop feature Forminator comes with only makes form creation a lot easier. It has several blocks you can move around to your desired location and fields you can put together.
The fields include name, email, file upload, date, phone number, text, HTML, number, radio boxes, payments, calculations, GDPR-friendly opt-ins, and hidden fields too.
Setting up an eCommerce store for a single product
Forminator allows you to collect information from your customers as well as provide options for them to pay for your product/services.
The eCommerce store for a single product set up with Forminator also provides you with means to send your consumers’ reminders and direct options to select a product variant (which could be multiple).
Forminator will perform all the necessary calculations, receive your payments, and will send you a copy of the completed form to your email.
Step 1: Install and activate the Forminator payment plugin
The first step is to install and activate the Forminator payment plugin.
This can be done automatically through the WordPress plugin repository or manually by downloading the plugin zip file from wordpress.org and uploading it to your WordPress plugins section.
Since the plugin is totally free, you can follow along with me right now.
- Log into your WordPress admin dashboard, click on the Plugins menu > add new, and type Forminator in the search box.
- On the results page, click on the Install Now button next to “Forminator Payment, Quiz and Contact Form Plugin” by WPMU DEV.
- Lastly, click on the activate button once the installation completes.
Step 2: Connect a payment gateway
A successful step one should introduce the Forminator icon to your WordPress menu bar.
- Click on the Forminator icon > settings. This should load the general setting page.
- Click on the payments tab and connect your preferred payment gateway. Remember, your choice of payment will be used to set up your product payment option.
Step 3: Create your order form
- Click on the Forminator icon > dashboard and under the forms section, click the create button. This should introduce a popup window.
- Select the blank option and click on the continue button. The next page will ask for the name of your form.
- Choose a name for your form. Something related to what you will be using the form for should be good.
- Click on the create button.
Step 4: Insert form fields
At this point, you should be seeing a blank form, if you completed the previous step correctly. Now, it’s time to insert all the fields you will require in the product sales form.
For this tutorial, I will choose the following fields:
- Name
- Address
- Select
- Calculations
- PayPal checkout
You have the liberty to include any other field you consider necessary in your order form. This also includes swapping the payment option with Stripe.
However, the last three fields are extremely important. You can ignore the select field if your product doesn’t include variants.
- Click on the purple INSERT FIELDS button
- Select all the fields you want in your form by clicking on each field once.
- Click on the INSERT FIELDS button once you’re done selecting the fields.
Step 5: Customize your order form fields
Only the last three fields in my selection above will require mandatory settings.
You could just drag and drop the consumer name and email to stack them on the same line if you want your order form to look like the one in this tutorial.
- To customize the select field, click on the field to get a popup menu. If you want to enable multiple selections of your product variants, change the field type to multiple by clicking on the toggle.
- Choose a label name (could be your product name), enter the variants in the option field. You can click on the add option button to add more variants of your product.
- Click on the calculations tab in the select field popup window, enable the calculation and enter the price (without any currency) of each item in the appropriate box.
- Click on the apply button
N/B: You want to drag and drop the calculations field at the bottom of your form, just above the PayPal check out.
- To customize your calculations, click on the calculations field in your form and change the label to Total or Grand Total.
- Click on the calculations tab, then on the add form field icon, and click on the name of your “select field”. In my case, the product name (PlayStation 5).
- Click on the apply button
- For the PayPal checkout, click on the field.
- Toggle the mode of payment to live and change the payment amount to a variable. This will load a drop-down for the variable amount.
- Select your label name for calculations (we used Total in this tutorial)
- Click the apply button.
Note: You can mark each of the input fields as required through their settings tab. To preview your form, click on the gray Preview button in the left-hand corner.
Step 6: publish your order form
- Click on the publish button in the top-right corner of your form.
- Copy and paste the order form code on the appropriate page.
- If you are using the Gutenberg editor, click the plus icon in the post page editor, select the form block, and choose the name of your form.
- Finally, publish or update the page.
And that’s it. You can now begin to sell your single product without the need for WooCommerce.
In Conclusion
Forminator removes tons of workload from your single product eCommerce website while providing your consumers with an extremely user-friendly form to complete their orders.
The form builder stores each completed order form in an easy-to-access database that you can export as a CSV file. Also, you can send a confirmation email to your consumers at the end of each transaction using Forminator features.
All in all, if you have the user-friendly Forminator payment plugin which offers quick and secure eCommerce transactions, there will be absolutely need for WooCommerce.