E-commerce has been around in almost every industry. There are a lot of people who are turning their attention to the most important and essential part of the business — selling items online to the best of their abilities. The important thing to note here is that there are thousands of different platforms so it can be very challenging to find the right service for your business.
Modern-day business is not just about physical world anymore. Nowadays, businesses are moving towards digital arena . And even if your business is not digital you will at least need to use digital marketing strategies to promote it. The ecommerce platform is one of the most important elements of digital marketing strategy. Here I want to cover some free ecommerce platforms out there and also provide you with a way to make some extra money on the side using those platforms.
Working on an e-commerce site, we are always concerned about its security. We start wondering which e-commerce platform to use that would not cost us much yet provide the best security features. Security is a major aspect when building an online store and it is advisable to choose the perfect platform that incorporates all features you need in your store.
A ecommerce platform is a software application that allows online businesses to manage their website, sales, and operations.Learn what the best free ecommerce platforms are compared with each other
Can I make my own ecommerce website?
Yes! Four of our top five platforms—Square Online, Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify—all help you build your own ecommerce website. Those platforms have easy guides, with built-in templates, to make designing your online store even easier.
Out of all of our choices, only WooCommerce and Ecwid require an already existing website to work. Otherwise, each of the six other ecommerce platforms doubles as a website builder.
JigoShop
JigoShop (read our review here) often gets compared to WooCommerce because of its ease of use and clean interface. You can also expand the functionality of the site with a wide range of plugins and add-ons, making your website far easier to scale up.
Overall, the development of JigoShop has improved over the years, so you’ll find that JigoShop is pretty easy to pick up, even as a beginner. You’ll find a basic dashboard, incredible themes (which are better than most themes from other platforms,) and a speedy interface when adding anything from products to promotions.
Drupal Commerce
Drupal is one of the most common options to go with when designing any kind of website. It’s one of the close competitors of WordPress since a strong percentage of the internet is powered by Drupal.
Not to mention, you can make pretty much any type of website with it.
As for Drupal Commerce, this is a separate module that allows you to build your ecommerce site rapidly on top of your already existing website, and it’s one of the best solutions if you plan on scaling up quickly.
The bonus is there’s a huge community of people behind Drupal, so you can turn to the forums, social pages, and blogs for support.
WP eCommerce
WP Ecommerce is the overshadowed cousin of WooCommerce. They’re not technically related at all, but it’s a solid WordPress plugin that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as WooCommerce.
Let me tell you how it works. First, you install WordPress on your hosting server, followed by the WP eCommerce plugin.
This transforms a regular WordPress dashboard into an ecommerce control center. So, you can add products, run promotions, create categories, and more.
As simple as that!
Smaller sites will be fine with the plugin, but you have to install paid add-ons for extra functionality.
Big Cartel
If you’ve got T-shirts, paintings, jewelry, or other crazy stuff to sell, you’ll feel at home with Big Cartel.
Free plan
With the free Gold plan, you can:
- Start your free store with up to five products
- Pick a theme and customize
- Add one image per product with product options and categories
- Sell in person and on Facebook
- Choose to accept credit card or PayPal payments, or both
- SSL encryption
- Basic order management via the Big Cartel dashboard
- Email support
Free plan limitations
On the free plan, it’s not possible to have a custom domain. Nor will you be able to add multiple images per product or track inventory.
Other key features
- Enable inventory tracking
- Offer discount codes
- Google Analytics
- Full code customization
Since minimalism is Big Cartel’s forte, you won’t find the platform weighed down by too many features. At the same time, the free plan gives you enough to set up a shop, sell, and receive payments.
Price & transaction fees:
Three premium plans are available that allow you to sell different numbers of products
- Platinum – you can sell up to 25 products at $9.99 per month
- Diamond – 100 products at $19.99 per month
- Titanium – 300 products at $29.99 per month
Transaction fees:
None charged directly by BigCartel, but your chosen payment processor will likely charge fees.
Gumroad
Gumroad is a suitable platform to sell digital, physical, and creative goods, though the emphasis is more on digital products and creative stuff, like photographs, writing, podcasts, and designs.
It lets you create a free eCommerce website upfront, but they charge a commission on everything that you sell, unlike the other open-source eCommerce platforms on this list.
Free plan
- Create and customize your storefront
- Sell as many products as you want
- Send out four updates each month
- Setup one automated workflow
Free plan limitations
Besides missing out on some key premium features, you’ll also pay a higher transaction fee in a free account.
Other key features
- Import email lists and rely on powerful analytics
- Sell physical product variants, track inventory, manage shipping, and restrict to countries
- Digital products sellers have a lot going – multiple versions, generate license keys, and offer discount codes
- With a simple ‘+’ sign, ask customers to pay what they wish
- Built-in abuse prevention with PDF stamping or turning off downloads
- Sell goods before they are ready and schedule future payment receipt
- Support for recurring subscriptions and membership plans that offer access to content libraries and license keys for software
- Multiple payment options and easy checkout
- Customers can create an account and keep all content in one place
Moreover, Gumroad promotes product branding with custom URLs and markets your products with customized previews for social channels like Facebook and Twitter. Thank you notes and updates in automatic workflows help you stay engaged with your customers.
Price & transaction fees
Professional features will cost you just $10 per month.
Transaction fees:
The fee on each sale for free accounts is 8.5% + $0.30 (USD) per sale.
It’s lower on premium plans at 3.5% + $0.30 (USD) per sale. There’s an additional 10% charge on first-time purchasers for sales that come through browsing Gumroad.
Joomla
Joomla is yet another open-source content management platform that enables users to build websites and publish content online. While commerce isn’t part of its core functionality, there are a number of free extensions that can help you turn a Joomla site into an ecommerce store.
Sitecore.
Sitecore is a leading digital experience platform that combines content, commerce, marketing automation and personalization with design and editing tools. The platform enables merchants to design and build digital storefront experiences and deliver personalized commerce journeys. With the BigCommerce plugin for Sitefront, you’re able to combine headless commerce capabilities with Sitecore’s powerful, built-in content experiences.
Magento
Magento is a popular open-source CMS for ecommerce solutions. Owned by Adobe, it has a great reputation and supports over 260,000 online stores worldwide. Magento offers rich functionality and a diverse extension marketplace, including integrations with solutions like CRM, ERP, chatbots and other enterprise-level software. And while it caters to all types of merchants, it’s often favored by fast-scaling and larger businesses due to its extensive setup, pricing options and development requirements.
Ubercart
Ubercart is often compared to Drupal Commerce in blog posts.
Drupal Commerce was created by an old Ubercart developer. Therefore, many people argue that Ubercart is the best because it’s the original and has more features to play around with, while others state that Drupal Commerce is the more improved version of Ubercart.
This is what you can normally find when an employee leaves his or her company to create an own and fire up the competition.
But, there are significant differences, making it rather important to find the one that fits your business the best. It would be a pain to migrate from one to the other after making a wrong choice.
In short, both are highly customizable, but Drupal Commerce is more geared towards complex customizations. Most of the differences can be found in the extensions and add-ons since some extensions just aren’t available in each library.
That’s why it’s essential to research which add-ons are needed for your company before pulling the trigger on an ecommerce platform like this.
Spree Commerce
Spree Commerce is an open source eCommerce solution that’s completely free to use. This makes it a popular choice among business owners worldwide. The modular platform ensures that business leaders have a flexible CMS to grow a business with.
With spree, you can configure, add, or replace any of the functionality you need to your site. This means that you’re not stuck with a one-size-fits-all store. You get the solution you want – exactly the way you want. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a problem here. Unlike other products, such as Virtuemart, Spree requires a bit of technical knowledge.
The system needs to be installed and hosted on a manual basis. This means that you might need to hire a dedicated team to handle their storefront for them. Spree commerce might be one of the most functional solutions on the market. However, it comes with a massive learning curve to prepare for.
Spree Commerce is most likely to be the better e-commerce business solution for you, if you’ve got a lot of experience with coding and web development, or you can hire someone with those skills. Spree has tons of customization options, making it great for companies that want to stand out. However, you also need to learn how to use a lot of functions on your own.
What is the easiest ecommerce platform?
The easiest to use ecommerce platforms are Shopify and Squarespace. What this means is that their dashboards and user experience allow you to see everything in one place—with a lot of up-front information—and help keep you organized. Meanwhile, they are web-based applications (with mobile apps) and have dedicated customer support that ensures you have all the help you need.
If you’re looking for the easiest platform in terms of setup and design, Shopify has experts and freelancers that can help you design while Square Online and Squarespace both have templates and easy-to-follow processes so you can create a site on your own.
Conclusion
Ecommerce is one of the most popular business models of the Digital Age. From personal products to B2B solutions, the benefits of an electronic storefront can be easily applied to any niche. If you are thinking about starting an online business, you need to choose the best online platform for your needs.
You should choose a free and open source ecommerce platform with these three characteristics: scalability, expandability, and support. Scalability means that you will not outgrow the platform easily. To be expandable means that you can integrate new and useful data and sales tools into your system to improve user experience.