8 Best Free Ecommerce Platforms 2023 | Save and Sell Today

Other website builders, like Wix and Weebly, offer ADI as an option. But with Square Online, it’s the main route. ADI means you’re guaranteed to end up with an ecommerce-optimized design, with minimal work on your end!

Overall, we scored Square Online 3.9 out of 5 for ease of use. This is because although it’s easy to get set up, navigating the editor isn’t as straightforward. Some of the language can be a little unfamiliar, so finding what you’re after isn’t always straightforward.

Square Online only offers two layout choices: Shop All and Order Online. The Shop All layout is for ecommerce retail brands that want to set up an online store to sell their products, whereas the Order Online layout is geared more towards restaurants and food businesses.

Despite the limited number of themes, you can still customize Square Online templates in all of the most important ways, like:

• Changing color schemes
• Picking fonts
• Repositioning page elements
• Importing your brand logo
• Uploading photos

We just mean that if you’re really looking to get your hands dirty and create something unique, then you’re better off with Wix or Squarespace (both of which offer free trials for ecommerce).

Square Online templates are professional, just not completely unique.

And even if you’re not already using Square Online products, its free plan comes with some great sales features:

• Sell unlimited products (rare for a free plan!)
• Automatic tax calculator (US only)
• Easily add products with different variations
• Simple inventory management
• Set free or flat rate shipping, or customize by weight, quantity, or order cost

Still, there are a few drawbacks to the free plan. For example, although you can accept payments through Square Online’s in-house payment processing system as well as Google and Apple Pay, customers won’t be able to use PayPal. Additionally, users won’t be able to leave product reviews, there’s no abandoned cart recovery, and your site analytics will be basic, to say the least.

Additionally, you’ll have Square branding stuck to the bottom of your site. Combined with the domain, this can make your online store look unprofessional and untrustworthy.

There are also transaction fees to contend with, as Square Online charges 2.9% + $0.30 for online payments. We mentioned before how Square Online’s free plan has no limitations on product limits, but you only get 500MB of storage and bandwidth. Too many products and high-quality images will slow your site down tremendously.

On a positive note, however, you can sell both physical and digital on the free plan. And if you’re worried about security risks, don’t be, as Square Online’s free plan comes with an SSL certificate included.

If you start on the free plan and find your store growing, then you’ll want to consider what the cheapest paid plan can offer – including a free custom domain for your first year, and no Square Online ads clogging up your store’s branding.

Square Online’s cheapest paid plan costs $12/month, which is even cheaper than best-paid ecommerce builders like Wix and Squarespace.

Big Cartel themes aren’t very customizable, unless you know how to code (which you can’t do much of on the free plan, anyway). So if you’re in the majority of us without a computer science degree, you may want to stick to Square instead. It’s not that you can’t do anything without coding knowledge, but you can’t do much.

But something we did like about Big Cartel is its onboarding process when you first sign up, which uses pop-up prompts and tips to walk you through your dashboard. You’ll be shown all the basics, from adding products to creating discounts – it’s more the design process that we found clunky!

Well… kind of. Big Cartel’s themes are similar to Square’s, because they’re simple and professional, but lack originality. The difference is that Square’s templates are easier to set up, and you can customize them a little more without any knowledge of code.

Plus, if you do know code and want to use it to make your Big Cartel website a bit snazzier,  you’ll have to upgrade to at least the Platinum plan ($9.99 per month). Annoyingly, those on the free plan can’t make any coding changes!

The drawbacks of Big Cartel’s sales features are that:

• You can only sell up to five products on the free plan – any more than this and you’ll have to upgrade
• You can only upload one image per product, so multiple angles are a no-go
• You can’t edit products in bulk, meaning you’ll have to make any changes individually.

A major limitation of Big Cartel’s free plan is its extremely tight product limit which gives you only five products and one image per product. If you were planning on selling even just six products you’d have to leave one behind or upgrade.

Additionally, Big Cartel doesn’t allow digital products on any of its plans. You’ll have to download third-party support with apps like Pulley, which you’ll have to pay monthly for too (though it has a free 14-day trial).

One major plus of Big Cartel is no transaction fees, meaning all the money you get through Big Cartel is yours to keep. For entrepreneurs on a budget, Big Cartel’s free plan gives them a big leg-up, even with the limited inventory.

In fact, there’s so much design freedom that you might feel overwhelmed at first – but you’ll get the hang of Wix’s template editor in no time. After all, we awarded it 4 out of 5 in this category, making it the second easiest ecommerce builder to use.

You can get your hands dirty with code if you want to, but it’s by no means required to create a unique, professional design.

We were impressed with Wix’s wide range of templates and generous design freedom – it’s hard to find both of these qualities in one builder! Overall, we score Wix 4 out of 5 for its design functionality, putting it in joint first place with builders like Squarespace and BigCommerce.

• Sell unlimited products
• Automatically send abandoned cart recovery emails
• Let customers create accounts for faster checkout
• Sell on Facebook and Instagram

Wix isn’t a dedicated, ecommerce-specific website builder – it’s a regular website builder with some ecommerce-specific plans – so it doesn’t have the most scalable features on the market. But for small-to-medium sized stores, you’ll have all the features you need and then some.

This can be quite intrusive for your visitors and can make it seem like your site is advertising Wix, not your own products. This is a shame since Wix allows unlimited products and the selling of both physical and digital products, SSL protected.

But the major limitation is that while you can sell products with the ecommerce plan on a free trial, you can’t accept payments until you upgrade. Wix will hold on paying you until you upgrade, effectively keeping your sales hostage until you decide to sign up for a paid plan.

Wix also limits certain key features with the free trial, such as no access to Google Analytics and only providing up to 500MB in bandwidth.

• Design a site on Wix’s free plan, then upgrade to a paid plan to start selling
• Sign up for a paid ecommerce plan, and get all of your money back if you cancel in the first 14 days

If you finish the 14-day trial period and like what you’ve seen, then you can stay on Wix’s cheapest ecommerce plan for $27/month.

Whether it’s setting up your store’s pages or managing your inventory, Shopify has a clean and logical interface that makes every task as simple as it can be.

We also liked that Shopify’s dashboard is full of useful tips to help you get started – you won’t be left to learn your way around alone!

Still, it’s not the easiest builder out there. Users were a little confused by the editor, and some disliked how you had to navigate back to the dashboard to add products separately. Because of this, it scored 3.5 out of 5 in our ease of use testing. However, given the powerful tools it has to offer, we think this is a reasonable trade-off for its ecommerce capabilities.

Each of Shopify’s free themes comes in multiple styles, so you still get a decent range to choose from. The main difference between a theme’s styles is the color scheme. For example, the Venture theme comes in three styles: Snowboards (blue), Outdoors (orange), and Boxing (black).

• Sell in 133 currencies and up to 5 languages
• Sell unlimited products
• Set up two staff accounts with access to the Shopify admin
• Sell on multiple channels (sync with online marketplaces and social media accounts)

One glance at these features, and it’s clear that Shopify is equipped to handle larger stores. Plus, we were really impressed with its inventory management, which makes it super easy to track stock levels and update product listings. It’s no wonder we awarded it 4.5 out of 5 in our sales features category.

However, it’s worth noting that you’ll have to check out some third-party apps from the Shopify App Store in order to really maximize your store’s potential. That’s where you’ll find features like email marketing and dropshipping.

You’ll also have to pay transaction fees unless you use Shopify’s in-house payment processor, Shopify Payments. That means popular third-party tools like PayPal will cost you up to 2% of each sale!

In short, Shopify can offer tons of features for larger stores, you’ll just have to download some of them yourself!

However, Shopify runs into the same issue of not allowing any sales transactions until you choose a price plan. Your free trial store will open with a storefront password and a freeze on all checkouts. You can get rid of the password if you don’t plan on selling, but since you probably are you will need to start paying for it.

Squarespace’s drag-and-drop template editor is a little different t0 BigCommerce’s, because you can see the changes you make to each page in real-time as you make them. We also particularly like how Squarespace’s rows add more structure to the design process. This means that, unlike Wix, you can’t just drag and drop anything anywhere, but the tradeoff is that you’re guaranteed a perfectly constructed store at the end of it all.

As we mentioned in the ease of use section, Squarespace’s template editor is section-based, meaning that you can customize and reorder different parts of a page, but you can’t completely overhaul the actual layout.

You won’t get quite as much design flexibility as you would with Wix, but the benefit is that you won’t have to worry about making a design faux pas or not following ecommerce best practices. Once you choose a Squarespace template, you can customize it “inside the lines,” without having to worry about messing up the general style.

• Sell unlimited products
• Sell digital gift cards
• Accept donations

Squarespace’s ecommerce plans also come with seamless inventory management. Managing products and variants is super simple, and you can even automatically display “limited availability” labels when your stock levels are low.

Just note that this plan charges a 3% transaction fee, and you’ll have to upgrade to a more advanced ecommerce plan in order to waive it.

One of Squarespace’s biggest strengths is its ability to sell digital products. In fact, we think it’s the ideal platform for sales because, although its inventory management is good, it’s not build to support very high stock levels. As a result, digital vendors will see more of what it has to offer as an ecommerce platform.

You will be stuck with a randomized .squarespace.com subdomain during this period, though you can pre-register a domain to a parked page and then transfer once you upgrade.

You will also not be able to send any custom email notifications to any customers or get access to advanced ecommerce features like abandoned checkout recovery or customer accounts.

On the plus side, if your mind is still not made up after the 14-day trial, you are able to extend it by seven days.

Users’ biggest complaint with BigCommerce was that its product management dashboard and actual storefront section feel like two very separate areas. Similar to Shopify, BigCommerce makes products and design feel a little disconnected. Swapping between the two can get a little disorientating.

This setup can be frustrating, but it’s by no means too difficult to use – BigCommerce’s interface just takes more getting used to!

Each theme comes in multiple shades, so you can have some control over the general color scheme. When it comes to customizing each page, BigCommerce’s editing tools allow you to make changes to the layout and style.

BigCommerce’s template editor isn’t as seamless as Wix’s or even Shopify’s, but the templates themselves are perfectly suited for ecommerce success.

• Optional digital wallet payments (like Apple Pay)
• POS integrations (sync your online and offline payments)
• Create 70+ native discounts and promotions

BigCommerce’s built-in tools mean that you won’t be as reliant on third-party apps as you would be with Shopify. But if you ever want to add even more functionality, then BigCommerce’s Apps Marketplace has you covered with over 600 apps to choose from.

However, once the trial ends, BigCommerce will seal you out of your account if you haven’t picked a plan.

Despite its trial’s perks, there are some things that BigCommerce doesn’t do, such as not being able to install third-party SSL certificates for the trial period. You also don’t get a custom domain, or access to product filters and setting up 301 redirects.

However, if you need the more advanced capabilities of a WordPress site, then WooCommerce is as easy as ecommerce will get. WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress, meaning you can add it as an additional feature to any WordPress site. It comes with a helpful setup wizard, so you won’t have to worry about learning the ropes on your own.

Once you’ve successfully installed WooCommerce, adding and managing products is really straightforward.

If you’re willing to go for a paid theme, you can expect to pay between $39 and $79 for one.

The WooCommerce Extensions Store covers everything from abandoned cart recovery to multi-channel integrations, so the sky’s the limit in terms of features. Just note that not all of these extensions are free, so be sure to budget for the ones that you really want!

You still get unlimited products to sell both physically and digitally, but whether your hosting provider can handle it – with enough storage and bandwidth, for example – is up to what plan you have, rather than WooCommerce itself.

You will also have to organize getting yourself an SSL certificate since WooCommerce doesn’t include it as standard.

Once your store is set up, be wary of transaction fees too. WooCommerce Payments charges no setup or monthly fees but will charge 2.9% + $0.30 on all transactions made with a US credit or debit card. For cards outside the US, an additional 1% is charged.

We recommend using Bluehost with WooCommerce, because it’s an officially recommended provider by WooCommerce itself.

Bluehost has plenty of WooCommerce-specific plans, starting at $15.95/month.

If you can’t code, we don’t recommend Magento. It’s aimed at developers and enterprise-level businesses, and it shows.

If you can code, Magento offers scalability and customization that’s unrivalled by any other ecommerce solution, open-source or otherwise – but don’t expect the setup to be easy. In fact, unless you have experience in web development, you won’t be able to set it up at all, far less customize it to your liking.

If you’re not super tech-savvy, then the best way to get the most out of your Magento design is to hire a web developer to tweak the theme for you. Just note that you can expect to pay at least a few hundred dollars for this option!

Magento claims it can hold over a million items comfortably and enables the selling of both physical and digital products. However, like WooCommerce, you will still need to supplement it with plugins from the Magento Marketplace.

You will also have to deal with transaction fees with Magento, charging the usual 2.9% + $0.30 as well as providing your own domain name and SSL certificate once your site is live.

There aren’t many hosts that cater for Magento, which is why installation can be so difficult. We recommend SiteGround’s Magento hosting plans for easy installation – it’s one of the few hosts with Magento-specific plans, and prices start at a modest $3.99 per month.

Still, they’re not the only ecommerce software options available. So if you’d like to broaden your horizons before making a decision, here are a few software options that are decent, but didn’t make our top two.

OpenCart

If your store is too large for WooCommerce, but too small for Magento, then OpenCart is worth a look: it’s a powerful platform, with a ton of scope for customization and additional features. In fact, there are over 13,000 OpenCart integrations available.

Just keep in mind that OpenCart itself is very light on built-in features, so you’ll need to make use of these add-ons. There’s a fairly steep learning curve though, and unlike WooCommerce, you probably won’t be able to ‘muddle through’ without any developer experience.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is an open-source software that pitches itself as more of a website builder. As you’ve seen with the platforms above, ease of use can be a real sticking point when it comes to using open-source software, so combining open-source power and potential with website builder simplicity sounds like a winning recipe.

Unfortunately, while a good platform, PrestaShop kind of misses the mark on both fronts. If you’re set on an open-source software, pick from one of the platforms above (depending on your business size). And if you’re after something that’s as easy to use as a website builder, why not pick… a website builder! The ones we featured at the very top of this article will be a safe bet.