Day-to-Day Tools for Small Ecommerce Businesses
For ecommerce entrepreneurs, managing and running an online store is intimidating, more so when they are just starting out. As an ecommerce platform, we at Zepo understand the mighty task not just running a successful online business but also ensuring that they are ahead of the game.This post today will give you a list of some of the best free tools that you can use on a day-to-day basis. These will help you manage your daily e-commerce activities single-handedly and without any technical knowledge. Be it creating banners on the fly or managing your social media activity use these free tools to power through your everyday to-do lists with ease.
1. Stock Free Images to Create Beautiful Banners and Social Media Posts: Be it for designing banners of your online store or those everyday social media posts, you can’t deny that ready images come in rather handy! Use stock images to your heart’s content without having to bother about infringing copyrights or giving due credit to its owner.
A. StockVault
B. SXC
C. Kavewall
E. FreeMediaGOO
For further reference: 50 sites to find free stock images
2. Image Editing Tools for Crisp & Clean Product Photos: Now that the images are taken of, the next step is editing your images. It may also be for editing your product photos to fill that little more light or crop out that extra background. Whatever jazz you want to add to your picks, these quick online editing tools will help you out.
A. Picasa
B. Pixlr
C. Aviary
D. Instagram
3. Batch Image Resizing Tools to Decrease Large Images to a Web-Friendly Size: The DSLRs that are popularly used today produce high quality large image files. And resizing all those images so that they are small enough for websites to load quickly is a pain in itself. But there is a rather easy way to resize all those 20 photos at one go – batch image resizing online tools.
A. Picasa
B. PicResize
C. JavaResizer
4. Pattern Designers for those Creative Backgrounds: The colour combination of the website is right but you don’t quite like the background. What do you do? Design one on your own if you’re hands-on with Photoshop. Or just go to one of these websites, pick a pattern of your choice, define the size that you want it in and download. Sorted.
B. Pattern8
C. ColorLovers
5. Banner Designing Tools to Ensure a Great First Impression: Banners are probably the most eye-catching and convincing content on an online store. And you sure don’t need to know Photoshop to create fantastic banners. Use these tools to help you create creative on the fly with minimal effort.
A. BannerFans
C. Banner.Fotor
6. Email Marketing Tools to Help you Increase Sales from your Current Customers: Frankly, you all have heard how important email marketing is to increase brand visibility and keep those sales coming. These 2 DIY tools have simplified email marketing. From amazing templates for newsletters to tracking every campaign, email marketing tools don’t get better than this.
A. TinyLetter
B. MailChimp
C. MadMimi
7. Social Media Management & Monitoring Tool to Stay Ahead of your Game: So the business is all setup and now it’s time for some social media indulgence to get the word out your amazing brand. There is Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+ to start. These tools can help you manage them all together, even schedule your posts and track mentions about your brand from all across the web.
A. TweetDeck
B. HootSuite
C. Mention
D. TwentyFeet
E. WildFire
8. Deciding a Catchy Domain Name for your Website: Thought of a trendy name for your online business? But how do you figure if the name you have zeroed in on available as a domain or not, and no one else has already bet you to it? Try these tools to find domain names of your choice or combinations of the same.
A. DomainTyper
B. Dot-O-Mator
C. NameMesh
9. To-Do Task Managers to manage your activities effectively: 12 new products need to be uploaded, 1 pick-up needs to be scheduled, a blog post needs to be written and a 100 other things. Phew! For keeping track of your own activities or assigning activities to some of the other team members, use these organizers to do it all.
A. Trello
B. To-Doist
C. Asana
About the author:
Tanya is part of Team Zepo, a start-up that helps small businesses start their own online stores easily. She writes about e-commerce trends and other resources that help small e-commerce businesses in India. You can read more of her posts on the Zepo blog.