you are interested in e-commerce and want to create a free online store, we have dedicated this article to you to explain how to design a convenient online store to display products in front of potential customers without the need for previous technical experience or incurring additional expenses. Rather, all the explanation steps will be free from the beginning until the end.
Of course, the free store that you design after reading this article will not be able to display thousands of products and accommodate millions of visitors, but it is enough to get started and get the basic features in online stores, and you can develop your store later.
Is it possible to create a free online store?
Regardless of the method you will rely on to create your online store, you must know that there are basics on which the online store will be built, just like any basics of building a website.
These basics are a must-have whether you get it for free or paid, and they include:
- Register a domain name to access the store, such as www.example.com , so that it is a unique address that visitors use to access your store.
- Web hosting in which to store the site files, and publish a website (or the technical environment on which the site will be established)
- A website management system aimed at facilitating the process of building a website (instead of coding it from scratch), and we mostly rely on the WordPress system.
- A system that helps you build a store and manage products, and we mostly rely on the WooCommerce system
These basics must be available in any online store that is able to display its products to customers, and in this article we will talk about how to obtain these components for free, partially or completely, through the methods that we will talk about.
Now let us show you the ways through which you can create a free online store.
Create a free online store with Amazon AWS
The current trend in creating websites has tended to use cloud hosting that charges you for consumption , as it is more secure and guarantees the performance of a website than other types of servers. You can rely on one of these hosting to build your online store for free through one of the providers of this service, which is Amazon Aws services. .
Amazon services offer several types of plans with different names Ec2, S3, RDS to suit the needs of different business owners in using hosting, but you do not need to worry about these differences at the present time if you want to create a WordPress website.
You can get a free plan as described on the AWS Free Tier page by getting a portion of the service’s resources for free that automatically expire after a year or are ongoing with you, and after those resources expire you will be required to upgrade to a paid plan.
Of course, you will not get these huge resources that can handle a large number of visitors for free for a lifetime, but you will get the minimum resources that will help you in the beginning to create a free online store without having to pay a lot of expenses in the beginning.
You can get a free plan and launch your WordPress site through the lightsail application, as we explained in detail
Then, after obtaining hosting and installing WordPress, you will install the WooCommerce extension , and thus you will have an online store ready for customers 🙂
Through this method, you will be able to obtain free hosting, a free WordPress system, and a free WooCommerce store as well. Therefore, you are not required to pay any money other than the cost of the domain in most cases, and you can get it at an affordable price from any service provider .
Or you can not buy a domain and rely on the IP provided to you by Amazon, but know that this service is suitable for you mostly for the purpose of learning or trying to purchase from a limited number of customers for a limited number of products and will not help you in building a huge online store.
Read also: How to get free WordPress hosting, its best providers, and its most prominent disadvantages
Create a free online store with professional hosting
The second option, which is the best one that I advise you to do for creating a free online store, is to get professional hosting at an affordable price and rely on the free WordPress and WooCommerce systems. This is an option in which you invest some money in exchange for more freedom in customization.
In this case, the expenses you bear are as follows:
- Hosting your website: starting from $5 per month
- Domain Name: Average $10 per year
- WordPress: Free
- WooCommerce: Free
- WordPress template: free
- WordPress Plugins: Free
You can rely on any hosting service provider through one of the reliable companies that we talked about the criteria for determining here , and after that you will be able to build the store with easy steps that we will explain to you.
For example, if you choose to rely on hosting from Digital Ocean to install WordPress on the hosting, you will have a ready-made WordPress site. You install WooCommerce and select the template and plugins necessary to have an online store.
If you perform the following steps to install WordPress on Droplet or install WordPress on any other hosting provider (you will find that the steps are very similar to installing WordPress with one click on hosting), you will be directed to the login page for the WP Admin control panel as follows: :
Then, after writing the login data, you will be transferred to the front end of the WordPress control panel, which we talked about in detail in the following illustrated guide , so that you can fully customize your online store.
These settings differ from one site to another depending on its template and its plugins, but the basic things will be the same on all sites. Do not rush, as you are still at the beginning 🙂
Now that you have obtained hosting and installed WordPress, you will move to the next stage, which is installing the WooCommerce add-on, which will help us review the products and customize them on the site.
WooCommerce installation and store customization
WordPress is an easy site management system that works by installing ready-made templates to customize the site’s appearance, as well as pre-configured add-ons to be able to manage the site’s functions without the need to write code. We will rely on the WooCommerce add-on, which is a ready-made add-on that helps you fully customize your store for free.
You can install the plugin from within the WordPress control panel. You will go to: Plugins << Add New, then you will type in the plugins search box (WooCommerce) and the plugin will appear as follows, then click on the ( Install Now) button as in the following image:
After installing the plugin, a new icon in the control panel will appear in the side menu of the WordPress control panel, which is the (WooCommerce) icon, below which there are other tabs that help you control the addition of products and analyze sales operations.
To add a new product, you will choose the (Products) tab , then the (Add a new product) tab to be able to publish your first product.
Also, through the addition, you can control many of your online store options, such as: payment methods, shipping products, and visitor analyses, as well as shipping options and controlling shipping prices and the areas to which products or goods are allowed to be shipped. And other important details.
These are the most important settings that you need to control in the WooCommerce plugin, including:
- Install the Woocommerce add-on
- Choose the appropriate WordPress template for your store
- Options provided by WooCommerce
- Shipping and delivery settings
- Payment and collection settings
- Add and customize the main and sub-sections of the store
- Preparing and configuring the online store and installing additions to protect, secure, and speed up the store.
We explained these important settings in detail in the article: WooCommerce Guide to Creating an Integrated Online Store – Step by Step
We advise you to read this guide, to learn how to professionally use the WooCommerce add-on, and all the settings required to fully customize your store, and we do not like to repeat these same steps again so that you do not get bored.
Thus, you can rely on the second method to create a free online store in exchange for a small investment in the price of hosting from one of the service providers, which is the middle option that we recommend to you.
Create a free online store through some platforms
There are some platforms that provide you with the service of creating a free online store to display your products, customize it 100% free, host your online store on their servers, and provide some tools that help you market your site.
Although these tools are attractive in that they can easily build, customize, and manage your store without paying any money, they will not help you create a professional online store as you imagine.
The advantages of these platforms vary from one platform to another depending on the advantages and disadvantages, but the disadvantages of these platforms do not appear to you immediately after publishing your store.
We are not saying that all free platforms are bad, nor are all paid platforms reliable for you to rely on. There are other criteria for evaluating the service. The free AWS service that we talked about at the beginning of the article may be better than some shared (paid) hosting, for example.
We are not offering comparisons here as much as we are explaining to you that we do not advise you to rely on these platforms in the beginning, and we have previously talked about: 17 reasons that prevent you from creating a free website and the disadvantages that companies hide from you .
We have mentioned this method because as you search the world of the web, you will find many platforms that offer you this service for free. We are not saying that all of these platforms are deceptive, but they will not provide you with the professional solutions that expect you to display your products. They provide you with temporary solutions that cannot be expanded unless Under the terms of the platform.
Therefore, we can say that the first and second methods are the best for you as a beginner in e-commerce, and you will inevitably need to increase your spending expenses if your business volume increases.
