Some of the best Shopify alternatives are BigCommerce, Shift4Shop, WooCommerce, Wix, Magento, Squarespace, PinnacleCart, Ecwid, Prestashop, and Sellfy.

When it comes to building an online store without breaking the bank, free eCommerce platforms are the ideal solution. The best free eCommerce platform for you depends on your specific business needs.

The exact amount varies depending on the nature and scale of your business. At a minimum, you can start your own eCommerce website for less than $100 or hire a professional agency for around $10,000.

How do you write product descriptions? Quick Answer: Keep product descriptions brief and emphasize features that demonstrate how the consumer will benefit from the item. Would you buy a product just by looking at a photo? Um..no! You need to know all the details about the item before you add it to your shopping cart. You have to know what material it is made of, its dimensions, among other things. And most importantly, you need to be convinced that the product will add value to your life or solve a problem. Post Contents: [ show hide ]

A picture is worth a thousand words. This oldest of adages never rings truer than when applied to online selling. Having high-quality product photos to showcase your inventory online is of paramount importance to your selling success. In fact, attractive imagery is probably the single most basic and essential elements of any online store. Even if you're drop shipping your products, and can't actually take a photo of the inventory, it's important to try and get a photo from the supplier. Suppliers can sometimes be stubborn on this point. So if they refuse to furnish you with a photo, ask for a sample so that you can take one yourself. Of course, once you've taken that photo, you may not know how to maximize a product image's selling potential. And that's the topic of today's SaleHoo blog post: how to get great photos of your products.

Tell me, what good is a tripod with two legs? Or how about a toothbrush without bristles? Give up? Well, they're both about as helpful as an unusable website. Usability is a clear front-runner in terms of what a developer should consider most important when developing an e-commerce site. Today, we'll be taking a look at how usability testing works, and why it's important to optimize your e-commerce site for it.

WooCommerce and Shopify are two of the top ecommerce platforms for running an online business. Combined, they account for half of the ecommerce platform pie in terms of usage. What makes them popular and how do they stack up against each other? If I’m a new dropshipper, for example, which platform will be the best for me? Decisions, decisions, decisions. To help you understand how each product works, we’ve created this comparative guide with a focus on WooCommerce and Shopify’s pricing structures. Main Difference Between Shopify and WooCommerce Here’s the thing, these two are completely different beasts in terms of execution. From how each one integrates into your business as a platform to how each product is priced, b

Did you know that over three-quarters of online shoppers that place items in a shopping cart go on to abandon that cart before making a purchase? An estimated $4 trillion of merchandise was expected to languish unpurchased in abandoned carts in 2017 alone — that’s a lot of money to leave on the table. People abandon carts for a variety of reasons. 64% were scared off by expensive shipping, while close to half had no intention of making a purchase in the first place — they were just browsing or doing research. Whatever the reason for cart abandonment, it has been shown that retargeting potential customers via triggered email is one of the most effective forms of email marketing. Studies reveal that 48% of abandoned cart emails are opened and one in three openers go on to make a purchase. That’s a compelling success rate, yet many retailers fail to retarget potential cu

If you’re familiar with the world of ecommerce, you will have come across the business model known as dropshipping. If you’re new to dropshipping, it can be hard to get your head around the idea of running an online store without having any stock. Dropshipping is essentially selling products via a third-party supplier or manufacturer, which means you don’t have to buy in bulk or deal with shipping. Once you understand how dropshipping works, you will see that it is one of the most effective models for small and new online businesses. However, if you take the dropshipping route you will still need to know how to turn your online store into a successful business. You will need to know how to attract customers and drive sales Here are five hacks that will help you to optimize your conversions and get traction for your dropshipping business. 1. Get great pictures

Free stock photo websites provide the visual content needs of startup entrepreneurs, bloggers, marketers, designers, journalists, and students who barely have the budget for premium photographs. These image resources are also a good place for photographers and artists to showcase their talent and launch or boost their career. This comprehensive guide explains image licenses, lists down free stock photo sites, and answers frequently asked questions about copyright. Post Contents: [ show hide ]

If you’re running an eCommerce website, your main goal is to make sales—but is your site designed to sell? A lot of online storefronts fail to consider what the site looks and feels like from the customer’s point of view, ultimately costing them sales. These 10 elements can help you create a more customer-centric experience and convert more visitors from browsers to buyers. 1. Clear, Recognizable Logo Amazon has its trademark smile. For eBay, it’s a simple company name in Google-esque colors. And everyone recognizes Walmart’s stylized spark (though unless you’ve visited the corporate website, you may not know it’s supposed to be a spark). A clean, instantly recognizable logo goes a long way toward branding your eCommerce business. Logos are also a shorthand element for trust—generally, consumers associate logos with longevity.

After making the decision to open an eCommerce site, many first-timers find themselves overwhelmed with information. For the most part, it’s better to keep things simple and follow the industry standards in order to keep a professional and affordable website.  This list will provide five pieces of advice to avoid and five additional aspects to follow for a smooth transition into the world of online sales and marketing. Follow these steps to develop and operate a successful eCommerce site.   Don’t Have a Website that Is Too Slow   According to Compuware, every two seconds of loading results in an 8% withdrawal rate among customers.  No one wants to waste time waiting for a site to load. Studies say that if a site that formerly took eight seconds to load drops that time to two seconds, the rate of conversion will actually jump by an average of 74

All ecommerce sites exist for one reason and one reason only: to make you money. Everything about your website should be designed to get your visitors to the checkout. Sometimes that means building enticing offers and advertisements that funnel traffic toward your offerings. Landing pages are a big part of that process, and you can’t afford to ignore them.

Are you one of those sellers who is wasting time and money when it comes to landing page upgrades? Do you spend time making superficial changes that result in tiny increases in conversion? Instead you should be revising the page and the strategy! You might not understand what landing pages and conversion rates are. To create an effective page, you’ll need a good grasp of these concepts. Ready? Let’s review.

The average browser doesn't really know (or care) about the design work that goes into every website that they visit. They're only aware that they like one site, hate another, and are so-so about others. They generally don't know or understand why. In most cases the response is subliminal, which is exactly what you're aiming for. Good UX is invisible. We've mentioned in a previous article that one of the top reasons visitors abandon their shopping carts is because of bad UX. It may be a perfectly functional website with all the elements necessary for a customer to find, select, and buy items, but if it doesn't provide an enjoyable experience then you're unlikely to attract many repeat customers. Perhaps it was a hard time finding a particular button. It could be the load times were too long, or maybe they just got tired of scrolling. Nearly anything can end up causing a bad impression. In such cases, it behooves you to understand how properly designed UX patterns work.

Did you know that it costs more for a brand to acquire a customer than it does to retain one? The secret to keeping a customer is exceptional customer service. That’s because the average consumer, nowadays more than ever, looks for an experience that is hassle-free and convenient. By providing customers with excellent customer service, you effectively make them brand ambassadors who not only favor your brand over others, but persuade their friends and family to do the same. However, before you start prepping your company for a customer relations upgrade, you must educate yourself on the various practices that you can implement for successful e-commerce customer service. Here are 15 helpful methods that your customer service team can incorporate today. 1. Take Responsibility For Your Brand

We’ve had lots of SaleHoo members asking us how to set up their own website recently. An ecommerce website of your own gives you freedom to advertise and link to your listings; control over costs, listing format and duration; and greater flexibility with branding. The best part is that buyers tend to pay more when buying directly from your website just because they are removed from competing offers on eBay! Sow how can you get your own website up and running? Check out our 5 step guide for the easy way... 5 Steps to Your Own Website There’s a lot to cover, but this should give you a broad idea of what is involved in setting up a site.   1. Site Design Are you going to design the site yourself or have someone else do it? DIY – This gives you greatest control, but you’ll need experience in graphic design to create anything but the most basic of pages. Popular web desig

So, you’ve launched an online business venture, huh? That’s great.  Whether it’s dropshipping, Amazon Affiliate marketing, info products, Software as a Service (SaaS), or whichever eCommerce venture you’ve embarked on, online is where the riches are these days. While your enterprise might be profitable, I’ve got some good news for you. You can still grow even more. How? Through smart eCommerce optimization. By fine-tuning what you are already doing, you can close more sales and maximize profits. In this guide, I will give you 12 proven eCommerce optimization tips to boost your online business. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s discuss your store’s vital but unseen foundation—the store architecture. eCommerce Architecture: Your Online Store’s Foundation How you set up your store determines wh

There's nothing worse for an ecommerce business than a shopper who browses, finds their chosen items, loads them up into the shopping cart, and then bounces away… never to be seen again. Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest problems facing online retailers. It's even more frustrating because it means some part of your marketing, advertising, and user experience efforts went awry at the last second. It's a total negation of all that tremendous effort you put into your marketing. For that to fail at the last leg of the journey really sucks. And yet shopping cart abandonment is very common.

A homepage is the first page a visitor arrives on when they directly put the website URL into the browser’s search bar (as opposed to searching it on Google).

A step by step guide to successfully starting an online store on Shopify, WooCommerce and more...

Dropshipping. It’s the word on everybody’s lips when they think of starting their own business. As the easiest way to start an online store on a tight budget, there’s a huge amount of interest in the topic. But who’s doing well in the realm and what can we learn from them? It’s surprisingly hard to find any real-life case studies of successful dropshipping examples going into the nitty gritty of processes and numbers involved. Dropshipper personalities on YouTube and Reddit will commonly tell you that they won’t reveal their store or products, which has led to most other entrepreneurs being annoyingly tight-lipped on any details too. But numbers don’t lie, and with some nifty research from our team of eCommerce experts, we&r

Doba has gained some great reviews on the web for providing a sourcing directory specializing in drop shippers. But does the reality live up to the hype?