9 Free Tools to Launch an E-Commerce on a Tight Budget

free tools ecommerce tight budget

How to find free tools to launch your website? Starting a website isn’t easy! You have to communicate your online store, optimize your SEO, deal with your customers, and even more detailed operations that maybe aren’t part of your core skills. All of those details cost a lot of money and when you’re just starting, you might not have the funds to invest as you would like to.
The e-commerce market can offer a lot of opportunities, as it’s been developed over several years. It’s been offering companies expansion to markets that were previously unavailable. More and more brands are growing on the internet, and it can be difficult for a new company to find its niche. Some free tools have been created to help professionals with a low budget and to give beginners a chance. In this sense, we’re going to give you 9 free tools that you can use to help you launch your e-commerce.

1. Can I use Free Tools to Create my E-Commerce?

Prestashop for creating an E-Commerce in an intuitive interface.

prestashop
Prestashop has become an e-commerce reference for web site creation. It is an intuitive interface, easy to access which allows you to build your e-commerce step by step.
Prestashop is free and Open source platform. Easy to use, it’s defined by its customizable front office. The website is regularly updated, you can download the latest version for free straight away. Prestashop is offering you a lot of modules to improve your e-commerce management, free and paid.
It’s even possible to configure your payment options. You can handle transactions in a safe and secure way, whether the payment is made by credit card or by Paypal. The tool was conceived to make sure your customers receive a good quality service.

WooCommerce to optimize your WordPress

woocommerce
Of course, you all know WordPress: the most used CMS by now. WooCommerce is a well-known WordPress plugin to turn regular websites into e-commerce sites. The plugin was downloaded over 1 million times and now powers over 30% of all online stores.
If WooCommerce is acclaimed that much, it’s mostly due to its simplicity. The plugin itself helps you control shipping policies, payment options and the personalization of your online store. WooCommerce also integrates Paypal, for you not to have additional fees for payments.

2. What Free Tools should I use to Market my E-Commerce?

Canva for designed communications

Canva
Canva is an online graphic design app helping you to create visuals for your marketing needs. You don’t need to be a graphic designer to create campaigns anymore. Canva is here to guide you! The website is very user-friendly, it offers you a well-stocked image bank and powerful graphics tools. You can choose backgrounds, pictures and templates you want to add easily.
Everything is reunited for you to obtain beautiful results, without you needing any graphics skills. Canva is a freemium tool, but the free version is enough to create visuals to share with your social networks.

Buffer to centralize your social networks

Buffer
Buffer is aimed to centralize and program all your posts on social networks. Thanks to this tool you can schedule publications several hours or days before you want them to be published. Which can be very useful for the brand which would like to have a great cover on social media, without taking too much time on this task.
Buffer connects multiple accounts in one publication schedule base. It’s possible to connect 10 different profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest and Google+ (one per each platform in the free version). It will help you gain precious time with your social marketing. You can calibrate images through the platform for them to appear properly. Everything is made to give you powerful tools to reach the public.

Pixabay, a free to use photographs database

Pixabay
On Pixabay you’ll be able to find rights-free photographs, free to use for your article or your posts on social media. It’s a high-quality database! Photographs are going to help you catch the eye of your followers or readers.
Posts with visuals are always more catchy. They foster better engaging rates and are easily shared. But you cannot use any photo you find on the internet, you have to ensure you’re free to use it.

MailChimp, the easiest way to send newsletters

mailchimp
MailChimp is a platform where you can create e-mail campaigns, handle your contacts and send your newsletters. User-friendly, it will give you access to analytics, even in its free version.
You can connect your online store to MailChimp to set up automation such as automatic call-back emails, welcome emails or notification for on-sale products. It’s really easy to optimize the design of your newsletter. You just have to drop elements into your visual composer.
It offers so much in its free version: you can build a list of subscribers, create campaigns via templates, analyse reports and data and send up to 12 000 per month.

3. What Free Tools can I use to Optimize my SEO?

Web developer to structure your tags

Web developer is going to be a great help to structure your pages. Exactly as a book, a website is specifically structured. This can be used for any part of your text is structured as a tag: h1, h2, h3 For example, H1 is the main title has to answers to specific standards. It should be composed from 5 to 7 words, and describe specifically your content.
Those tags, are defining your SEO position. As everyone is not an SEO expert, it’s not always easy to play by the rules. That’s why you need to download Web developer! It’s a toolbar that you can use for free with Firefox, to facilitate the integration and the diagnosis of a document. A web developer is offering you, a CSS management, a source code display and a cookies modification.

SEMRush to track your competition


SEMRush is helping you to compare your strategy of your competitors’ display advertising. Whether if it’s organic, paid search or link building. SEMRush is analysing the SEO rank of a website and compare it to its competitors.
Its suggests keywords similar to the one you typed as all websites that are ranked for them. Get the best long-term keywords, and explore multinational search as well. If an e-commerce has paid to be ranked on specific keywords, you’ll discover their strategy and budget. SEMRush is a complete tool: with graphics, you’ll be able to visualize and estimate your traffic, optimize your keywords and possess data relative to advertising research.

Google analytics to monitor your traffic

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a mandatory tool! It will provide you all the data you need to monitor your e-commerce traffic. Giving you information about your visitors, google analytics will help you optimizing your e-commerce site. It’s a very large and central data metrics.
Where are my visitors from? Thanks to this free tool you’ll be able to see metrics about where your visitors are from and your conversion rate.
Thanks to Google Analytics you’ll be able to discover the entire conversion path, that will allow you to emphasize your strengths and your weakness. You can also develop your m-commerce with digital analytics. Additionally, you can even collect data from your social network, to provide you with a 360° vision of your customers.
The e-commerce market is flourishing. More and more transactions are made through this canal. That’s why a lot of brands decides to start their e-commerce sites. The market is really competitive. To be noticed you have to be irreproachable and to offer the best user experience possible. Not always easy when you’re short on money!
It’s possible to launch an e-commerce, even with a low budget. With these 9 free tools, you now have all the keys to launch an e-commerce with a little amount of money. More and freer tools are developed every day and they can be a wonderful way for you to grow. Do not hesitate to try them and to draw out the best from each one!
What are your favourite free tools?

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ECN Team
E-Commerce Nation is The 1st B2B Web Media about E-Commerce in Europe. The team of E-Commerce Explorers help businesses to reach new potential market through delivering useful content. Let us know in comment if you enjoyed this content.