Some Great Free Tools for Growing Your Ecommerce Business

Ecommerce refers to any type of commerce (buying and selling) that occurs online. However, that very general description rather belies the many unique and specific attributes of ecommerce that make it quite a bit different from commerce as it has existed for the part of human history that existed before the rise of the internet. Nevertheless, if you are starting out in ecommerce, there are many internet-specific things to account for when you’re selling things across the online world.

For example, where are you going to sell your product? Will you use a multi-channel strategy, or will you sell everything directly from your own website? Will you handle order fulfilment yourself? How will you design your website? And finally, how will you handle marketing? All these considerations are specific to the world of ecommerce, which is at once different and the same to commerce as we have traditionally known it.

Size Matters

Shipping and Handling of Texas, an ecommerce fulfillment service operating out of Houston, Texas says that there is one overriding factor that will decide how you answer the above questions – how established is your ecommerce business? What stage of growth your business is at will determine how you fulfil orders and also how you conduct your marketing – whether that is a far-reaching Facebook ad campaign or simply trying to get your followers up on Instagram.

Most new ecommerce ventures fail within the first five years, and this is most often the result of a poor scaling strategy – whether trying to expand before you are ready or failing to expand when the time is right. To get this right, you need to do what is right for the size of your business. And if you’re just getting started in e-commerce, checking out the free tools available to help you grow (and track growth) is a very wise move.

Top Free Tools for E-commerce Growth

Here follows then a list of some of the most useful free tools online. These will allow you to do the right thing at the right time:

Hot Jar

Hot Jar is a fantastic tool for monitoring how visitors are interacting with your site. Hot Jar provides you with a heat map, which tracks clicks, mouse movement, and scrolling habits. If you want to know how to improve your ecommerce site, this data is essential.

Mail Chimp

Mai lChimp helps with your email marketing. E-mail is still vital for small ecommerce sites. For example, you can prompt your existing customers (from your site) to check out a product launch on Amazon and leave an all-important review. This helps you get established on that site. To avoid a great deal of clutter in your personal e-mail and your e-mails being marked as spam, MailChimp can organize everything for you.

Buffer

For optimizing your social media marketing, Buffer is a great free tool. This tool can remove the hassle of manually posting on social media and allow you to organize a marketing strategy, program that marketing strategy, and then have it carried out automatically in a time- and location-optimized way.

Optimonk

Optimonk is an onsite message toolkit. It can create pop-ups and unobtrusive sidebar chats with the customers who are on your site. This allows you to interact with them in real time. This type of service is great for keeping customers on your site after you have attracted them there.

Ultimately, what all these tools provide you with is knowledge – knowledge of your customers, the performance of your products and your marketing. All of that is essential data for scaling an ecommerce business. Accordingly, these tools are essential for growth.