Starting an e-commerce business has never been this easy. Ten years ago, opening an online store meant hiring a software developer, renting servers and going through months of development. Now you can set up a working online store in a single evening. But choosing the right tools is still critical, because the wrong choices can cost you dearly down the road.
In this post, I'll share the best tools for every stage of an e-commerce business, based on our real experience. We've run two different e-commerce projects and tested dozens of tools.
Website and Store
First, the online store itself. There are two main approaches: a ready-made e-commerce platform or a custom solution with no-code.
Webflow is the best option for those who want a custom design. With its e-commerce feature, you can fully customize both your store and your site. A client of ours sold handmade jewelry and wanted a custom design that would tell the brand story. With Webflow, we built both an impressive brand site and a functional store.
Softr is a very fast solution for a simple product catalog and order system. You can keep the product list in Airtable and build the interface with Softr.
Payment System
Stripe is the most reliable way to accept online payments. It supports credit card, debit card and digital wallet payments. It's easy to integrate and its security standards are very high.
Lemon Squeezy is perfect if you sell digital products. For digital products like e-books, courses and software licenses, it manages tax calculation, invoicing and delivery automatically.
An acquaintance of mine sells online courses and uses Lemon Squeezy. He sells from Turkey, the US and Europe, and Lemon Squeezy automatically handles each country's tax rules. Doing this manually would be a nightmare.
Marketing and Customer Acquisition
In e-commerce, listing a product isn't enough; you need to attract customers.
Build an SEO strategy with Semrush or Ahrefs. Find out what people are searching for and optimize your product pages accordingly. Organic traffic will be your most valuable traffic source in the long run.
Mailchimp is the gold standard for e-commerce email marketing. Cart reminders, product recommendations and campaign announcements are sent automatically. A client of ours recovered 15 percent of abandoned carts thanks to cart reminder emails. That's a serious revenue boost.
Manage social media with Buffer or Later. Post product photos, customer reviews and campaign announcements regularly. Consistency is the most important factor on social media.