What you should know about free website builder software for ecommerce

Anytime you can get something that aids your goals for free its a great choice to use it, however we need to admit that everyone is trying to feed their family and it would be rare for anyone to give something away without a return on investment. You really need to keep this in mind when choosing a free website builder and this article will help your understand the reasons.

Lets firstly congratulate the existence of free website builder software because it has enabled thousands of excited humans to launch an ecommerce business without spending any money. Now with that out of the way, lets address the thee big problems, which are support, add-on’s and templates. Starting with technical support, I’m not going to pull any punches and just tell you the cold hard fact, you will not get true support and people will only help if they can be bothered (surely their too busy running their own ecommerce shops right?).

Before you get angry, by “true support” I mean getting an instant answer through live chat or on the telephone. Free website builders will provide you with a community forum to post questions and your required to wait for hours until a “guru” offers a potential solution for your enquiry. Imagine pitching to an investor the idea for your ecommerce website and explaining your online business is powered by a system that doesn’t provide true support, how do you expect them to respond?

Now we can move to the add-on crisis and this one is very easy to understand – you have to pay. Wait a minute, isn’t this supposed to be free? This is where the game starts and your wallet gets drained, do you remember me saying something about “everyone is trying to feed their family”? Selling online has changed over the years because competition has increased and the new ventures typically offer a free service, which has premium add-ons. The funny thing is, these add-ons are priced on the moon and you can simply choose a paid ecommerce website builder for around £25 monthly that includes everything out of the box.

The final issue is templates because the standard ecommerce themes offered by even the best free website builder are frightful and you guessed correctly, premium themes are available that coincidentally look great. Once you have the free shop builder software installed you would spend hours uploading products to the system and then decide the basic themes are not good enough. After putting in all the effort of adding inventory it’s unrealistic you would quit and instead pay a chunk of cash for a nice theme. After installing a premium theme you will then conclude your ecommerce website is lacking a few things, such as social integration and feeds. At this point, having put in the effort and invested money into the website, your going to decide its easier to just buy the add-ons rather than switching to another store builder.

I’m sorry to put a downer on launching your ecommerce website, however it’s really important to understand why things are labeled free and how you can avoid falling into a trap. Lets use a real world example from another industry, when doing your weekly food shop you’ll be offered “free tasters” by women standing around, after trying the product a conversion will strike and you’ll end up buying the product. If you have the ability to try “free tasters” and just walk away then free online website builder software could be perfect for your business.