8 Free Tools to Enhance Your E-commerce Site

Running an e-commerce site is a challenging yet rewarding undertaking. Those who dare to undertake this challenge quickly learn that they must capture—and hold—the short attention span of visitors long enough to convert sales. But how can you accomplish this if you’re just starting or have a limited budget? This is done through using budget-friendly tools to enhance your e-commerce site.

The tools I’m sharing today are tools that I have first-hand experience with. Most of these tools are free to start; later, they scale as you grow your business. As you upgrade to “paid” plans, the developers unlock more advanced options, features, and reports. Starting out, however, you have access to the basic tools that you will need for success in the highly competitive e-commerce arena.

Let’s dig into it!

Free Image Tools

To catch readers who find your e-commerce site, you must capture their attention immediately. Let the images on your site tell your story. These may be photos, infographics, or charts and graphs. But there’s one thing in common. With just a glance, readers decide if they want to stay on your site or leave.

Not a graphic designer? No problem! The image tools on the internet today make generating gorgeous graphics a breeze.

Sources for Royalty-free Images: Please don’t pirate images. It’s both illegal and unnecessary. Sign up for a free account with a free photo gallery such as Pexels or Pixabay. You can download royalty-free images and use them for free! Selecting royalty-free images will keep you from the headache of legal disputes over the images on your website down the road. While the selection of photos on these sites is limited, the gorgeous images are 100% free.

PicMonkey for Image Editing: Have you ever wondered how bloggers create those gorgeous social media posts? It’s the magic of professional-looking image editing. PicMonkey is one of these providers. Even with the free subscription level, you can edit images; add text to images; create social media posts; and crop and enhance images for your e-commerce store. As you grow, you can upgrade and unlock even more features.

Free Copy Writing Tools

Grammar. I know. Boring, right? Well, believe it or not, people will judge your website on how well-written it is. Remember that site visitors make snap decisions on whether to stay on your site to shop. Grammatical gaffes can leave visitors confused which leads to them browsing away. In addition, it can cause them to unfairly judge your website in a negative light.

Grammar Check with Grammarly: This is a wonderful tool that will pick up grammatical errors that MS Word and Google Docs miss. Plus, it suggests the correction with the click of a button. Once you install it, you can also integrate it with your emails and business correspondence to deliver great grammar across the board.

Generate Blog Post Ideas: I know you’re reading this because you’re in the business of e-commerce. However, I do hope that you’re blogging to help your SEO and drive visitors. In fact, because you are a retailer, you probably struggle to come up with ideas and titles for those blog posts! HubSpot’s Blog Idea Generator solves this problem. Just enter in the topic you want to blog about, and the generator will give you several ideas on relevant content you can create.

Create Compelling Titles: Now that HubSpot has given you content topics, craft a headline that will encourage those visitors to stay on your site and read your blog post! I use the Co-Schedule Headline Analyzer each day that I write. It helps you to choose words that drive both SEO and reader engagement and insights on how to improve your title-writing skills.

Free Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing can be one of the easiest, and the most challenging, to use. The ease of sending out a mass email is a convenience to you as a retailer. The challenge is in getting people to open the emails and take action. It’s a marketing effort that can be very effective when utilized properly. When you subscribe to a free email marketing service like MailChimp, it’s certainly worth a try. ConvertKit and Aweber are also favorites and used by thousands of people online.

Email Marketing Advice: MailChimp allows you to build a list, send out email marketing, and track results for free when you’re starting your campaigns. As you set up your first email campaign, they also tutor you on the legalities of email marketing to keep you from being flagged as a spammer. Because everyone hates spam, this improves your open rate.

Free Website Forms

Every e-commerce website has forms. Subscription forms, checkout forms, contact forms, and payment forms add functionality and invite users to engage with your site. As you know, an engaged reader will be more likely to click on “buy it now.”

Form Template: Skip the paid plug-ins. Generate secure and functional forms with EMailMeForm. Their forms integrate in almost every environment because the forms are in HTML. You go to their website, select a template, build the form, and generate the HTML, and copy and paste it into your site. It’s easy.  Plus, it’s free to get started. Like the other services in this article, you can scale it to a larger plan as your business needs change.

Summary

As an e-commerce business owner, you face many organizational challenges throughout your day. From running the business and accounting side of your business to marketing and selling your products, your time is valuable. Therefore, time management is essential. These tools will help you save both time and money. In addition, they will create an environment that will engage visitors to your website and encourage them to buy your products.

Use these on the “free” plans for each of these tools until you grow your business. As your needs change, step up to the paid subscriptions that you need and take advantage of the additional functionality and features.

Best wishes for continued e-commerce success!

Author Bio:

Deborah Tayloe is a professional freelance writer and holds a B.S.Ed. in Education/English from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She’s a consulting writer with EMailMeForm and loves technology. The Erie, Pennsylvania native resides in North Carolina with her husband and an energetic toy fox terrier.

 

 

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