Create a free online store through 3 ways

If you are interested in e-commerce and want to create a free online store, then this article has been dedicated to you to explain how to design a mobile online store to display products in front of potential customers without the need for previous technical experience or incurring more expenses. Rather, all explanation steps will be free from start to finish. the end. 

Certainly, 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 that you will rely on in creating your online store, you must know the basics on which the online store will be built, like any website building basics.

Whether you get it free or paid, these basics are a must, and they include:

1. Register a domain name to access your store, say www.example.com , which is a unique address visitors use to access your store
2. Web hosting where site files are stored, and you publish a site on the Web (or the technical environment on which the site will be built)
3. Website management system in order to facilitate the process of building the site (instead of coding it from scratch), and we mostly rely on the WordPress system
4. A system that helps you build the store and manage the products, and we mostly rely on the WooCommerce system

These basics must be available in any online store that can display its products to customers, and in this article we will talk about how to get 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.

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Create a free online store with Amazon Aws

The current trend in creating websites tends to use cloud hosting that charges you for consumption , as it is more secure and guarantees the performance of a site than other types of servers, and you can rely on one of these hostings to build your online store for free through one of the providers of this service, which is Amazon Aws services .

Amazon Services offers several types of plans with different names Ec2, S3, RDS to suit the needs of different business owners from using hosting, but you do not need to worry about these differences at the present time if you want to create a WordPress site.

You can get a free plan as described on the AWS Free Tier page by obtaining a portion of the service resources for free that expire automatically after a year or be continuous with you, and after these resources expire you will be required to upgrade to a paid plan.

Of course, you will not get these huge resources that bear a large number of visitors for free for life, but you will get the minimum resources that 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 app, as we explained in detail

Then, after obtaining hosting and installing WordPress, you will install the WooCommerce plugin, and thus you will have an online store ready for customers🙂

In this way, you will be able to get free hosting, the free WordPress system, and the free WooCommerce store as well, and 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 that Amazon offers you, but to know that this service works for you with the aim of mostly learning or buying experience from a limited number of customers for a limited number of products and it will not help you build a huge online store.

Also read: Ecommerce WordPress Themes – Best WooCommerce Themes In 2022

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Create a free online store with professional hosting

In the second option, which is the best that I advise you to do in order to create a free online store, it is to obtain professional hosting at an affordable price and rely on the free WordPress and WooCommerce systems, and in this option you invest some money in exchange for more freedom in customization.

In this case, the expenses incurred by you are as follows:

• Hosting your website: starting from $5 per month
• Domain name: $10 a year average
• WordPress: Free
• WooCommerce: Free
• WordPress theme: 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 then 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 hosting, you will have a ready-made WordPress site. You install WooCommerce and specify the template and plugins needed to have an online store.

If you have carried out the following steps to install WordPress on Droplet or you have installed WordPress on any other hosting provider (you will find that the steps are very similar for one-click installation of WordPress on hosting), you will be directed to the WP Admin login page 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 , through which you can fully customize your online store.

These settings differ from one site to another, according to its template and its accessories, but the basic things will be the same on all sites, and do not rush, as you are still in 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 and customize products on the site.

WooCommerce setup and store customization

The WordPress system is an easy site management system that works by installing ready-made templates to customize the appearance of the site, as well as pre-configured plugins to be able to manage the functionality of the site without the need to write code. We will rely on the WooCommerce plugin, which is a ready-made plugin 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) to show the plugin as follows, then press the ( Install Now) button as in the following image:

After installing the add-on, a new icon will appear in the side menu of the WordPress control panel, which is the (WooCommerce) icon, under which there are other tabs that help you control adding products and analyzing sales.

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 add-on, you can control many options of your online store, such as: payment methods, product shipments and visitor analytics, as well as shipping options and control of shipping rates and areas where products or goods are allowed to be shipped. And other important details.

These are the most important settings that you need to control in adding WooCommerce, and that includes:

• Woocommerce plugin installation 
• Choose the appropriate WordPress template for your store 
• Options offered by WooCommerce
• Shipping and delivery settings 
• Payment and collection settings
• Adding and customizing the main and sub-sections of the store
• Preparing and configuring the online store and installing add-ons to protect, secure and speed up the store. 

We have 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 did not like to repeat those same steps again so that you do not feel bored.

Thus, you can rely on the second method to create a free online store in exchange for a small investment in the hosting price from one of the service providers, which is the middle option that we recommend.

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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 and customize your products for 100% free of charge, hosting your online store on its own servers, and providing some tools that help you market your site.

Despite the attractiveness of these tools in terms of the ease of building, customizing and managing your store without paying any money, they will not help you create a professional online store as you imagine.

The advantages of these platforms differ from one platform to another according to the advantages and disadvantages, but the disadvantages of these platforms do not appear to you after publishing your store directly.

We do not say that all free platforms are bad and not all paid platforms are reliable 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 do not offer comparisons here as much as we show you that these platforms do not advise you to rely on them at first, and we have talked before that about: 17 reasons why you cannot create a free website and the disadvantages that companies hide from you .

We have referred to this method because during your search in the world of the web you will find many platforms that offer you this service for free, and we do not say that all these platforms are deceitful, except that they will not provide you with the professional solutions that expect you to display your products, as they provide you with temporary solutions that cannot be expanded except terms of the platform.

Thus, we can say that the first and second method is the best for you as a start in e-commerce, and you will need to increase spending expenses if your work volume increases.