In its original form, it may be difficult to imagine that you can use WordPress as an e-commerce platform due to its basic structure that is fully intended as blogging media. After the release of WordPress 3.0, this platform has improved so much and in some ways may rival other platforms that are designed primarily for online business. Plugins are the most versatile components of WordPress that can turn your site into almost anything imaginable.

If you think that spending $1500 for a customized e-commerce platform is ridiculous, developing an online business could be as easy as downloading WP 3.0 and these nine plugins for free.

1.  WP Live-Shopping: It adds a shopping cart to your WordPress, with the ability to displays all important information needed for online shopping inside a small widget. You may put the widget on the sidebar and adjust its appearance.

2.  WP e-Commerce: An elegant, simple, and versatile shopping cart plugin to sell your products and service online. This plugin is remarkable for its good looks and usability. You’ll also have a good support on PayPal, Google Checkout, Payment Express, Authorize.net and other popular payment processors.

3.  Are PayPal:

This plugin is perfect for those who only need an excellent PayPal support and don’t need complex e-commerce features. It also offers an excellent tool for setting up a Pay-to-Read site. Certain pages can be made hidden for non-paying visitors and visible for paying visitors. Each hidden page will include an instruction in how access the content. To further streamline the process, it supports Instant Payment Notification feature, in which access can be granted automatically to a new paying member without your intervention.

4. YAK: It is an open source plugin to add a shopping cart to your web site. Its unique feature is the ability to associate certain product items with weblog entries, therefore the page ID will reflect the item code. It provides a panel for shopping cart configuration and can use categories to better manage large number of products.

5. eShop: An excellent shopping cart plugin with some unique and useful features

–          Create pages for your products

–          Automatic emails management

–          Support for major payment processors such as Paypal, Payson, Authorize.net, Webtopay, iDEAL, Cash/Cheque! and eProcessingNetwork.

–          Basic statistics

6. Paypal Shortcodes: A very simple plugin that allow you to put a PayPal button in your pages with a short code.

7. ArtPal: An excellent plugin to sell your artworks or photographs online. By integrating PayPal and WordPress, buyer can gain a full access into a certain page after completing the payment and sold items will be disabled automatically.

8. WP Auctions: It allows you to make your WordPress blog as an auction store by creating, managing and editing an unlimited number of auction items. It has advanced features to remove any bad bids from the custom admin panel and all necessary options to manage your host bidding. One other useful feature is generating traffic by listing your auction in WP Auctions Live pages.

9. StorePress: This plugin comes with a complete package of scripts, which make it easier to turn your WordPress blog into a powerful e-commerce store.