The e-commerce platforms in the list below, both free and paid, offer you a software solution for building your own ecommerce website even if you have no technical knowledge. If this is your first ecommerce store, it’s going to save lot of money and time as compared to hiring a custom web developer to create your e-store.
Looking for best free ecommerce platform that enable you to sell unlimited products? Then you should choose their templates and edit them with their drag-and-drop website builder. Don’t worry, you don’t need any technical or design experience to create a beautiful online store. This platform also allows you to easily customize your site with the HTML and CSS code if needed.
It doesn’t matter if you are launching a side project or a full-fledged business — you will probably at some point need a platform to sell physical and digital products. For that, you need an ecommerce platform. You always have the choice of setting the whole thing up on your own server or using a completely free hosted solution. This article compares and contrasts the best free ecommerce platforms available right now.
Looking for a free ecommerce website builder that comes with unlimited products, no shipping and order management fees, a drag-and-drop website builder, and more? Look no further! We’ve done our research and put together a list of great free ecommerce platforms.
What to Look for in Ecommerce Platforms
Because there are so many eCommerce platforms out there, you’ll also discover a lot of varied features and capabilities created to make each service stand out. For our reviews of the best eCommerce platforms, we tried to keep things simple, looking at the kind of tools that generate the best results for businesses of all sizes. If you’re in the initial stages of your platform research, here are some of the factors you’ll need to consider:
- Ease of use: An ecommerce platform needs to be intuitive, so you can leverage all of the features effectively. Some platforms are more simplistic than others. For instance, you can usually expect a higher learning curve from an open-source platform where you need to do your own coding, than you’d get from a hosted service.
- Feature set: This is probably the most important thing to consider when looking for your ideal ecommerce platform. Basic sales features are a must-have, like a checkout page, multiple payment options, and even the option to sell different products, like services or physical items. You might also need to look into additional features like inventory management, or employee management too.
- Marketing: Most ecommerce platforms come with additional tools for marketing and promotion. The best tools will often integrate with your existing email marketing service, as well as various social media tools. Looking at things like SEO functionality can also be useful, as the higher you rank in the search engines, the more likely you are to attract new customers, and generate brand awareness.
- Design: Design refers to the way you can customize and enhance your store to reflect your brand. The best tools often come with a range of themes and templates to choose from to get you started. You might want a drag-and-drop builder, which means you can customize your pages more easily. Some companies also like having access to HTML and CSS customization.
- Pricing: Although the price of an ecommerce software solution shouldn’t be the only thing you consider, it is something that’s going to make a difference to your choice. Make sure you find a price structure that makes sense for your budget. It’s also helpful to see if there are multiple pricing choices to access as your business grows.
Magento Open Source – Most Popular Open Source Ecommerce Platform
Magento (read our review here) is one of the most popular open source ecommerce platforms, and for good reason.
To start, it has more features than you can ever expect to use. However, this opens up all sorts of avenues when it comes to marketing to your customers and creating things like membership plans, recurring payments, and discounts.
Do you seek complete control over the design and functionality of the site?
If the answer is a solid yes, consider Magento Open Source. It’s very similar to that of WordPress, where the community is strong, you can choose from hundreds of thousands of themes, and there are plenty of extensions to get your hands on.
OpenCart
Compared to other open source platforms, OpenCart (read our review here) is actually pretty easy to use and lightweight. It’s free and there is a decent community to turn to if you have problems when designing your store.
I recommend it for startups since it doesn’t take too much time to customize the website from scratch.
Due to the ease of use, the overall cost of setting up a store typically decreases. For instance, you don’t have to pay for a special developer, and the themes aren’t expensive.
The lookout and user experience has dramatically improved over the past few years and is much more user-friendly.
osCommerce
With osCommerce (read our review here), you have access to a thriving community of developers and users, with a wonderful forum to check out solutions to your problems and talk with other people. Almost 300,000 online stores are made with osCommerce, so you know there are plenty of companies that already find it suitable.
The pricing is obviously a plus since you don’t have to pay a dime to launch an online store. I would also give it top marks for the features, online support, and ease of use.
WooCommerce via Bluehost
Right up at the top among the best eCommerce platforms is WooCommerce. It is a free and open source ecommerce plugin that integrates perfectly with WordPress (both WordPress sites and most WordPress plugins). Even though “a plugin” might not sound like much, WooCommerce is actually a fully-featured tool that has all the eCommerce features you might need. Plus, there’s also a huge ecosystem of extensions that let you build on top of WooCommerce’s main offering and make it fit your needs perfectly.
Free plan
There’s a lot you can do with the free WooCommerce plugin:
- Sell anything: physical or digital goods, including subscriptions
- Easy installation and use
- Adding your products is straightforward
- There are many free WooCommerce themes to help you design your store the way you want it
- Flexible and secure payments
- Multiple currencies to sell globally
- Integrates with multi-channel shipping options
- Stripe plugin available if needed
WooCommerce is a delight for advanced users as it gives you complete control over your eCommerce platform. As for beginners, it’s a complete solution to start your online store, scaling up and learning as you grow.
Free plan limitations
The base plugin with free add-ons should more than suffice for most online stores that are just starting out. However, if you want to use additional payment gateways, integrate with certain shipping solutions directly, or have WooCommerce help you with handling taxes, then this will require additional investments in some extensions. There are a lot of those available.
Price & transaction fees
Here’s something important to note – WooCommerce, by itself, is totally free; so is WordPress – the CMS that WooCommerce works with. However, as with setting up any website, there are other costs involved – mainly web hosting and domain name. That being said, there are some very budget-friendly options to choose from for those who want to minimize the costs as much as possible. For example, Bluehost will give you an optimized web hosting space, a free domain name for the first year, and a quick single-click WordPress and WooCommerce installation. All of that for the price of $2.75 / month.
Transaction fees:
If you end up using the native WooCommerce Payments module, the transaction fees are 2.9% + $0.30 for each transaction made with U.S.-issued credit or debit cards. For cards issued outside the U.S., there’s an additional 1% fee.
If you choose to use PayPal, that is also around 2.9% and $0.30 per transaction. Other payment methods have their own rates and fees.
Ecwid
Want a store that plugs into your existing site? If that’s a yes, it’s Ecwid for you. No website? Not to worry, you’ll get an instant starter site too for free.
Free plan
Ecwid has a free plan that’s very usable. Once you sign up, you can set up a fully functional free eCommerce website that sells up to ten products in two categories. Here’s what you get:
- Mobile responsive customizable online store with product options
- Mobile responsive shopping cart
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Add it easily to WordPress or any other website
- Sell simultaneously on multiple sites
- Facebook Pixel
- Built-in support for SSL certification, security, server configuration, and hosting
- 40+ payment methods in multiple currencies
- Real-time shipping rates from some carriers
- Built-in Google Analytics integration
Free plan limitations
You won’t get access to digital goods, staff accounts, or promo codes. These features, along with many more, are available only in premium plans.
Other key features
- Sell on the go with Ecwid mobile
- Store management app
- Multiple sales channels like Facebook, Instagram, or other POS
- Unlimited products, including digital goods
- Inventory management, automated tax calculation
- Order creation, product filters, and variations
In short, Ecwid’s free plan can be a fine option for small merchants who have basic selling requirements.
Price & transaction fees
Beyond the free plan, three paid plans are available:
- Venture – $15 per month
- Business – $35 per month
- Unlimited – $99 per month
Transaction fees:
None of them are charged directly by Ecwid, but your chosen payment processor will likely charge fees.
BigCommerce
One of the most prominent ecommerce platforms on the market, BigCommerce supports over 60,000 merchants of all types and sizes. With a plethora of built-in features and CMS capabilities, BigCommerce platform is powerful enough to facilitate the growth of fast-scaling ecommerce businesses and intuitive enough to empower complete ecommerce beginners. It caters to the full spectrum of the ecommerce sector.
The platform is known for its advanced SEO integration and flexible APIs, enabling merchants to connect to leading software and other CMS solutions, while leveraging the BigCommerce shopping cart in the backend. BigCommerce is fully hosted, Level 1 PCI compliant and available on a monthly subscription basis.
WordPress
WordPress is the most dominant CMS player in the industry, but it isn’t an ecommerce platform in itself. To transform a WordPress site into an online shop, you will need the WooCommerce plugin.
Incredibly popular, the open-source WooCommerce platform is favored for its immense selection of extensions and themes — most of which are available for free. The great thing about these plugins is that they can easily enable missing features and functionalities within the WooCommerce core product at a click. The downside is that adding a high number of plugins leads to unnecessary complexity and impacts site performance.
BigCommerce also offers a WordPress plugin that’s easy to integrate and adds an extra layer of convenience. It allows ecommerce merchants to combine the frontend flexibility of WordPress with the backend benefits, such as abandoned cart recovery, coupons and discounts and single-page checkout that comes out-of-the-box with BigCommerce SaaS platform.
Drupal.
Although Drupal isn’t designed for ecommerce specifically, it can be combined with different plugins and frameworks to enable eCommerce functionality. In fact, it is one of the most widely used open-source content management systems, nearly as popular as WordPress or Joomla. Sadly, Drupal is not particularly user-friendly for those without significant development knowledge (although that’s slowly changing for the better).
As a CMS, Drupal commerce offers incredible flexibility. If you combine it with the BigCommerce plugin, you get the best of both worlds — a fully customizable frontend and fully hosted backend.
Best Ecommerce Platforms for Large Businesses
The bigger your business, the more diversity you’re going to need from your eCommerce solution. Larger companies are more likely to invest in access control features and the ability to share their technology with multiple members of staff. You might also need to host your store with a dedicated server, which means SaaS solutions like Shopify aren’t ideal.
If you’re looking for a quick and easy setup, but you still want the ability to scale, BigCommerce is a good choice. This technology works for both large and small companies alike, with packages to suit everyone. If you’re an enterprise brand in need of a lot of customization, then Magento will give you far more freedom, and a range of hosting options.
If you are interested in one of the “simpler” products above, you can also look for the “Enterprise” version of these site builders. WooCommerce Enterprise, Squarespace Enterprise, and Shopify Plus all have expanded package offers for bigger brands.
Conclusion
Free online ecommerce platforms: There are many free online ecommerce platforms available on the internet that can help you start your own ecommerce website for free. With huge discounts and deals, the companies do not make any profit from these platforms but still they provide the services at zero cost. The e-commerce companies offers best features to increase your sale leading to success of your business. It’s a good strategy for beginner level entrepreneurs who want to start their own business for the first time as it offers various types of features to manage your business in an easy way which can help you cope with the biggest brands and delivering on same products with better customer support.
Every business wants a store that is built with their style, brand, and personality. The best free ecommerce platforms offer everything you need to sell online without any annoying limitations. We’ve analyzed some of the best solutions available so you can make an informed choice about which one is right for your company. Each platform has strong suits and it’s important you have all the information before making a decision.