If you’re an online business owner, your ecommerce website will most likely be a major component of your online strategy. You need to have potential online consumers land on one page of your website and entice them to click on one of your various calls-to-action (CTAs). With more than 85% of web traffic now being generated from search engine results, you need as many conversions from the search engine as possible in order to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace. So, without knowing how to search for best ecommerce website development tools, you could be left behind.
The open source community is full of amazing people who are constantly working on improving their software, making it better and fixing bugs. The first part of this article will look at the best free ecommerce platform options currently available to you for setting up a free ecommerce website. I’ll also be looking at how you can create your own free ecommerce website or adding a shopping cart to your existing site.
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In this post we’ll show you the best free ecommerce website development tools that you can use to build your own online store. They are free to use, setup and maintain and include a branded website templates, shopping cart plugin, shipping calculator, product management system and E-Commerce dashboard.
Size (Of Your Store) Matters
The amount of software support and functionality you need is directly proportional to how big, complex, and varied your online store is–or will be. A solo creator who’s tired of paying table stakes for Etsy is in a very different position than a company with staff needing to oversee an online store that’s open 24/7.
A mismatch here can lead to a lot of headaches. Trying to do more than your platform is designed for is a recipe for frustration and an eventual switch, while trying to use an immense platform for a basic online trade show booth will feel like trying to drink from a fire hose.
Accuracy and simplicity also factor in here. A relatively basic store that’s accurate and up-to-date is going to be better than a dazzling one with mistakes. If pricing is no longer correct, or you’re listing products for sale that are actually out of stock, customers are going to hate shopping on your site.
Be realistic about the time you can give your store, too. The more plugins you add and products you list, the more work you’re going to have to do to stay on top of it.
If you offer a simple menu of products or services and don’t plan to scale up very far, Wix, SquareSpace, and WooCommerce on Bluehost won’t take a lot of time to set up or maintain.
One user we spoke with who used SquareSpace to sell house plants said it was perfect for a side hustle. “I’m able to do what I need to do pretty easily with the time I’m able to give to it.” She still works a full-time job, and wished she had more time to master everything, but “I just don’t have the luxury of that time and energy.”
Similarly, you don’t have to do much to get a stellar, on-brand site with Wix. It’s like filling a display window–a couple outfits on mannequins, a few accessories, a little seasonal decor, and boom, the small shop has what it needs to bring visitors in the door.
For people who know their way around WordPress, WooCommerce on Bluehost can be a super-affordable way to get a simple online store off the ground. Adding more plugins increases the cost and time spent doing maintenance. Keeping things simple has its benefits for folks who are short on time.
I wouldn’t recommend WooCommerce for people dreaming of massive growth, though, as Shopify and BigCommerce are just better set up to handle complex inventories.
One WooCommerce user on Bluehost told us that the cart system lacked the ability they needed to keep updated prices for the thousands of parts they stocked. It was simply too difficult to keep track of shipping costs from different vendors, and they wound up moving to another platform.
If you have a complex inventory or ship a lot of products each week (or you know you plan to get to that level within a year or two), platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce are better suited. The same simple product line that looked tight on Wix might look a little sparse on BigCommerce–like a warehouse with a lot of empty shelf space.
You’ll have more options to classify, filter, and sell products with ecommerce builders like these. It might be overkill for the side hustle or simple shop, but both Shopify and BigCommerce are designed for maintaining inventory at scale.
You just have a lot more control over product variations with Shopify (up to 100) and BigCommerce (up to 600).
One BigCommerce user who worked for a digital marketing company that helped retailers sell online told us how easy it was to manage a super diverse inventory. “You can set up custom rules for product variations, as far as, when you’re showing different pieces of content,” he said. “You can even show specific photos just for specific variations of a product.”
And a Shopify user told us how much time they saved updating high-volume inventory because of Shopify’s easy upload process. “You can come up with these great workflows for managing dozens to hundreds, to thousands of items and ensure that your QA is being adhered to.”
Previously, these updates involved manually going in and making the changes to each product. By their estimation, Shopify cut the time it took to update their product line in half.
Wix and WooCommerce let you add six product options, which is going to be fine for some users, but completely unacceptable for others. According to Wix, they’ve updated the platform so that you can add up to 100 variants, but none of the users we spoke with had used this feature yet.
With SquareSpace, you can add a lot of variants, up to 250, but the process of uploading a .csv or using the product editor is not as streamlined as it is for BigCommerce and Shopify. This gets incredibly important when you’re trying to scale.
If you have a really simple inventory, SquareSpace, Wix, and WooCommerce have the tools you need to manage it. But once things start to get complicated, Shopify and BigCommerce are much better set up. You’ll be able to categorize and display products on your terms, and keeping everything up to date will be far easier.
Magento
Magento began back in 2008. There are two versions, the free one and the paid one. Magento Community Edition is a free option and is ideal for growing small businesses and start-ups. Users can customize it to suit their own needs, and there are forums available for users to share tips and tricks.
Magento (read our Magento review) claims it has the most active and most prominent community of developers in the world. Reviewers say it’s easy to navigate if you’ve never set up an ecommerce site before.
There are free materials offering advice on how to grow your business, how to sell your merchandise online, and much much more. That’s in addition to technical support you can use to help set up your ecommerce store.
What are the advantages of using Magento?
- The free version is open source and boasts high levels of customizability
- Their stores are easy to scale
- There’s a significant number of features for you to use
- Magento has an active and global community you can join
What are the negatives of Magento?
- Magento is complex with a steep learning curve. To make the most out of this solution, you’ll need an in-depth knowledge of web development.
- To use Magento’s templates, you’ll need experience designing and customizing themes
- There’s no customer support available (beyond looking for help from the community).
- The ‘Commerce Variation’ of Magento comes with a high price tag
- You still need to carry the costs of web hosting, SSL certificates, and payment processing.
Who should use this ecommerce builder?
Magento is a fabulous option for those with the right development know-how. If you’re equipped with enough knowledge, you’ll enjoy a variety of features and get access to a platform you can quickly scale. You’re not lumbered with the usual limitations that come with paid-for website builders.
But, for those just starting out or entrepreneurs uncomfortable with coding, this isn’t the right ecommerce website builder for you.
nopCommerce
nopCommerce is a free, intuitive, fully customizable, open-source solution that integrates with many services, including Amazon, FedEx, Stripe, Google – to name a few!
It describes itself as the most popular ASP.NET shopping cart in the world, based on Microsoft technologies. It’s used by over 60,000 store owners across the globe and boasts more than 3 million downloads. In addition, this software comes with several powerful ready-to-use features, including unlimited product listings, dropshipping features, SEO, and marketing tools.
nopCommerce users can set up multiple online stores from a single nopCommerce installation. When building your site, you can add as many product attributes as you like, including size, color, price, weight, and stock level.
What makes nopCommerce special?
- It’s free
- It’s fully customizable, so you can tailor content to suit the exact needs of your brand.
- There’s plenty of self-help support on nopCommerce’s website.
- There are many native integrations, many of which are free, including PayPal, QuickPay, and DPD.
- Users benefit from unlimited product listings and product attributes.
- You get access to a handy SEO tool.
- Users get access to a generous array of marketing features, including discounts and coupons, reward points, gift cards, and newsletter subscriptions.
A few reasons why you might pass on nopCommerce:
- Some integrations are expensive, but prices vary. For example, Authorize.net is $80, while Facebook’s customer live chat widget is just $9.90
- It’s aimed more at developers and people with some coding knowledge, so it could be a tough start for beginners.
- If you want Premium Support Services, you have to pay. Prices start at $166.33 a month for a three-month support period or $83.25 a month for a year’s support.
Who Uses nopCommerce as a Free Ecommerce Website Builder?
nopCommerce is typically used by small to medium-sized businesses looking to scale operations without paying hefty fees each time they wish to expand.
That said, thanks to its customization capabilities, scalability, and 250,000+ strong developer community, larger enterprises could also benefit from nopCommerce.
In short, if you’re looking for a free website builder that stays free, nopCommerce could be a great choice. If, however, you’re an absolute beginner who’s put off by a steeper learning curve, you may be better suited to one of the other simpler website building options on this list.
MyOnlineStore
If you’re based in the EU, this may work well for you if you want to sell to an international audience. There’s a language translation option, and you can arrange your orders by country or by language if you want to.
There are several plans or packages; the free one allows you to list up to 25 products. It gives credit card, debit card, and PayPal payment options and produces mobile-friendly websites.
However, it doesn’t give you the ability to social share, something many of its competitors offer as a matter of course.
When you’re creating your online shop, MyOnlineStore‘s template allows you to drag and drop elements while building and customizing your store.
What are the features that make My Online Store so great?
- There are plenty of language translation options
- You get a ‘drag and drop’ website editor
- You can arrange your orders by country or language
A few things that may turn you off this service:
- No social sharing options
- The free plan only lets you sell up to 25 products. If you need more than that, you have to upgrade to a paid plan. But, in fairness to My Online Store, these premium plans are competitively priced.
Who should use My Online Store?
My Online Store is a good option for European sellers with customers in different countries. This solution provides users a decent overview of where their orders are going and what language to apply to them. The language translation feature also allows for better international selling.
Freewebstore
Freewebstore displays the number of store owners who chose their product on their landing page. At the time of writing, it’s around half a million users. Their motto “eCommerce for everyone” seems to make sense for a lot of people.
It’s certainly not a bad deal as you can sell an unlimited number of products for free, and SSL is included. The designs are ok, if a bit dated, but they are responsive for mobile phones and tablets.
What we like:
- Free SSL.
- Numerous online payment processors: Stripe, PayPal, Skrill, 2Checkout and more are included.
- No transaction fees.
- Unlimited number of products
- Advanced features: import / export products via CSV and abandoned cart, amongst others – some of these may be available with paid plans only.
What we don’t like:
- Dated and complex backend: it’s not exactly intuitive or fun to create the site.
- Physical goods only: can’t sell digital products online.
Sign up free here: www.freewebstore.com
Strikingly
Strikingly’s mission is to let you “build your brand” and “conquer the world”. Apart from that, there’s not much information about them online, except that their product is free and includes a web store.
The main catch is that you can only sell one product for free. Also, they only let you create single-page layouts. This isn’t bad if you want a minimalist website, but not great for SEO. Let’s see more of their pros and cons below.
What we like:
- Good designs: they are modern and responsive.
- Numerous online payment processors: PayPal, Stripe, and offline payments are accepted.
What we don’t like:
- Only sell one product: you have to pay to sell more.
- Limited template choice: limited for the websites, and there are even fewer for ecommerces.
- SEO-limitations: mostly due to the one-page template.
Sign up free here: www.strikingly.com
Square Online 4.4/5
Best value for money
Square Online provides everything you need to start selling products – for free! Well, you do pay 1.9% per transaction instead, but it’s still your best option for creating a free ecommerce website.
It has the most generous free plan of any platform we tested, offering multi-channel integration with Instagram and Pinterest, the ability to sell unlimited products (most other platforms allow you to sell three to five products on their free plans), and automatic inventory syncing.
As with all free website builder plans, the only slight catch is that you have the platform’s branding on each of your web pages, plus a subdomain on your URL. These risk your site appearing unprofessional (or worse, untrustworthy), which can lead to lost sales.
If that’s something of concern, then you can sign up to the Professional plan at just £9 per month instead. This will connect your own website domain name, and remove the Square branding.
Pros:
- Generous free plan offering multi-channel integration
- Access to even more features for just £9 per month on the Premium plan
- Quick and easy to set up your free ecommerce website
Cons:
- Free plan comes with Square ads on every page
- Very limited creative freedom when designing your site
- Lacks the helpful prompts and support found on Wix when setting up your site
Square Online is the best overall option for creating your free ecommerce website
Lock Your Shipping Strategy Down Early
After all the hard work of getting customers on your site and through the checkout process, the final step of actually delivering the product is supposed to be easy.
But is it?
We heard a lot about shipping issues from people, especially if they had large, heavy, or living items, like plants. They didn’t always know who to blame–the shipper, the platform, themselves–but the more you can figure out about what shipping setup works for you ahead of time, the better.
You may be able to use the built-in shipping features included with the platform, especially if you’re shipping conventional items, and you feel confident enough in your prices to charge default rates.
Bear in mind that entry-level plans don’t always include tools to handle more than basic shipping. WooCommerce and Shopify let you print shipping labels with their entry-level plan, but other platforms like Wix require you to upgrade if you want to avoid a trip to the post office.
With BigCommerce, you’ll have to use a plugin like ShipStation to print your own labels.
Out of the box, Shopify works incredibly well. You’ll get up to 77% off shipping rates with DHL Express, UPS, or USPS with the entry-level Basic Shopify plan. The discount increases up to 88% for premium plans.
If you need to ship large, heavy, or otherwise unconventional items where you need more flexible shipping rates, you are almost certainly going to have to use a plugin or extension.
These will fetch pricing rates from shippers, calculate the cost according to zip code, or allow customers to request shipping quotes where a flat rate or live quote isn’t feasible.
We spoke with one Shopify user who handled a lot of their own furniture deliveries because they needed a white-glove, concierge delivery.
“I mean, some of these orders are half a million dollars of stuff,” he said. “But we did offer shipping for a lot of products because if people can’t put in their credit card, and complete the order right then, they won’t buy it. They’re going to go to Amazon or somewhere else.”
He felt like anything you can ship should be available to buy with a click on their site. “Shopify would manage it for us based on whatever we were putting in there,” he said. “I didn’t even have to worry about that.”
Shopify and BigCommerce allow a ton more flexibility when it comes to shipping, especially internationally. BigCommerce has the edge simply because it’s easy to negotiate different currencies.
With other platforms, you’re going to run into some limits, like lack of currencies to smooth international shipping, or the inability to dial in shipping costs for a varied inventory.
SquareSpace, for example, does not allow for shipping costs by individual product. It adds corresponding weight and then calculates the total. You also can’t track your shipping from multiple locations, whereas Shopify lets you assign inventory to four different locations with their entry-level plan.
As one SquareSpace user noted, the platform really works best for small scale. “If you just have a storefront, a couple hundred items, and you get like one or two orders a day, that’s easy,” he said, but recommended something like Shopify if you’re trying to do more.
Wix is another good option for ecommerce if you’re not shipping that much. For one thing, you don’t get automated tax calculations with their entry-level plan. You’ll either have to figure this out on your own or upgrade to Business Unlimited or Business VIP. Even then, though, the automated calculations are still limited to 100 transactions per month with Unlimited, and 500 transactions per month with VIP.
If you are interested in dropshipping, Shopify would be my top choice. No other platform integrates as seamlessly with as large a variety of dropshippers, directories, and databases.
BigCommerce and WooCommerce also have a healthy number of dropshipping and fulfillment integrations as well, but Shopify allows the most flexibility in this regard.
Conclusion
There is a wide variety of free ecommerce shopping cart software available for creating a complete online store to sell products. You are probably thinking that if these tools are free, the quality must be low. However, this is not true in general. Many of them provide the same features like paid ones and sometimes even more.
If you’ve ever seen an attractive online shop and thought, “wow I want something like that,” you’re not alone. We all want our own online stores, but building them can be tricky when we don’t know where to start. You might have to pay a premium amount of money in order to find the one that is ideal for your website. It’s always best to test out different ecommerce platforms and choose the one that’s the most convenient and suits your needs without breaking the bank.