Planning to shift your online store to catalog mode? Looking for a free WooCommerce catalog mode plugin? Choosing the apt catalog plugin for your WooCommerce store is not an onerous task. But, understanding each one’s features and pricing will help you pick the best suitable one which is right for your online store. Here, let’s take two leading WooCommerce catalog mode plugins and check their features and pricing.
When and Why Your eCommerce Site Needs To Switch To Catalog Mode?
Based on the nature of your business and some other temporary technical issues in your site may lead you to change your eCommerce site into catalog mode. If you are running an online wholesale business, you want bulk orders rather than direct individual product orders. So using these free WooCommerce catalog mode plugins will help you replace the ‘Add-to-cart’ buttons on individual products by ‘make a quote’ or any other customized call to action button based on your business.
If your warehouse is under maintenance work or facing some stock issues, would you like to lose your potential customers by leaving it offline? So here also you can convert your WooCommerce online store into catalog mode by keeping the visibility of products as well as offering a channel to further contacts with you. So you can boost your site engagement in addition to all these features.
Now, let us see how ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode and YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode compare against each other.
Converting Your WooCommerce Store To Catalog Mode
As we have discussed, both are for the same purpose, freemium plugins, and have custom options. Still, they have their features and peculiarities.
Features
Well, before choosing the best free WooCommerce catalog mode plugin for your store, you have to know about its features and how it will work on your online store.
ELEX’s free version itself provides a good number of features along with basic catalog features. So it’s clear that it won’t disappoint in its premium version. Yes, it’s rich in features compared to other catalog mode plugins. Because once you have chosen ELEX catalog mode’s premium version it offers wholesale and role-based pricing features also. So these additional features will complement well with the basic features and will enhance your customer satisfaction.
YITH version also comes up with some interesting features. But when it compares with ELEX, some features like detailed role-based pricing, tax assignment based on user roles and some customization options are missing in the YITH plugin. But yes, it offers features such as adding an inquiry form to each product to contact you.
Let’s compare these two plugins with some key points –
- User Interface
- Add-to-cart button
- Product pricing
- Catalog customization
- Filter users
- Compatibility
- Cost
- Rating
- Support and Update
User Interface
Both free WooCommerce catalog mode plugins are built with a simple user interface that you won’t find difficult to set all the features that are needed for your online store. After activating the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode plugin, you can find the ‘Catalog’ option that comes under the WooCommerce plugin. There you can find all the features which you want to set.
Let’s have a look,
Go to the catalog mode tab, and enable features such as Remove Add to Cart, Hide price and Exclude Administrator as well. You can also customize the button texts and its URL. Set all the features and filtrations you want in role-based pricing, if needed. And save the changes.
It’s simple, right?
When it comes to the YITH plugin, you can find a separate option on the left side of the screen. There you can enable ‘Hide add to cart button’ for both product pages and shop pages. In addition to that, you can set the admin view and ‘Disable shop’ in its free version.
Have a look,
Add-to-cart Button
The add-to-cart button is necessary for every eCommerce store, right? But, you have to hide them while converting your store to catalog mode. ELEX WooCommerce catalog mode plugin and YITH WooCommerce catalog mode plugin’s free version provides the option to remove this button from the respective product and shop pages. In their free version, you can conceal the cart and check-out pages as well.
Product Pricing
By following simple steps you can disable the product price on your online store with the ELEX catalog mode’s free version. But when it comes to the YITH catalog mode plugin, you have to opt for its premium version. In ELEX’s premium version, it’s a combination of features such as catalog mode, wholesale and role-based pricing. Hence, it offers role-based product pricing for different user roles. How?
In your wholesale eCommerce store, the customers might be wholesalers, retailers or even regular buyers. And you sell your products at different price scales to different customer roles from your real store. How you can implement this to your online store is a question many store owners face.
Here in ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale and Role-Based Pricing plugin, you can set different custom prices and discounts for your loyal customers. In addition to that, you can set user roles and add special prices and discounts to particular products and their variations for a specific user role. And also you can set markup price and price adjustments to individual user roles and products.
Customize Your Catalog
In ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode’s free version you can change and customize the text on the Add-to-cart button rather than hiding it. And you can add a custom URL to redirect your product page to an affiliate site or a third party site. In the YITH plugin, you have to choose a premium plan to do customization on a button on your product page.
If you want to create custom WordPress user roles and assign price suffix for specific user roles, you can go for ELEX’s premium version. It will offer more customization options for user roles. And yes, YITH plugin also offers several customization options besides customizing call to action button in their premium version such as, helps to add a new tab with a contact form or request form for your customers to inquire about a product to you, and includes the link of your product page from where the customer has sent the request or inquiry.
If you want to prevent users from writing reviews to your product, there is an option in YITH’s premium plugin. That is, you can disable the ‘reviews’ tab from your product page to forbid your users or registered users to write reviews.
Filter Users
Both plugins provide options to filter your users in their premium versions. As we discussed, in ELEX plugin, there is a role-based pricing feature that allows you to filter users based on their roles. And you can exclude yourself, that is administrator from the catalog mode setting. You can choose the users in each feature by selecting them from a dropdown. Have a look at it,
In ELEX plugin, you can set these features for registered users and unregistered users. And also you can manage user roles as well.
Similarly in YITH plugin, you can choose the administrator to see the site in catalog mode if needed. This exclusion feature of the administrator is available in the free version of both plugins.
Now let’s come to their premium version.
In the ELEX premium plugin, we can set it as different catalog modes to different user roles. As it provides wholesale and role-based pricing features in addition to catalog mode, it incorporates the features needed in wholesale eCommerce stores. That is, in wholesale, there are users such as wholesalers, retailers, vendors, etc. And based on the quantity they order, the number of previous purchases, and specific categories of products, etc, you can filter the users and offer them different pricing.
Offering a reasonable percentage of discounts and setting mark up prices will boost the number of potential customers to your online store and it will increase loyalty. This will automatically increase the traffic flow to your site and it will help to rank your site well organically.
One of the interesting features of ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale and Role-Based Pricing plugin is the role-based assignment of tax. Like you can apply different prices and discounts to different user roles, and you can set tax for your users.
In YITH Catalog Mode, you can filter your users by registered users and unregistered users. You can hide the prices of your WooCommerce store from all users of your site or unregistered users as your requirement. And you can prevent unregistered users from writing reviews of your products.
Similarly, in ELEX you can customize the accessibility of your WooCommerce store for unregistered users, guest users or simply visitors of your site.
If you want detailed filtration and offer features by filtering users, ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale and Role-Based pricing will be the right choice.
Compatibility
ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale and Role-Based Pricing plugin is highly compatible with ELEX WooCommerce Request a Quote Plugin, which helps you to switch your store into Request a Quote mode for specific user roles with or without the ‘Add to Cart’ option. ELEX’s premium version is compatible with WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML). WPML is a WordPress plugin that helps you to create multilingual websites and helps to run them. Therefore all the languages supported by WPML will automatically be supported by the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode’s premium plugin.
But when it comes to YITH Catalog Mode’s free version it is highly compatible with YITH WooCommerce Request a Quote, Badge Management, Tab Manager and Quick View plugins. So you can also add the features of these plugins to your YITH Catalog Mode Plugin.
Cost
Both catalog mode plugins are freely available. If you want basic catalog features with some additional features like hiding price, you can go for the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode plugin. And if you need more filtration and detailed role-based pricing features including discounts, mark up prices and apply role-based tax to purchases, you can update to its premium version which starts from $69 for the single-site subscription.
If you need a plugin to add inquiry or contact form to your every product, disable review options from users by filtering registered and unregistered users you can go for YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode’s premium version which starts from $49.99 for the single-site subscription.
Rating
Rating plays a crucial role in choosing a product nowadays. It indicates the number of satisfied users. So now let’s check the rating of these two plugins.
ELEX Catalog mode is younger than YITH catalog mode. But still, it acquired a good number of satisfied customers within a short period of time. It really matters, right?
Here you can find that, compared to YITH, ELEX has a 5-star rating within a short period of time. So it reflects customer satisfaction!
Support and Update
Both plugins offer 1 year of support and update to its subscribers. ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale and Role-Based plugin offers the support and updates even after 1 year with a 20% discount to its subscribers.
Well, let us wrap up now.
Conclusion
Both are free WooCommerce catalog mode plugins and offer the basic feature of catalog mode in their free version. According to the requirements of features for your online store, whether it is a simple online store or a wholesale online store, you can choose the premium versions of these plugins. One of the peculiarities of ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode’s premium version that uplifts it from similar plugins is, it incorporates features to wholesale online business and offers very detailed role-based pricing to different kinds of users who all are the customers of a wholesale online store.
YITH Catalog Mode’s premium version also provides many features for your online store. But if you run a business that deals with many wholesalers, retailers, vendors, etc, ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale and Role-Based Pricing plugin will be the right option to manage your product catalogs as well as your WooCommerce store immaculately.
To explore the premium version of ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode plugin, check out ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale & Role Based Pricing
Explore our blog section for more articles.
You can also check out WordPress and WooCommerce plugins in ELEX.
