How to Sell on WordPress Without WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a powerful eCommerce platform for WordPress sites, but you won’t always need such a complex and resource-draining solution.

If you’re a small online store or, perhaps, a nonprofit with a few items to sell for your fundraising needs, there’s a better way. With a WPForms Pro license, you’ll easily be able to sell products and accept payment for them from right in your forms.

Want to learn how? Let’s get started!

Why Shouldn’t I Use WooCommerce on My WordPress Site?

WooCommerce is a great solution for medium-large scale online stores, but for smaller businesses, or businesses that only sell a few products, it’s not always the best idea.

The main reason not to use WooCommerce for smaller sites is that the plugin comes with a lot of features and functions, which add some weight to your website and can make it load slower.

For larger stores, the benefits may outweigh the slight inconvenience, but for small stores with fewer products, there are much better solutions out there. One of these is simply using WPForms Pro.

Read on to see how this works!

How to Sell on WordPress Without WooCommerce

Step 1. Install WPForms

As we’ve just mentioned, you can easily sell products and collect payments right from your forms using WPForms. This is so convenient since you’ll need to have forms on your site anyway. All you’ll need to do is add a few extra fields to your form to make them eCommerce-ready.

So we’ll get started by installing WPForms Pro, which is a paid WPForms license that comes with all the features you need to build powerful eCommerce WordPress forms.

With WPForms Pro installed, you’ll have free access to the WPForms payment addons, which include popular payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal Commerce, Square, and Authorize.Net.

If you need a bit of help with installing WPForms Pro, check out this helpful guide to installing WordPress plugins for beginners.

Step 2. Install Payment Addons

With WPForms installed, the next step will be adding a WPForms payment addon. There are several to choose from, but for this guide, we’ll focus on the Stripe addon.

Another popular choice is the PayPal Commerce addon, and if you’re unsure which is best for you, our Stripe vs. PayPal comparison will help clear your mind. That said, you can activate multiple payment gateways so that your users can decide which they’d prefer.

Installing either addon is easy. First, let’s head into the WordPress admin area, where we’ll click through WPForms » Addons to get to the WPForms Addons page.

You can easily find the addons you need by scrolling through the page or simply using the search bar.

Once you’ve found the addon you’d like to use, simply click Install Addon and then Activate to get started.

Then there’ll be one more step to get the addon working fully.

Head back to the WPForms tab on the sidebar of the WordPress admin area, and this time, click through WPForms » Settings » Payments.

On this page, you’ll run through a quick integration process for the payment gateway you chose.

As mentioned, we’ll be using Stripe, but the steps are not significantly different for any other payment gateway. On the Payments page, scroll down till you see the section labeled Stripe, then click Connect with Stripe.

You’ll then be prompted to authorize the connection between your site and Stripe. If you already have a Stripe account, enter the email you used to set it up and click Continue.

You’ll have a few more steps to complete in a Stripe window, and then you’ll be redirected back to the WPForms Payments page. You’ll see that your site is now connected to stripe.

The last thing you need to do here if you’re using the Stripe addon is to select whether you want to use Card Element Mode or Payment Element Mode.

Card Element Mode only allows credit card payments. Payment Element Mode (which we recommend) allows credit card payments as well as alternative payment methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Don’t forget to save your settings!

Now that we have a payment gateway enabled, we can get on with creating an eCommerce form using WPForms.

Step 3. Create an eCommerce Form

Creating forms with WPForms is a breeze. The WPForms form builder is a visual, drag-and-drop tool with a live preview area. And you don’t have to build your forms from scratch if you’re pressed for time!

WPForms offers over 500 prebuilt form templates that cover a broad range of business and nonprofit uses. For this tutorial, we want to build a form that allows us to sell products and collect payments.

The WPForms Billing/Order Form template is perfect for this. To find it, we’ll head back to the WPForms tab on the WordPress admin area sidebar and click through WPForms » Add New.

This will open up the WPForms template area. We can find the Billing/Order Form template by searching for it in the search bar on the top left corner of the page. Click Use Template to get started.

The Billing/Order form will open up in the WPForms form builder, where you’ll see the template on the right, with WPForms form fields on the left.

We’ll quickly edit some of the fields on the form to make it more suitable for our needs. For example, though the Billing/Order form template comes with some placeholder products, we’ll need to customize these.

On the form template, you’ll see a WPForms Multiple Items field. Users can click these items to order those products.

We’ll edit this field to name them after products. To get started, simply click anywhere on the Multiple Items field to open the field options on the left of the screen.

You can easily change the labels on these items to reflect your products.

You can also add product images by toggling the image choices button.

You’ll now be able to add images to each item on your multiple items lists.

Here’s what our Billing/Order form looks like now:

If you would like to display the price of each item alongside its product image, just toggle the Show price after item labels button.

Once your items are set up, you can make changes to the Stripe Credit Card field. Click on it to change its label and description.

Then click on the Advanced tab. If you set up Stripe in Payment Element Mode, you’ll see an Email subfield. This lets users checkout faster using Stripe Link autofill.

You can choose to keep the Email subfield or use another Email field in your form here.

Now, we’ll just need to enable Stripe for this form, and add the Stripe payment field to make our form fully functional.

Step 4. Enable Payments For the Form

To enable Stripe payments for this form, we’ll navigate over to the menu on the left sidebar of the form builder interface, and click through Payments » Stripe » Enable Stripe payments.

There are a few more optional settings you may want to take a look at:

Payment Description

Enter a basic description, such as your business name or the product type to help users identify transactions they’ve made on your site.

This description will show up when they view the transaction on their bank statements.

Stripe Payment Receipt

Enter the field of the form where the user’s email address should be pulled from. In this case, we have only one email field, so we’ll simply choose Email.

Users will now receive their receipts in whatever email address they’ve entered into the form.

Recurring Payments

If you want to set up recurring payments, perhaps for a recurring subscription, you’ll need to activate the Enable recurring subscription payments button.

Enter a name for the subscription plan, set the subscription period, and again, set the Customer Email field to Email.

At this point, we’re all set up with a fully functional payment form.

And that’s it! You now know how to sell on WordPress without using WooCommerce.