Big Cartel free e-commerce sites builder is trying to catch up with the leaders of the market – Shopify and BigCommerce. It does not excel in anything particularly but there are things where this free e-commerce websites builder lags behind: help and support of customers are not just ‘bad’, they are terrible. The templates are not too flexible and literally disallow you to demonstrate your oeuvre. If you select this free e-commerce site builder, be sure that you aren’t planning to grow in the future but firmly want to take your current position or maybe to even downgrade a little.
Wix free e-commerce website builder is not a specialized tool; it’s just the one allowing making sales and having dedicated templates of e-commerce.
It has 8 subscription plans but only three of them are suitable to run a store online: $17, $25, and $35 a month. The price can change – depending on what territory in the world you’re opening the pricing page.
Shopify free e-commerce website builder is known as a leader of the market, no matter what other people say. It has excellence in everything: SEO, sales, taxation, discounts, special offers, bulk management, shipment tracking, and shipment discounts, sales channels, mobile-friendliness, POS, and PIN functions, as well as many other smaller things.
This free e-commerce website builder is a chaser of Shopify – and is practically its clone. It differs insignificantly with its pro: almost the total absence of commissions for transactions. Its con is limit in annual sales.
It is not directly a free e-commerce website builder but it is equipped with somewhat powerful e-commerce. If you like its relatively low pricing compared to BigCommerce or Shopify and can live with its significantly lower sales power, then it shall be a good choice for you.
Here, in this free e-commerce website builder, you are going to receive less beauty than in Squarespace and gain more functionality, like in Wix. If you are a lover of widened stats, tables, and information – then Volusion is the right e-commerce website builder.
However, it is an openly poor choice due to high pricing combined with annual sales limitations, not great designs, and a small number of products that are allowed to be sold at a time.
Each year we conduct Website Builder Reviews from the previous years to find the best website builder or the best business website builder that can easily create a nice, functional website quickly. View an At-a-Glance Comparison Chart for each right here!
These website builders require no software download and can easily be used online through your browser. When we do a Website Builder Review, we are also looking for the easiest to use Ecommerce Software Solution integrated with the website builder.
E-commerce is the notion, which describes in a word the online sales processes: everything considering e-store. Such notions are included under its umbrella:
The most powerful sales tools offer the aforementioned in their subscription plans and much more.
Deciding on what tool is the best for your needs, we recommend you to pay attention to the following factors. Combined, they will make your sales much more comprehensive than in some non-specialized site builder and the knowledge about the existence of these prerequisites is going to help you choose a tool – as you will pay specific attention now on this or that factor.
Integration with sales platforms and social media – to offer your merchandise to a global audience, which can increase your sales just because your goods are present there. These platforms offer you much more marketing opportunities that you would have with a standalone site. Also, you can start selling on those platforms and end on your site, where the sales processes are tuned to your needs, strategy, and vision.
SEO – if you want to be found online (and you do need to be found, as there will be no sales without customers), then you should have at least decent SEO (if not to say ‘excellent’) so to be found online in search engine of Google (and other engines if you are interested in them in the 21st century).
Friendliness to mobile gadgets. There is no such a customer of an online store, who would not use a mobile phone or, at least, tablet, to browse for some merch online. If they find it on a non-mobile-friendly site, they are likely to go to some other place than try to deal with small letters and numbers incomprehensibly visible on a small screen.
The convenience of work inside of a free ecommerce website specifically for you. Test it, try with a hand, see how it works, and feel if there is a connection between you. Only in this way, you can really estimate if a tool is worthy of your attention.
SSL and HTTPS are must-have things for every site dealing with finances – it must be secure to make money transactions through it. Especially when it comes to cards – PCI DSS regulations strictly describe a ton of requirements that sites dealing with finances should have. And your free e-commerce store must provide you an opportunity to enable SSL and HTTPS to start sales – otherwise, abandon such a free e-commerce web builder as a hot potato from your burnt hands. You’ll be also banned by Google shortly without HTTPS & SSL.
Shipping management – every customer would like to know where his or her shipment currently is. That’s even more than just a ‘nice-to-have’ tool.
Online help for your customers – if you’re running a big store (or trying to make one), it would be nice to have some online or e-mail or phone manager, who would give a piece of advice to clients, helping them out.
Sold product types – there are three of them: physical goods, electronic goods, and services. From one to another free e-commerce website builder, you will find differences in what they allow to sell (some may even differ from plan to plan).
Items management – if you run a store with thousands or tens of thousands of items, bulk management is a must-have thing. You specifically can’t allow yourself to manage every piece of merch by hand – it would take you days just to change pricing inside of a big group of items, for instance.
Now as you know, what features to look for, let’s go observing six best free e-commerce websites makers.
It is possible to build for free but it’s not always possible to run it for free. Even running for free, you are limited in functions, sales, reporting, nice name of a website, and other essentials.
Shopify – for the fullest power of e-commerce. BigCommerce is an option number two. Squarespace – for a great view of pages and the nice bulk management of goods. Wix is for the number of sophisticated templates for websites, and others on our list are the worst choices.
It depends on your merchandise’s number. Tens of units are uploaded into the catalog within an hour. Hundreds will take days. Thousands – from days to months. Tens of thousands are recommended to upload automatically based on some additionally written procedure (a piece of software) as manual loading will take months.
No, a free run is not developed for good SEO.
A lot of things. Basically, everything – from the nice volume of storage and nice domain name (which isn’t going to be nice unpaid) to the number of pieces of merchandise you can sell at a time or for a month, stats of visitors and sales. It is impossible to have options of discounts and promo codes, as well as users won’t be able to pay, selecting some preferred channel they want (an unpaid usage regularly limits users to only 1-2 payment channels, like PayPal with an increased commission or akin). So, a free run of free e-commerce website builders is NOT the choice if you want to expand and grow or to say loudly about self from the start.
