The Best Free Website Builder: Your Online Business Card

Ease of Use

Weebly is an excellent website builder for beginners. You don’t need to be skilled in building websites, and you don’t need a background in HTML, CSS or design to build an eCommerce website. The platform enables users to sell both physical and digital assets and boasts a drag-and-drop system that allows you to add items smoothly.

Pricing Plans and Payment Methods

Weebly is the perfect choice for those looking to create a store with a cheap website builder that has a proven track record. The vendor created several pricing plans that are designed for small businesses, startups and reputable companies. The plans include a variety of tools and features for building an eCommerce store. The main strength of this platform is the affordability of its basic plan that costs only $12 per month. With this plan, users get a free domain and a $100 credit on Google ads.

When it comes to payment methods, a Square account automatically connects to the Square Online Store, and users are not required to set up or install anything. Payments can also be made through PayPal.

Designs and Templates

Weebly eCommerce offers stunning themes for creating captivating storefronts. The library is loaded with a variety of elements including texts, maps, images and videos that can be used to customize your domain. The drag-and-drop system gives you the ability to add these elements immediately.

Additional features for website customization make Weebly one of the best eCommerce sites. For example, you can add free Weebly video files or upload your own onto the background of your website. The dynamic elements polish up the look of the website and can attract more clients. They’re definitely worth investing your time into them.

SEO and Marketing Tools

Weebly provides useful SEO tools that can help you improve the visibility of your eCommerce website and reach your clients faster. Once you customize your theme and add your business list, you can start with Search engine optimization by adding tags into the description for each product. You can also optimize each of the videos you created, so your products are visible on YouTube.

One particularly attractive aspect for businesses comes with Weebly’s tools for creating branded gift cards. The shop builder is equipped with countless features for designing unique cards to attract your buyers. This is a great way to improve sales even if your store is lacking new products on the list.

Sales Features

Weebly allows you to organize and manage your product inventory with relative ease. The platform recently updated a feature that also makes it possible for users to import products on their website. Moreover, Weebly Team designed a tool for exporting all products into a comma-separated values file. Now, you can make changes to your inventory and share data across other platforms. Also, users no longer need an internet connection to track products in their store. The platform allows you to streamline all products at any time from your desktop or mobile device.

Weebly is the best website platform thanks in part to its robust set of tools for managing inventory and improving sales. With just a few clicks, you can send your customers different notifications like “only 1 left” and help boost the number of purchases. These tools can also be used to automatically inform clients when an item is no longer available.

However, this website builder has a number of shortcomings. Although it is equipped with advanced sales tools, the platform doesn’t allow you to sell products on the most important social networking sites including Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest. Many businesses may see this as a significant disadvantage since social media platforms are a great place to get shares, promote events, advertise and sell products.

The Ucraft website builder is an exceptional tool that lets you play with various high-quality templates without breaking a sweat. You start things off by choosing the layout you want from more than 80 completely functional layouts.

The list is constantly being improved and expanded, so if you still haven’t found your perfect design, just give it some time. The editor itself is fairly simple to use. You just stack blocks on top of each other. Even if you haven’t had a chance to use this type of technology before, Ucraft’s drag-and-drop website builder will quickly get you up and running.

To make things quicker, all of the templates have built-in features based on the industry you’ve chosen. They seem to be image-heavy, so make sure you have a good way of visually presenting your business. While this can seem a bit limiting, there’s really nothing stopping you from starting your website from scratch.

The free plan includes some basic elements like images, paragraphs, and buttons. The slightly more advanced elements like buttons for sharing, maps, forms, and carts are locked behind a paid subscription. That being said, Ucraft offers a lot of interesting features for no additional charge. For example, you can control what your users see based on their geolocation, device, page, or even current session.

SEO comes down to filling out titles, descriptions, and other basic meta parameters. You can keep track of your visits through Google Analytics as there is no built-in analytics tool.

One amazing tool you get completely free of charge is Ucraft’s logo maker. Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean that you’re getting an inferior product. The tool is easy to use and can help you come up with some solid designs.

Switching to a paid subscription plan is a great move if you want to get all the small business features out of it. The $10-a-month price is almost nothing considering that you also get everything you need to set up an eCommerce site.

Constant Contact is a household name in email marketing and CRM software for small businesses. The company was launched in 1995 and has since joined the Endurance International Group, an IT services giant with over five million clients worldwide. They offer some of the best CRM systems for small business owners currently available on the market, but it can get pretty expensive for larger companies with lots of clients.

Main Features

Constant Contact is primarily an email creation and automation service, but its CRM products also include excellent contact and event management tools, eCommerce and reporting features, and great third-party integrations.

Starting with contacts, you can easily import them from productivity and email services such as G Suite and Outlook. You can also sort through them using multiple filters or employ interest tags to track their interests and tailor advertising campaigns accordingly. It’s possibly the best CRM system for small business owners that want a hands-off approach to email marketing, allowing automation of several tasks such as tracking emailing list unsubscribers or bounced mails and sending automated email replies.

The handy drag and drop interface of the software allows you to create much more than emails. There are templates for social media content, advertisements, surveys, landing pages, events, and even online storefronts.

Real-time data reports can help you track all sent, bounced, opened, and clicked emails. Meanwhile, eCommerce features such as cart abandonment notifications and purchase confirmations help you track how well your products are doing. While it may not be the best CRM software for small businesses when it comes to third-party app integrations, there are over 20 integrations with popular platforms such as Facebook, G Suite, Outlook, WordPress, and QuickBooks.

User Experience

Everything from the registration process to creating campaigns, surveys, events, or even websites and online storefronts is a simple and intuitive process, with plenty of help available if you need it. The web interface is mobile-friendly, but you can also choose dedicated smartphone and tablet apps, which are very well designed for both Android and iOS systems.

A lot of CRM reviews for small business-oriented solutions point to issues with customer support, and we’ve seen this with Zoho and HubSpot. Unfortunately, similar problems plague Constant Contact, as customer support can be especially slow to respond to emails. On the upside, you can also reach customer service by phone or live chat, and there are also excellent community forums available.

Pricing

Unlike some of its competitors, Constant Contact offers no free plans. The best you can hope for is a 30-day free trial on one of the two offered packages.

The cheaper Email plan costs anywhere between $20 and $335 per month, depending on the number of contacts you have (from 500 to 50,000), while the Email Plus plan starts at $45.

From a small business CRM comparison standpoint, at over 10,000 clients you are better off using the Email Plus plan, as the prices for both plans even out by that point. You’ll get all of the features from the basic Email plan plus email automation and advanced eCommerce and marketing tools.

Finally, you can get a 10% discount by paying six months in advance, 15% if you pay annually, and 30% if you run a nonprofit organization.