Ecommerce tools for small businesses are gaining popularity day after day. Thousands of businesses are switching from physical stores to ecommerce sites. If you run a small business, then free ecommerce marketing tools can save lots of money for you and your business. Let’s start with the most important thing – ecommerce software. There are thousands of websites where you can get them absolutely free.
Curiosity is often a great virtue in a small business owners. After all, curiosity meant you were eager to learn new things and make an effort to improve your business. However, I don’t think you need to be a small business owner to be curious about ecommerce tools for small businesses market. Ecommerce tools have made running a business so much easier. With these tools, you can do almost everything with an online store. Tools like Stripe have made it possible for anyone to start earning money from an online store without having advanced technical knowledge.
Ecommerce tools for small businesses market is growing fast and there are constantly new tools being created. Being a SMB owner or just considering launching an e-shop, how do you keep up to date with all the new tools? We’ve made this list for people like us – for small business owners who are always eager to learn about the latest and greatest, but also want it to be free where possible.
As the owner of small business and if you are running small ecommerce website, you need to find great ecommerce tools that can help you grow your business. These tools will help your business to develop along with your competition. Ecommerce tools help your business to get additional sales and they make workflow easy.
Advantages Of Using eCommerce Solutions For Small Businesses
Here are the top advantages of using the best eCommerce solutions for small businesses:
- Quick entry to online selling: With any of the eCommerce software listed in this post, your online store can be ready within minutes. They have pre-built templates that you should only configure and insert your products. Then, you are ready to start selling.
- Easy administration: Most of the platforms on the market offer themes that are ready to use. They just need a little customization so that you adjust them according to your needs. This is great because anyone can personalize their online stores without having any knowledge in coding.
- Customer service: Almost all of the available eCommerce solutions offer 24/7 customer support. So, whenever you come up with an issue you can just talk to your team. And the problem will be solved as soon as possible.
- Omni-channel selling: eCommerce software makes it possible to sell on different platforms like Amazon or Facebook and manage your customers and sales from one dashboard. This is great because it saves you both time and effort.
- Easy payments and shipping: These platforms also have integrated payment gateways that allow you to receive easy and secure online transactions. What’s more, they also come with different shipping options from which customers can choose.
Squarespace
Squarespace was one of the first website builders to truly make the process simple and accessible to the general populous of entrepreneurs and content creators. Squarespace users have the ability to choose a template style most aligned with their business or personal use and subsequently use drag and drop elements to quickly create a slick and professional website. You can purchase a domain through Squarespace or transfer a pre-existing domain through the site.
Squarespace also has integrations specifically for businesses looking to sell their products online. You have the ability to take online payments via Stripe, PayPal, and accept in-person payments with Square hardware. Those purchasing products from your site will be able to browse and add items to their cart as they would with any other online retailer. Squarespace also provides numerous customization options such as limited availability alerts and the ability to create customer surveys or share a gifting message. Squarespace’s tax tools make compliance simple with the ability to set local tax rates for countries and regions, tax-inclusive pricing, and automated sales tax filing.
Google Analytics
This is the most common tool used by businesses. It helps to better understand your customers. The insights you can gain from Analytics will help you evaluate how your market, content, products, campaigns and more are performing.
It’ll guide you to where your investments are failing so you can take action. Google Analytics for eCommerce business also shows you how many people were on your website and how many followed through with a purchase. This can help you make better strategies, product pages and more.
Kissmetrics
This tool helps you understand your customers and their behavior. It answers common analytical questions like your most-engaged users, best-performing products and the customer leaving rates. This, in turn, will allow you to invest in better marketing campaigns so you can get new customers and keep the old ones.
Elementor
Used by more than 6% of all the world’s websites, Elementor is a powerful WordPress website.
Boasting a powerful WooCommerce builder, Elementor is the weapon of choice for those looking to create WordPress-based online stores without having to write a single line of code.
What sets Elementor apart is the slew of marketing-oriented features it offers web designers and individual users.
With Elementor, you can arrange for visitors to be met with marketing and promotional material at strategic moments.
Leveraging Elementor’s powerful popup form builder, you can capture new leads and expand your potential customer database. You can also integrate with an almost infinite number of 3rd party platforms, including CRMs and other sales enablement solutions.
Shopify
Shopify is one of the biggest and most popular ecommerce platforms amongst businesses of all sizes. It is one of the best ecommerce website builders for small businesses.
This website builder has a user interface that is very easy to use. You don’t need to have IT or coding skills to create your store. Many businesses like Shopify because they can build an awesome, customizable store without having to learn to code or design.
Shopify caters to small businesses and large ecommerce businesses. If your small business grows and expands beyond a small business, you won’t have to worry about changing platforms. You can upgrade to plans that are more suited for larger businesses.
When it comes to the design, you have hundreds of themes for options. Shopify provides a variety of different types of themes to fit all kinds of business. You can pick the theme that fits best for your business’s aesthetic.
The best part is that all of these options include responsive design. Responsive design ensures that your website adapts to whatever device a user is using. Regardless of the design you implement into your website, you won’t need to worry about adjusting it for mobile users.
If you have any issues with creating your site, Shopify has 24/7 customer support to help you with your problems. You can reach out to them with questions, concerns, or for directions on how to manage features on your website.
As for the financial aspect of your website, there are no transaction fees if people purchase products from your site. Shopify also offers fraud analysis to keep consumers safe.
Overall, Shopify is a great option if you are looking for a website builder that is user-friendly and easy to develop. Optimizing your site for search engine optimization (SEO) is also easy when you have the help of a Shopify SEO expert.
BigCommerce
Another great ecommerce platform is BigCommerce. This platform is great for small and large businesses to create ecommerce websites.
BigCommerce offers an extensive set of ecommerce tools to help you build your website. You also have the opportunity to integrate social media into your site and sell your products through those channels.
BigCommerce makes it easy for you to branch out and sell your products through other mediums. You can use your BigCommerce site to build storefronts on other sites like Amazon and eBay. It’s a great way to help you expand your business’s reach while creating a consistent brand identity across platforms.
Like Shopify, BigCommerce offers 24/7 customer support for all your needs. You can turn to them to get expert help while you compose your site.
BigCommerce will also help you manage payments and shipping your items. It’s generally a flexible platform that makes it easy to create and monitor your site.
Selz
Selz is considered one of the cheapest ecommerce platforms that is still effective for driving valuable results. This website builder offers standard and pro plans. As a small business, the standard plan will offer you everything you require.
You have many themes to choose from when you design your site. With 24/7 customer support, you have access to set up sessions to help you get started with your site. Selz makes it easy for you to choose the theme that works best for your business and implement it into your site.
This platform is very easy to use. If you don’t have coding or design experience, Selz is a great option. They emphasize the use of user-friendly tools to make it easy for your business to build your website. In addition, there are numerous customization options to help you create a website that works for you.
The drag and drop website builder feature makes it easy for you to create product pages fast and easy. If you’re looking for a website builder that is affordable and easy to use, Selz is the answer.
Square Online
Are you looking for an ecommerce builder that will allow you to combine your online selling strategy with your offline sales? If so, then it’s definitely worth checking out Square Online, the site-building technology available from Square. If you already have a Square Point of Sale System, Square will allow you to build a website for free. The store builder is powered by Weebly, however, which means that you’re going to get the same customization limitations that you had with your Weebly store.
On the plus side, like Weebly’s store building solution, the Square Online system comes with all the ease of use that you could ask for as a beginner trying to launch your shop online. You can immediately begin building highly professional looking stores in no time. Additionally, because everything integrates with your Square point of sale system, you get access to advanced inventory management too. When something sells online, it updates your inventory in your back-end.
Square also uses artificial design intelligence with its store builder. This means that you get a more advanced experience, without having to spend a fortune. Adding products and features to your store is easy, and with the free plan to get you started, there’s nothing to lose.
Pricing: Free to get started with the option to upgrade to a more advanced store experience.
Pros
- Excellent if you’re already using features of the Square ecosystem
- Easy to use for beginners
- Combines online and offline selling
- Fantastic inventory management tools
- Great for AI design
Cons
- Limitations in customization options, particularly with the checkout
- Limits to your payment processing options
Key Features Of eCommerce Systems SMEs Should Use To Grow Their Revenue
Here are the top features of eCommerce software for small businesses:
1. Customization
The best eCommerce solutions for small businesses offer hundreds of pre-made templates which you are able to customize as you please, adjusting your user interfaces (UI) to reflect your brand identity.
And, going beyond UI, features such as multiple shipping options, payment methods, product categorizations, discounts and coupons can help you customize your users’ experience and incentivize more sales.
2. Automation
One of the best features of eCommerce software is its ability to automate routine as well as complex processes such as:
- Detect customers’ addresses when shipping products
- Calculating taxes, shipping rates, pricing for selected products
- Customer registration and generating usernames and passwords
- Send notifications and emails
- And more
Automating these can significantly improve your efficiency and customer service.
3. Marketing Tools
With the marketing tools these platforms offer, you can drive traffic to your website and grow your audience.
Here are some of them:
- Emails: eCommerce software comes with various email templates that you can personalize. For instance, with Shopify Email, you can create campaigns and send emails using your domain name. Later, you can use your dashboard to analyze their performance.
- SEO: These platforms also include various SEO features. Wix, for instance, offers stores that load fast and are mobile-friendly. What’s more, it allows optimizing titles, product descriptions, meta and alt text which are essential in increasing your search engine visibility.
- Social media: Solutions like Squarespace allow integrating with different channels like Facebook and Instagram while allowing consumers to buy directly from them.
4. Analytics And Reporting
The analytics and reporting tools within the eCommerce solutions for small businesses help you measure success and give you an insight into how well your store is performing.
So, thanks to these features you can:
- Monitor visitor numbers
- View sales, refunds and coupons over time
- Get alerts when traffic is spiking or dipping
- See your top products and categories
- Track cart abandonments
- Check trends over time
All these will help you understand what is working or not and allow you to improve your selling strategies to increase your revenue.
5. Integrations
Most of these solutions integrate with a number of third-party platforms to improve your online store’s performance.
Some the most popular integrations are:
- Payment gateway integration: eCommerce software integrates with most credit cards and platforms PayPal, Stripes, Apple Pay and Google Pay. These facilitate easy and secure transactions.
- Marketplace integration: You can also connect your online store with other selling platforms such as eBay and Amazon, while managing sales from your online store. This can help you increase your reach and, consequently, sales.
- Social media integration: Your online store can integrate with Facebook and Instagram to facilitate direct social media selling, while processing your payments within the store.
Conclusion:
Starting an ecommerce business is a tough job. There are so many things that you need to do and make sure that they’re done right. Building your brand and making sure it is known to people is one of the most important things that you need to think about. One of the best ways you could use right now would be adding a few more ecommerce tools in your marketing strategy, but there are so many you should pick from that it’s hard to know which ones are actually worth using. That’s why we decided to look around for some great ecommerce marketing tools for small businesses and see which ones are actually worth using.
The rise of Ecommerce has been surprising to say the least. Entrepreneurs are now making hundreds of thousands — or even millions — without even owning a storefront, and that’s thanks to online stores. Small and large businesses alike have changed their business models, using WordPress as the backbone for their ecommerce endeavors.