Growing your e-commerce business can be expensive for a lot of reasons. One of the ways that e-commerce can get expensive is all the pricey tools that can supposedly help you rocket your business to success. There are so many e-commerce tools out there that you could go broke if you bought a membership for all of them.
Fortunately, you can access some of the best e-commerce tools on the market for free! While all of these tools also offer upgraded, paid options, their free versions offer a shocking amount of value.
5 Free E-Commerce Tools You Should be Using
Hot Jar
Hot Jar is a heat mapping tool that is easy to set up on your own e-commerce website. With Hot Jar you can track click, tap, scroll, and mouse movement heatmaps. Basically Hot Jar allows you to see how customers are actually interacting on your page.
This is extremely valuable information! Seeing what percentage of visitors make it to different points on a particular page can tell you where you’re losing their attention. With this info in hand you can revamp your pages to keep customers engaged longer.
Hot Jar also allows you to see desktop and mobile results as well so you can see if your pages perform better for one or the other. Most e-commerce sites get the majority of their traffic from mobile which is why it’s important to be able to track those results.
The basic plan is a great way to get started and get a taste of what Hot Jar can do. It limits you to only tracking 2,000 pageviews per day and you can only run three heat maps at a time. But depending on the amount of traffic you get on your site, this can give you a lot of info, especially when you’re just starting out.
Mailchimp
Email is one of the most powerful marketing tools out there. It’s the only way to directly communicate one-on-one with your customers. Email marketing allows you to talk to segments of customers, send abandoned cart reminders and provide valuable content directly to customers’ inboxes.
Sending emails straight from your personal email address to hundreds of customers can cause your personal email to get marked as spam, which you don’t want. Plus, there’s no way for people to unsubscribe. That’s why it’s important to use an email marketing service, it can help you with all of that and more.
Mailchimp is a great place to get started with your email marketing! Their free plan gives you 2,000 contacts for free, plus a bunch of basic templates as well as many other features. Mailchimp has been around since 2001 and is easily integrated with many website platforms like
WordPress.
Buffer
Posting on social media can take a lot of time, trust me I understand. Manually posting on each and every social media channel can take hours, especially when you’re posting multiple days a week or even multiple times a day.
You don’t need to give up on social media or even cut back what you do need is a better way of distributing your social media content. Social media marketing is crucial to building your brand so why not make it easier to do?
Well that’s where Buffer comes in. Buffer is an app that allows you to connect all of your social media accounts so that you can create and schedule your posts all in one place. It’s super nifty and easy to use and it will literally save you hours!
The free version of Buffer allows you to connect 3 social accounts, 10 scheduled posts and one user. If you mostly post to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter this is the perfect option for you. You can schedule posts weeks in advance which will free you up to concentrate on other important tasks at hand.
OptiMonk
Once a visitor has reached your site it’s up to you to keep them there! The goal is that they find what they’re looking for on whatever page they land on. But we all know that doesn’t always happen. Maybe they didn’t find what they were looking for or the price was more than they were expecting, etc. Having someone visit your site is still an opportunity that you don’t want to miss out on.
Optimonk is an on-site message toolkit. With OptiMonk you can add pop-ups, sidebars and nanobars to your website to better engage with your visitors without hurting the overall user experience. These tools give you another chance to convince your visitor that you have what they’re looking for.
OptiMonk is compatible with any kind of site and is easy to install. With the free plan you get unlimited campaigns but you’re limited to 5,000 pageviews and a maximum of one domain. OptiMonk has proven to be very effective for many big brands. Even the experts over at Digital Marketer use OptiMonk to put their theories into action.
Canva
Canva is a great tool for anyone that has little to no design experience. Design is such a huge part of shaping your brand image. Whether that’s emails, social media posts, flyers to pop in your customers’ orders or even your logo. It’s all a part of how you present your brand and products to the world.
While design is extremely important, not everyone has the skills to do it themselves or the money to pay a designer. That’s why Canva is such a great tool. You can create a wide variety of designs yourself for free with the help of Canva. They even offer a variety of templates as well.
There are, of course, other paid tiers but the free version offers quite a lot. You can use Canva to create PNG, JPG, PDF, MP4 and even GIF files, plus more. It’s easy to use and free making it one of my top recommendations for any e-commerce entrepreneurs.
The Takeaway
Getting the tools you need to grow your e-commerce business doesn’t need to bankrupt you. There are so many tools that small, growing e-commerce brands can use for free! These are just a handful of the most useful and valuable tools out there.
When it comes to growing your e-commerce business though, every little bit counts. Any way that you can give yourself a leg up can make a difference and we highly recommend that you give these tools a try. There’s nothing to lose!