We’ve built a lot of different WordPress websites over the past 15 years, and one thing we’ve found to be true is that people can and will sell anything on the internet. Even cars.

Although we haven’t personally sold cars online, we do know what goes into running an online business and selling physical products. And we wanted to find out how we could help our readers who run automobile websites and car rental agencies.

To make what might seem like an overwhelming task more manageable, we downloaded and tested the most popular car listing plugins and WordPress autotrader plugins so you don’t have to. We were also pleasantly surprised to discover that the popular WooCommerce platform can be used for exactly this purpose.

In this article, we will explain everything we learned while testing the best car plugins for WordPress and share our top picks, along with their pros and cons.

If you are in a hurry, then take a quick look at our expert picks to make a decision.

How We Test And Review Car Plugins For WordPress

Using a car plugin for your online store will allow you to create and manage vehicle listings on your website. You can also add car images, manage inventory, add search forms, schedule appointments, and integrate your store with different payment gateways.

However, since there are so many options in the market, it can be confusing to choose the right one according to your business needs. We have made this easier by testing the popular car plugins for you.

When doing that, we focused on the following areas:

• Ease of use: For this showcase, we have added WordPress autotrader plugins that are easy to use for beginners and come with extensive documentation.
• Inventory Management: We examined each plugin’s ability to manage car listings efficiently, including features for adding, editing, and removing vehicles. This includes checking for bulk upload options and VIN decoding.
• Search and Filter Capabilities: We tested the search and filter functions, ensuring that potential buyers can easily navigate through listings by criteria such as make, model, year, and price range for cars.
• Integration Capability: We evaluated each tool’s compatibility with popular WordPress themes and other essential plugins, ensuring that it integrates smoothly and functions without conflicts.
• Performance Impact: We monitored each car listing plugin’s effect on website speed and performance, ensuring it can handle large car inventories without slowing down the site.
• User Feedback and Reviews: We saw feedback and ratings from real users to gather insights into the plugin’s performance in actual sales environments.
• Reliability: We have only included the plugins we have tested ourselves on real websites. We also took a look at customer reviews.

Having said that, let’s take a look at the best plugins to sell cars with WordPress.

1. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the overall best eCommerce platform for selling all kinds of physical products, including cars, using WordPress. It is open source and easy to set up and customize.

We have extensively tested WooCommerce over the years and have had a great experience with it. The platform is highly beginner-friendly, free to start, and extremely scalable. For more details, you can see our complete WooCommerce tutorial.

The plugin’s visual builder allows you to sell all kinds of products, including cars, and integrates with popular payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe, making it super easy to receive payments.

WooCommerce is also completely free and can integrate with numerous other plugins to add different functions to your site like coupons, popups, sliding carts, and more.

For details, see our top picks for the best WooCommerce plugins to grow your business.

Pros

• We really like that you can easily add, edit, and manage your car listings under the ‘Products’ section.
• You can also use WooCommerce to sell car parts in your online store.
• The plugin lets you track and manage customer orders, including processing payments, handling refunds, and fulfilling orders.
• During our testing, we found that WooCommerce creates different pages for your store by itself. Plus, it lets you add pricing variations, use categories and tags, and comes with image and gallery management.

Cons

• WooCommerce is not specifically built to sell cars. This means that some of the options offered by the plugin may not be useful to you.
• We don’t like that it does not offer any real-time support.

Why we recommend WooCommerce: WooCommerce is the best plugin to sell cars with WordPress because it is free, open source, and beginner-friendly. It can integrate with any payment gateway and offers numerous extensions and plugins to add different functions to your auto store.

2. Auto Listings

Auto listings is a popular car listing plugin that lets you add, edit, and manage car listings right within your WordPress dashboard.

While exploring the tool, we discovered that you can add comprehensive details for each car, such as make, model, year, mileage, features list, condition, engine specifications, and VIN. This will help users make an informed decision before they contact you.

Auto Listings lets you integrate lead capture forms with your cars to collect customer information and is optimized for SEO to help your store rank higher.

Pros

• We were particularly impressed by the plugin’s price negotiation feature, where potential buyers can submit purchase offers.
• It allows users to shortlist and compare cars, create image and video galleries, and add a powerful search form.
• We liked that the tool also lets you add social sharing buttons to encourage users to share cars on their social media accounts.
• It has multilingual support and is fully compatible with any WordPress car dealership theme.

Cons

• The Auto Listings plugin does not integrate with any payment gateways. However, you can receive payments by integrating the plugin with WooCommerce.
• Some of the features can only be unlocked in the pro version.

Why we recommend Auto Listings: If you want to create simple car listings and don’t want to receive payments online, then Auto Listings is a great choice. It will allow users to view cars available in your physical store and submit offers.

3. Motors

Motors is a free WordPress autotrader plugin that lets you create car listings in just a few minutes. It stands out because it allows you to add a listing submission form on your website and accept information from your other car sellers. In this way, it can be used for an online marketplace.

During our testing, we found it to be an ideal solution for beginners who don’t have a big budget since it comes with all the necessary features to get started with your car business.

The plugin is super user-friendly and allows you to create categories for different vehicles, add a search form, and compare cars to help customers make better decisions.

With Motors, you can also add social sharing buttons, loan calculators, and certification logos.

Pros

• Our research revealed that the plugin has a test drive form. You can add this to your website, and users can submit it to test drive a vehicle of their choosing.
• If multiple users are submitting car listings on your store, then you can create public profiles for different authors.
• Motors allows you to manage listing statuses (available, sold, pending) for better inventory organization.
• We like its wishlist feature where users can save the cars they like for future reference.

Cons

• You will need to integrate the plugin with WooCommerce to receive payments online.
• It does not offer built-in contact forms, so you will have to integrate it with a popular contact form plugin.

Why we recommend Motors: If you want to create a marketplace and accept car listings from different users, then this is the plugin for you.

4. Business Directory Plugin

Business Directory Plugin is a popular WordPress business directory plugin that lets you create an online car sales directory and easily accept payments for your listings. This makes it a great option for creating a profitable online car marketplace.

We’ve experimented with this plugin many times for making different kinds of listing websites, and we have been impressed with the results. For details, please see our Business Directory Plugin review.

It’s very beginner-friendly, making it simple to set up and customize while still offering the advanced options needed for more complex listings.

It is a good choice if you want to accept listings from users and make money by charging them a small amount for putting their car for sale in your store.

The plugin is mobile-friendly, optimized for search engines, and comes with a robust search form, making it a great choice.

For details, see our tutorial on how to create a web directory in WordPress.

Pros

• When researching the tool, we came across the plugin’s Mapping feature. This lets you display the location of dealerships or individual sellers for car listings.
• You can create a marketplace for used cars by providing a platform for individual sellers to list their used cars and then connect them with buyers.
• It can integrate with multiple payment gateways, including Authorize.net.

Cons

• Some of the features can only be unlocked in the pro plan.
• It is focused on listings, not sales, so we don’t recommend it if you plan to sell cars online.

Why we recommend Business Directory: If you want to create a marketplace and earn money by allowing users to put up their used car listings, then Business Directory is a great choice.

5. Car Dealer

Car Dealer is a free WordPress plugin for creating car listings and selling vehicles online. It’s a great option if you run multiple dealerships and want to see your vehicles straight from WordPress.

While testing the plugin, we discovered that it comes with a bunch of premade templates for cart listings and a powerful visual builder that lets you customize your listings and see the changes in real time. You can also create custom fields to showcase car features according to your liking.

Our research revealed that Car Dealer has multilingual support, offers a price range slider, and comes with a currency manager, making it a great choice if you want to sell cars directly from your store.

Pros

• The plugin lets you add multiple dealership locations. This feature can come in handy if you accept listings from other people as well. Users can then visit those stores to view the vehicle before making a purchase.
• We were really impressed upon finding out that the Car Dealer shows a summary of the car when the user hovers a mouse over the car’s image.
• It comes with easily customizable search options, custom widgets, and a flex slider gallery.
• The plugin can also add a call to action contact form to your store.

Cons

• It had limited features compared to other plugins on our list.
• Many users have reported the plugin starts slowing down your website if you have a large car inventory of above 50.

Why we recommend Car Dealer: If you want to create listings and sell cars directly from WordPress, then Car Dealer is the right choice for you.

6. CarDealerPress

CarDealerPress is an open-source WordPress plugin that integrates with the DealerTrend Vehicle Marketing System (VMS). It allows you to connect your WordPress site with your VMS account to showcase your car inventory details using customizable templates.

During our evaluation, we found it to be super mobile-friendly. It also allows users to search and filter car listings, and integrate with lead capture forms offered by DealerTrend to collect customer information.

Overall, it could be a good option if you’re already using the DealerTrend VMS system.

Pros

• You can add vehicle details and manage the availability status easily.
• DealerTrend VMS can connect with email marketing tools and allow you to create listings using automated workflows.
• We particularly appreciate its CRM where you can manage your customer data.
• When we used the tool on our test website, we found that it generated reports that helped us gain insights into sales performance, marketing campaign effectiveness, and customer behavior.

Cons

• CarDealerPress does not offer any function by itself. It only allows you to connect your website with DealerTrend VMS.
• The paid plan for DealerTrend can be a bit expensive.

Why we recommend CarDealerPress: If you already have a DealerTrend VMS account with car listings, then you can connect it with WordPress and sell your cars using this plugin.

Bonus Entries

7. WPForms

WPForms is the best WordPress form builder that you can use to create all kinds of forms for your car dealership website. These include an automobile information form, car show registration form, car loan lead capture form, car maintenance service request form, car damage report form, and many more.

We’ve been using WPForms on all our websites for contact forms and surveys, and it has consistently delivered outstanding results. To learn more, check out our detailed WPForms review.

Overall, WPForms has more than 2000 templates to choose from and even ships with an AI form builder feature. The plugin makes it really simple to create forms in just a few minutes, saving you time and effort while ensuring great results.

Pros

• We love the plugin’s amazing AI Builder feature. Simply describe the type of form you want, and the AI creates it for you and seamlessly adds it to your website. It’s a game-changer for simplifying form creation.
• You can also style and customize forms according to your liking.
• During our research, we discovered that WPForms offers a ‘Car Payment Calculator Form’ template. You can add it to your website to help customers calculate a car’s payment, including the interest rate, down payment, and percentage.
• WPForms offers complete spam protection.

Cons

• Some of the features are only available in the pro version.

Why we recommend WPForms: If you are planning to add any kind of car-related form to your website, then WPForms is the ultimate choice. Its user-friendly interface and wide range of templates make it super easy to create professional forms within minutes.

8. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is an advanced form builder that you can use to create complex forms for your car dealership website. For example, it enables you to create and add a car payment calculator to your site. This will allow users to get an estimate for their monthly loan payments, compare offers, and find the best deals on their car purchases.

Over the past few years, we have tested out Formidable Forms on our websites to create a wide range of forms, and our experience has been great. We’ve been impressed by its reliable performance, and the built-in integrations make it easy to connect with other tools we use. For details, see our Formidable Forms review.

You can also use the plugin to create a car listing form with a template and add it to any page. The plugin can even integrate with popular payment gateways, making it a good choice for selling online.

Pros

• Our research revealed that the plugin can integrate with AI to create interactive forms.
• It lets you validate user data, create a searchable database, and create a shipping calculator.
• Formidable Forms seamlessly integrates with third-party tools.

Cons

• The free version does not offer the ‘Listings’ template.
• It has a lot of features, which can be overwhelming for beginners.

Why we recommend Formidable Forms: This plugin is a good choice if you want to add a simple listings form with a car calculator.

What Is the Best Plugin to Sell Cars With WordPress?

In our expert opinion, WooCommerce is the best platform for selling cars in WordPress. It is free, scalable, integrates with most payment gateways, and has many extensions to add different functions to your store.

However, if you want to accept car listings from other users and make money from them, then Business Directory Plugin is the better choice.

On the other hand, if you want to sell cars and accept listings on your store, then we recommend Car Dealer because it has a visual builder, offers payment options, comes with custom widgets, and more.

Frequently Asked Questions About Selling Cars With WordPress

Here are some questions that our readers frequently ask us about selling cars with WordPress.

What features should I look for in a car dealership plugin?

When you are looking for an ideal car dealership plugin, here are the features that you should keep in mind:

• Easy vehicle listing creation and management
• Search and filters
• Lead capture forms
• Mobile-friendly design
• WooCommerce integration (For selling cars)

What car plugin is best for beginners?

If you are a beginner who is just starting your WordPress journey, then you can opt for Auto Listings or Motors. Both of these plugins are free and beginner-friendly and will allow you to create a store with car listings and purchasing options in just a few minutes.

What plugin is best for established dealerships with a large inventory?

If you have a car inventory of about 50, then you can use the Car Dealer plugin.

Related Guides to Selling Cars

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