Software to create ecommerce website offers a plethora of advantages. Build your own ecommerce site using popular software that is easy to use, powerful and affordable. Read this article on ecommerce software free to know more about top ecommerce platforms.
Ecommerce is all about sales and business. In this fast pace time, you have to be very creative to get more customers. You need best software to create ecommerce website to attract your visitors because visitors are real consumers. ecommerce is always tricky for new users because it requires online payment solutions like paypal, shopify or squarespace etc payments, secure storage facilities and best checkout process. So you want a seamless solution which has everything in it. Ecommerce is always a headache if you want to set up your own ecommerce store without hiring any exprienced web developers.
The demand for ecommerce software is on the increase in recent times. And there are a range of factors that have contributed to this increase. It has become easier for people to access the internet, and changed the way in which people do business. From simplicity in marketing, accessibility to wider target markets, enabling customers to purchase goods and services online directly from a seller’s website or via mobile phones, etc., are driving the online shopping industry.
Depending on your niche, there are many different approaches to building an ecommerce website. Knowing a little bit about the technical side of things isn’t too hard to achieve, but there are lots of software programs on the market that can help you to create a premium looking website with minimal effort.
Advantages of Using BigCommerce for Designing a Site
The website examples above were all designed by BigCommerce. The quality speaks for itself and here’s why enterprise clients and SMEs alike choose our ecommerce platform:
1. Design flexibility.
Pretty or functional ecommerce website? With BigCommerce you get both.
Think of ecommerce website design as building a house. First, you have to develop strong mortar and outer walls. BigCommerce provides you with the technical ‘bricks’ to place at the core of your online operations — no-code page builders, secure check-out, SEO-friendly codebase and more. You can mix and match different ‘bricks’ to assemble a tiny house or a 6-bedroom Victorian mansion.
We also don’t limit you when it comes to the front or interior design. You can give your website a fully custom on-brand look without skimming on SEO, usability or security. At the same time, you can customize your back-end to match your operations by pairing the in-built core commerce with external integrations.
2. 150+ very good ecommerce themes.
If you don’t feel like creating your store design from scratch, you can take a look around our theme store. With 150+ unique designs, you are bound to find something that pleases your eye. Browse options based on grid type, product catalog layout or industry. You can also review the best ecommerce themes, picked by our staff.
Every BigCommerce theme is responsive, mobile- and SEO-friendly, and optimized for usability. Using a premade theme is a shortcut to designing a great ecommerce website at a lower cost.
3. Customization opportunities.
What if I want to design a truly custom ecommerce experience? Think third-party integrations and add-ons with AR apps, a custom CDN + CMS to support heavy-duty publishing and an ML-powered product recommendation engine on top with real-time data. Is BigCommerce still relevant to me?
Absolutely. BigCommerce is an open-SaaS platform, meaning our technical infrastructure can be easily connected with an array of other applications through APIs. Our platform seamlessly integrates with external apps and can be integrated within larger technical ecosystems. With the assistance of agency partners like Folio3 that use BigCommerce design services, you can create a store of your dreams. With BigCommerce, you can use our core commerce features for inventory management, payment processing, shipping, fraud management and more, while using another technology such as WordPress or Adobe Experience Management to power your website’s front end. Such a setup goes by the name of headless commerce.
4. Code-free building tools.
If you need less sophisticated but still robust design functionality, we deliver that too. Take our Page Builder — a drag and drop web page editing tool small businesses and Fortune 500 companies use to create attractive landing pages. Using pre-made design elements, you can rapidly prototype attention-grabbing and click-inducing product listings without writing a single line of code. Create interactive customer experiences, level up your content marketing game and add new supporting pages to your sales funnel without calling the dev team.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a fully hosted (or all-in-one) eCommerce platform that you can use to create your eCommerce store. There’s also a WordPress plugin available, if you have an existing site that you want to use with BigCommerce.
While they don’t have a free plan available, there is a free trial which lets you set up your shop and get started without paying anything.
Pros
- You don’t have to enter any credit card details to take the free trial.
- BigCommerce is really easy to get started with. You can just sign up, enter details about your store, and start adding products.
- You can get a free domain like mystore.mybigcommerce.com if you don’t want to pay for a custom domain name.
- BigCommerce gives you plenty of different ways to take payments. It has built-in integration with lots of payment platforms, including PayPal powered by Braintree, Stripe, Authorize.net and more.
- There are lots of third-party apps that you can add to your BigCommerce store to extend its functionality.
Cons
- The free trial only lasts for 15 days, which doesn’t give you long to start making money from your store. After that, you’ll need to pay $29.95/month or more to keep your store going.
- BigCommerce is an all-in-one platform, which means you’re limited to using their addons and themes. You won’t have the range of choice that you’d have with some other eCommerce options.
Shopify
Shopify is another fully hosted eCommerce platform. Shopify also offers a 14 day free trial and, like BigCommerce’s free trial, this doesn’t require a credit card.
Pros
- It’s really easy to get started with Shopify. Their website builder has a drag and drop interface that means even total beginners can create a great looking online store.
- If you want to add extra features to your store, there’s an app marketplace with lots of add-ons that you can buy.
- There’s 24/7 support available, through live chat, phone, email, and Twitter.
- Shopify Payments (Shopify’s built-in payment gateway) charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. Since this is a built-in feature which has the same price as Stripe or other gateways, this makes it easier for users to get started.
Cons
- If you use other payment gateways, like PayPal or Stripe, Shopify charges a 2% transaction fee. This is on top of the fee charged by the third-party payment gateway.
- The free trial only lasts 14 days. After that, you’ll need to move onto a paid plan. The cheapest is $29/month.
Weebly
Weebly isn’t quite so well known as some other eCommerce platforms, like Shopify and WooCommerce, but they offer a free trial where you can test out the platform.
Pros
- You can add any kind of physical or digital products to your store
- The drag and drop interface is easy to use to build your site and manage items in your store.
- There are around 100 different themes (designs) you can choose from, so you should be able to find something that’s just right for your site.
- Built-in inventory, shipping, taxes management features.
- As well as the community forum, the free plan gives you access to live chat, email, and even phone support.
- If you do want to upgrade to a paid plan, these are affordable even for very small businesses. Ecommerce starter plan starts at $12 per month paid annually.
Cons
- Weebly charges a 3% transaction fee. That’s in addition to the transaction fee that your payment gateway charges.
- If you’re on the free or Personal ($9/month) plans, Weebly will show ads and branding from Square, Weebly’s parent company.
- Even with the paid starter plan you are limited to sell only 25 products at a time.
Big Cartel
Big Cartel is a hosted eCommerce platform that’s designed especially for artists and creatives. If you want to have a store selling handmade products or similar, it could be a great option for you.
Pros
- The free plan doesn’t have any transaction fees. You will need to pay Stripe or PayPal fees, though (these are the only options Big Cartel offers for payment processing).
- Your free shop URL can be customized. It has to be in the format name.bigcartel.com, but you can choose whatever you want for the name. Many other platforms assign you a specific URL based on your username or store name and you can’t change it.
- You can have up to 5 products on your free plan, which makes it more generous than other hosted free plans.
- It’s quick to get your store set up and it’s easy to add your products. Big Cartel walks you step by step through the process.
Cons
- If you want to customize your website theme, you’ll need to edit the theme’s HTML. This definitely isn’t as beginner-friendly as most other eCommerce platforms.
- The free plan only has limited features. You need to upgrade to a paid plan if you want to use things like inventory tracking or discount codes.
Wix
Best for small online stores
Wix
Best for small online storesOUTSTANDING
4.7out of 5
- Plenty of design freedom
- Powerful features
- Easy to use
Free trial available
Paid Plans: $14 – $56 / monthSEE PROS & CONS
Overview of Wix
88% of the Wix users we spoke to would recommend it to a friend, and for good reason: its templates are extremely flexible, but still easy to use, and its ecommerce features are perfect for any small or midsize store. If you can’t identify any one category that means the most to you (i.e., you can’t choose between features and ease of use), we recommend Wix for creating a well-rounded store.
Squarespace
Best value for money
Squarespace
Best value for moneyVERY GOOD
4.5out of 5
- Great management features
- Best designs
- Great built-in tools
Free trial available
Paid Plans: $12 – $46 / monthSEE PROS & CONS
Overview of Squarespace
Squarespace isn’t as powerful as BigCommerce, but it has the best-designed templates on the market, and offers great ecommerce features for a low price. We recommend Squarespace for businesses in a creative industry, because you can really walk the walk with its amazing template designs.
Constant Contact
Best for selling on the side
Constant Contact
Best for selling on the sideSTANDARD
3.6out of 5
- Beginner-friendly
- Limited features
- Least user-recommended
Free trial available
Paid Plans: $20 – $335 / monthSEE PROS & CONS
Overview of Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a pretty limited platform, but the features it does offer are high quality. We recommend Constant Contact for small projects and side gigs, because it has quality features but limited growth potential.
Square Online
If you’re not particularly eager to join the Wix premium plan bandwagon, you might want to try out Square Online.
Now, for a long time, Square had fundamentally existed as a versatile payment solution. Until it finally decided to spread its wings by setting up a multi-faceted business ecosystem. You can read our full Square Online review.
So far, quite a number of people are aware that Square increasingly facilitates merchants dealing with physical businesses restaurants, coffee shops, and so forth. While that’s fairly accurate, it turns out that Square has now grown to be much more than that.
In essence, the platform offers a myriad of extensive features plus integrations that not only support brick and mortar businesses, but also ecommerce websites.
And no, we’re not only talking about digital payments here. But rather, the entire ecommerce framework. Square offers tools for pretty much all the critical online store functions- from inventory management and sales, to marketing and team coordination.
All things considered, the most outstanding feature here is the ability to set up a fully-functional ecommerce website for free.
You don’t need to pay anything to build an online store. Not even for hosting. In fact, you can proceed without the slightest bit of knowledge about coding.
Creating free ecommerce websites with Square is as easy as 1-2-3. After you select an ideal theme from the array of predesigned customizable options, just make some tweaks, and voila!
Ultimately, you’ll achieve the full online store experience. And in case the default features happen to be inadequate, you can leverage Square’s integrations to link your free ecommerce website with third-party apps for booking and scheduling, employee and inventory management, accounting, plus much more.
But that’s not all. If you have some coding tricks up your sleeve, you can consider capitalizing on the Square Connect API to build your own specialized integrations. Otherwise, it’s also possible to link free ecommerce sites with their corresponding offline brick and mortar counterparts. This feature alone is particularly handy for streamlined multi-store selling and product management.
That said, I can guess what you might be wondering at this point. How the heck does Square generate revenue from this?
Well, interestingly, there are no ecommerce web monthly plans on this platform. Not even one. Instead, it basically charges a fixed rate of 2.9% plus 30¢ for each online transaction. Therefore, ecommerce sites are genuinely free on a permanent basis.
Benefits of Square Online
- Setting up a complete ecommerce website is fairly easy. Simply download the online store app, install it into your computer, and then launch its user-friendly drag-and-drop editor to design a unique site for free.
- While building ecommerce sites is actually free of charge, the subsequent pricing framework is quite straightforward and favorable. You essentially get to pay 2.9% plus 30¢ when you start selling, which is admittedly reasonable compared to the standard transaction fees on other platforms.
- Square shares an exceedingly diverse ecosystem with third-party app integrations. You can take advantage of this to set up additional ecommerce website functionalities. Or otherwise, use the Square Connect API for your own unique integrations.
- If you have a decent social media following, you can consider extending your ecommerce site to sell items on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. Consequently, the entire inventory will be synced in real-time across all the sales channels for streamlined management.
- Square is a comprehensive selling platform that facilitates both online and offline selling.
Downsides of Square Online
- Although excluding comprehensive underwriting from the start makes it incredibly easy to build ecommerce sites, it turns out there’s a caveat. Square Online is apparently infamous for frequently holding funds over transactions it considers suspicious. The platform continues to do so in a bid to protect itself from possible online fraud.
- Square is only ideal when it comes to basic ecommerce websites. Due to the simple nature of its functionalities, you might find it difficult to create or run a complex online store. You can only do that on a dedicated ecommerce platform like WooCommerce.
- Square does not have an entirely reliable customer support system. Although it offers support through phone, social media and email, it mostly prefers using the latter two. Plus, the platform is yet to set up live chat support.
9-Step Ecommerce Website Design Checklist
Even with the best-in-class tools, the design process can get easily derailed without a clear roadmap. What do you need to prepare for your e-store launch?
- Homepage.
- Category pages.
- Product landing pages.
- Checkout page.
- About us.
- On-site search engine.
- Account registration and login forms.
- Email subscription form.
- Legal requirements.
Conclusion
Ecommerce website builder allows you to create online business of your own and start selling products or services online. Ecommerce software can help you build your own online shop and start selling your products or services online with ease. The popularity of ecommerce has been growing rapidly ever since its introduction. Today, more than 55% of the total online sales are through ecommerce sites, and it is expected to grow even more in the upcoming years, global e-retail companies are estimated to make $4 trillion by 2021.
For your business to gain success, it’s very vital to have a good website. And now you can have one with With the best software to create ecommerce website designs that could be used for your business. You don’t have to spend fortunes anymore!