No matter how much you may want to, there is no way you can run an ecommerce store completely on your own. While you may have to start out that way in terms of team members, thankfully there are tons of tools available to use that will help you manage and run every aspect of your store. From graphics programs to marketing tools, analytics measurement, dropshipping, customer service, and social media management, there are endless options out there to help you out.
Once you realize there are so many choices out there, the problem then becomes determining which tools are best. To help you out, we came up with a list of the 40 best marketing tools that you need to be using. Every one is labeled below with whether it is genuinely free, has a permanent free tier, offers a trial only, or is paid, along with what the free tier actually gets you. A good number of these cost nothing at all.
Visuals
Your brand needs good visuals in order to be successful. At this point, that should pretty much be a given. However, producing those visuals can sometimes be a challenge. Here are some tools that will help you out.
- Canva – Canva is a great design tool that will help you create stunning visuals for your website and social media pages. There are plenty of templates to choose from, or you can design something completely from scratch. What’s great about this tool is its easy-to-use system and helpful sizing guides for designing things like Facebook cover photos.
Free tier · Permanent free plan. 50 AI credits/month, shared across every AI feature. Pro adds brand kit and premium stock.
- Piktochart –
Free tier · Permanent free plan. Unlimited projects, 100MB storage, 2 PNG downloads/month, watermarked exports.
Image Credit(s): Piktochart
If you are looking to put together an infographic (heads up: people love infographics and are 3 times more likely to share and like them than other types of visual content) Piktochart is the way to go. Their wide variety of professional grade templates are easy to work with and incredibly customizable.
- StockSnap.io – Finding quality stock photography can be a huge hassle, especially when trying to navigate copyright laws and attribution requirements. While there are plenty of websites you can use where you pay for your images, if you are a new ecommerce brand you might not have the budget for that. StockSnap.io provides a huge database of high quality stock photos that are completely free, and attribution isn’t required. Hundreds of new photos are added every week, making this a great resource for finding quality images for blog posts and other visual content for your brand.
Free · Entirely free. No account, no attribution required, unlimited downloads.
- PlaceIt –
Free trial · No permanent free tier. Free previews are watermarked, downloads need a subscription.
Image Credit(s): PlaceIt
PlaceIt specializes in what we’re calling “customizable stock photography.” They provide stock images of iPhones, tables, laptops, banners, brochures, apparel, and more, and allow you to insert your own visual (such as your logo, app layout, or website). This is a great way to produce professional looking marketing material without having to hire a designer or learning how to Photoshop the images yourself.
- Awesome Screenshot – If you need to produce product demos, Awesome Screenshot will be a great tool for you. This program lets you take screenshots and edit them without ever leaving your browser. Add arrows, circle relevant items, and more to enhance your screenshots with ease.
Free tier · Permanent free plan. 100 screenshots and 20 recordings, capped at 720p.
- Photoshop – Finally, Photoshop is always a great tool for creating or editing images. While there are plenty of technical features you might not know how to use, there are also tons of basic editing tools that will help you enhance your photos. Additionally, there are tons of tutorials online on how to use Photoshop and all its elements, making it a great program to invest in. A free alternative to Photoshop is Linearity Curve, the vector design app formerly called Vectornator.
Paid · No free tier. Photography plans start around $9.99/month. Linearity Curve, below, is the free alternative.
Marketing
You might have the best product and best website, but if no one knows about it, there’s no point. Properly marketing your brand to your target audience, and then additionally following up and retargeting the right people, segmenting your emails, posting your blogs, determining keywords- it can get overwhelming. That’s where these tools will come into play and help you out.
- Aimtell –
Free trial · 14-day free trial, no credit card. Paid plans start at $49/month for up to 10,000 push subscribers.
Image Credit(s): Aimtell
Web push notifications are quickly becoming one of the best ways to interact with your customers. We’ve already discussed the benefits of web push notifications (which you can read here) but we couldn’t compile a list of marketing tools without mentioning them. With Aimtell, you can send push notifications for just about anything, including shipping notifications, discount offers, cart abandonment, or based on certain target demographics. The options are endless, and the results are impressive. If you would like to start using web push notifications, you can get started in just 5 minutes. See Aimtell pricing for how the plans scale with your subscriber count once the trial ends.
- WordPress – Blogging is still a great way to interact with your customers, expand your audience, boost SEO, and more. And when it comes to blogging, WordPress is the gold standard. With plenty of free options to use, you can get a blog up and running quickly and at no cost. With tons of plugins, you can make your blog (or website) as detailed as you want.
Free · The WordPress software is free and open source. You pay only for hosting and any premium themes or plugins.
- Mailchimp – If WordPress is the standard for blogging, MailChimp is the standard for emailing. Email remains an effective method of marketing (when done properly), and MailChimp is a great tool for creating, sending, and analyzing your email campaigns.
Free tier · Free plan cut in January 2026 to 250 contacts and 500 sends/month, and automations are no longer included.
- Reply –
Free trial · 14-day free trial. Multichannel plans start at $99/user/month.
Image Credit(s): Reply
“Cold emailing” is hardly an effective way to increase your sales, as people today are very wary of automated messages. However, with a tool like Reply, you can personalize your messages and set up a schedule for when to send them. Emailing can take you hours each day, so a tool like this can help to handle this for you, while still keeping things personal so that your customers remain happy.
- Google Ads – Google remains a great place to turn to for marketing your ecommerce store, as people still use the search engine all the time to discover new products and brands. With Google Adwords you can set up campaigns based on your target demographics and keywords, and being a pay-per-click (PPC) set up, you will only pay for actual results.
Paid · No free tier, you pay per click. The Keyword Planner is free with an account, which is useful on its own.
- Optimizely – Optimizely is all about A/B testing, and is a great resource when creating your website. Set up A/B testing with ease and determine what setup will provide you the greatest conversion rate. We like that this tool allows you to run A/B tests for your website and your mobile app, all in one place.
Paid · No free tier. The old free Starter plan was retired in 2018 and pricing is now quote-only.
- Customer.io – Customer.io is another automated messaging platform that will save you tons of time when it comes to contacting customers. Set up automated messages based on a variety of situations, create segmented lists, track your success, and more.
Free trial · 14-day free trial. Plans start at $100/month. Startups that have raised under $10M may qualify for a free year.
- OptiMonk – Use this tool if you want to target your customers right before they leave your website. Instead of running the risk of a user visiting your site and never returning, create an onsite retargeted message before they leave.
Free tier · Permanent free plan. 10,000 pageviews/month on 1 domain, with unlimited campaigns and A/B testing.
Social Media
While social media is clearly part of marketing, it has become such an important and large aspect of marketing (especially for ecommerce brands) that we broke it out into its own section of helpful tools. Properly leveraging the power of social media is one of the best ways to help scale your business, but it can easily take up a lot of your time if you’re doing everything on your own.
- Hootsuite – There are tons of social media platforms out there and managing them all can be incredibly time consuming. Hootsuite is a great program that gathers all of your social platforms into one place. Post updates, monitor your feeds, schedule posts, and more. Hootsuite currently works with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, WordPress, and YouTube.
Free trial · Free plan retired in March 2023. 30-day trial only, then plans start at $99/month.
- Facebook Ads –
Paid · No free tier, you pay per impression or click. Creating a Business Manager account is free.
Image Credit(s): Facebook
Of course, what list of social media tools would be complete without listing actual tools present through social media? First off are Facebook ads, which are incredibly useful for targeting and acquiring new customers based on various demographics and targeting features that you set up when creating your ads. Overall they are fairly cost effective as well, which is great for new ecommerce sites that don’t have a large marketing budget.
- Instagram Ads – If your ecommerce store specializes in very visual products (say a clothing line for example) Instagram ads will be an effective tool for you to use. The focus of the ads on this platform are the visuals (as is true for the rest of the content on Instagram), giving you a great opportunity to gain new customers through stunning visuals- either in the form of images or videos.
Paid · No free tier, billed through the same Meta ad account as Facebook Ads.
- X Ads – Twitter is the last of the big three social networks that has its own native advertising program. Twitter is a great way to connect with your audience, and promoted tweets can help broaden your audience and gain more followers.
Paid · No free tier, you pay per engagement. Formerly Twitter Ads.
- ClickToTweet – This tool turns your content into a tweet in an instant. All users have to do is click to tweet and the content you selected will automatically be inserted into their Twitter status box. Use this for short quotes or words of wisdom that you think people will want to share. The tweet will also contain a link that you will be able to track over time.
Free · Free to create and share tweet links, including basic click tracking.
- CapCut – Short-form video is where most social reach lives now, and CapCut is the editor most creators reach for. Templates, auto-captions and background removal are all included, and the output is sized for TikTok, Reels and Shorts without extra work. (This entry replaces Hang w/, the live video app originally listed here, which has since shut down.)
Free tier · Permanent free plan covering most editing features. Pro adds premium effects and cloud storage.
- AdEspresso – If you aren’t having success with your Facebook ads, you need to consider AdEspresso. This tool lets you A/B test thousands of Facebook ad variants, ensuring you will be able to increase your conversion rates.
Free trial · 14-day free trial. Paid plans start around $49/month.
- Instafeed – Pulling real customer photos from Instagram onto your product pages is still one of the cheapest ways to add social proof, and Instafeed is the best-supported way to do it on Shopify. Feeds are shoppable and update on their own. (This entry replaces AuthentiPix, which was removed from the Shopify App Store in January 2026.)
Free tier · Permanent free plan for a single feed. Paid plans add shoppable tagging and multiple feeds.
- Mention – If you are on social media (scratch that: we know you are) you need to be using Mention in order to monitor what people are saying about your brand. With millions of active users on multiple social media platforms, there is no way you can go through yourself and see what everyone is saying about you. Mention will do all the work for you, and allows you to respond, favorite, like, and retweet all within the program.
Paid · Self-serve tiers were discontinued in July 2025. One plan remains, from $599/month on an annual contract.
- Buzzsumo – Our final social media tool we are mentioning is Buzzsumo. This is a great tool for coming up with ideas for new content for your blog. Use this tool to determine what content is popular at the moment, as well as who is interacting with similar content. With this information you can find a new potential audience, and use the content as inspiration for new articles you can create.
Free tier · Free plan capped at 10 searches/month. Paid plans start at $199/month.
Analytics
You’re going to make mistakes with your business, and that’s okay. That is one of the many reasons analytics tools are out there. These tracking tools will show you exactly what is working for your business, and what isn’t. Learn from your mistakes, keep doing what is working well, and you’ll be well on your way.
- Google Analytics – We’ve said it before, Google is incredibly popular. You know you want to focus your attention on ranking highly on their search results, and with Google Analytics you can also measure other things such as how many people are visiting your website, bounce rates, and more.
Free · GA4 is free at the volumes almost every site operates at. Analytics 360 is the paid enterprise tier.
- Social Media analytics – All of the popular social media platforms have their own individual analytics tools, and you would be a fool to not use them. These tools are tailored to the individual platforms and can help you understand how your audience is interacting with your content in the social media sphere.
Free · Native analytics on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and Pinterest are free with a business account.
- Albacross –
Free trial · 14-day free trial, no permanent free plan. Paid plans start around EUR 59/month.
Image Credit(s): Albacross
Albacross – a B2B lead generation service, shows you what companies have been on your site, which pages they’ve been to, where they spent the most time, etc. Basically, it’s a user-friendly tool that gives you all of the necessary data on each unknown organization interested in your business including their size, revenue, industry, demographics, and the ways they can be contacted. As a result, Albacross service lets you get to know all your prospects, their interests, and business-related data, which in turn will help you to convert traffic into actual sales.
- Moz – Moz is a great analytics tool for comparing your website with competitors’ sites with regards to keyword ranking. You can also monitor other SEO related topics like mobile ranking and link opportunities. A feature we love is that you can have Moz crawl your site to determine if there are any SEO problems present that might be damaging your ranking capabilities.
Free tier · Free community account includes MozBar and roughly 10 SERP queries/day. Moz Pro starts at $49/month.
- KISSmetrics –
Free trial · Free trial only, no permanent free plan.
Image Credit(s): KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics is all about measuring your traffic and determining where your audience is coming from. With this information you are well equipped to target this audience in order to further expand and grow your business as a whole.
Business Management
There is a lot of behind the scenes work that goes into running a business, and while all of that is important, it can be very time consuming. Project management tools can help you stay on top of everything, because unfortunately, running a business isn’t solely comprised of creating a fantastic product and telling people about it. That alone would be difficult enough, but you also have to deal with accounting and finances, legal issues, taxes, shipping, and more. These tools should help make your life a little bit easier when it comes to these issues.
- Streak – Their website states that their mission is to “run your entire business from your inbox.” With their software system, you are able to do just that. This program integrates with Gmail, making for an easy transition when getting started. Instead of having multiple programs to help run your CRM, you can instead do it all right from your email.
Free tier · Free plan for solo use, capped at 500 boxes and 50 mail merges/day. Pro starts at $59/user/month.
- inDinero –
Paid · No free tier. Accounting and tax services are quoted per business.
Image Credit(s): inDinero
Messing up your accounting and financing information is definitely not a mistake you want to be making, no matter how small your ecommerce business may be. Instead, it is worth paying for a tool, like inDinero, that will take care of that for you. With this tool, you have people (who know what they’re doing) taking care of your finances, transactions, and even your tax filings.
- Zirtual – If you feel like you are stretched too thin, consider using Zirtual to hire a virtual personal assistant to help with any tasks you need. By hiring someone to handle the tedious tasks you don’t want to take care of, you will have more time and energy to devote to the other aspects of your business that need attention.
Paid · No free tier. Dedicated assistant plans are billed monthly by hours.
- Wiser – A lot of focus on running an ecommerce business is on developing the right product, creating a solid marketing plan, finding the proper target audience, and having the perfect website. All of these are important, but something often overlooked is the pricing of your items. With Wiser, you can determine what your competitors are charging in order to help determine what your pricing should be.
Paid · No free tier. Price monitoring is quoted by catalog size.
- ShipStation – It is crucial that your items are successfully delivered to your customers, but handling that on your own is a lot to take on. ShipStation will take care of all of your shipping needs for your business, and is the #1 choice amongst online sellers.
Free trial · 30-day free trial. Paid plans start around $9.99/month for low shipment volumes.
- Signifyd –
Paid · No free tier. Priced as a percentage of protected orders.
Image Credit(s): Signifyd
No one wants to think about fraud protection, but you need to when it comes to your ecommerce business. With a tool like Signifyd, you don’t have to worry about paying a chargeback, and they offer a 100% fraud protection guarantee.
Customer Service
This final set of tools is all about what should always be your number 1 focus: your customers. Without customers, you don’t have a business. Keeping customers happy, and hopefully retaining them, is vital to the success of your business.
- Zendesk – Zendesk is the go-to tool for a complete customer service support system. Handle customer complaints over the phone, via email, or with live chat (more on that next). They also have their own analytics tools to help determine if the support you are providing your customers is working well or if you need to make some changes.
Free trial · 14-day free trial. Suite plans start around $19/agent/month.
- Intercom – Intercom is hands down one of the best live chat tools out there. Live chat has become the best option for customer support in recent years and not only does Intercom make it extremely simple to add chat to your site, but they provide a great user experience for your visitors at the same time.
Free trial · 14-day free trial. Plans start around $29/seat/month.
- ReferralCandy – People love rewards, so consider offering some type of referral rewards program. ReferralCandy makes it easy for you to set up a refer-a-friend system, and the company handles all of the work for you. Users receive a custom referral code that they share with their friends, and in return they get a reward of your choosing, such as a discount code.
Free trial · No permanent free plan. Plans start at $39/month plus a commission on referred sales.
- Smile.io (formerly Sweet Tooth) –
Free tier · Permanent free plan covering points and referrals for smaller stores. Paid tiers add VIP tiers and branding control.
Image Credit(s): Smile.io
If you wish to offer a full-fledged rewards program, consider using Smile.io, which is what Sweet Tooth was renamed to in 2017. With this tool you can set up your own rewards program quickly and easily. Customize the program however you like, and Smile.io will do all the work to keep things maintained. Offer rewards based on purchases, social shares, referrals, and more.
- Yotpo – Finally, don’t underestimate the power of customer reviews on your website. People don’t always trust brands and advertising, but instead are more likely to trust what other customers are saying. Use a tool like YotPo to set up a customer review service for your website. This tool makes it easy for customers to leave reviews for products they purchase, especially with their feature that allows you to automatically email a review request once a user makes a purchase.
Free tier · Free starter tier for reviews. Loyalty referrals require the Pro plan at $199/month.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best free marketing tools?
For most teams the strongest genuinely free options on this list are Google Analytics for measurement, Canva for visuals, StockSnap.io for stock photography, OptiMonk for on-site conversion, and the native analytics built into each social platform. All five are free at the volumes a small or mid-sized site operates at, rather than being trials that expire. WordPress belongs in the same group: the software itself is free and open source, and you pay only for hosting.
Are free marketing tools worth using?
Yes, with one caveat. Free tiers are usually capped on the dimension that grows with your business, such as contacts, pageviews, searches or seats. That is fine while you are small, and several tools on this list never need to be upgraded. The thing to check before you commit is how painful the migration will be once you outgrow the cap, because a tool that holds your subscriber list or historical analytics is far harder to leave than one that does not.
Which marketing tools have a permanent free plan?
On this list, Canva, Piktochart, Awesome Screenshot, Linearity Curve, Mailchimp, OptiMonk, Buzzsumo, Moz, Streak, CapCut, Instafeed, Smile.io and Yotpo all offer a plan that does not expire, alongside the fully free tools named above. The limits vary a lot, though, and they move. Mailchimp halved its free plan in January 2026 to 250 contacts and 500 sends per month and dropped automations from it, and Hootsuite retired its free plan altogether in 2023. Check the current limit before you build a process around one.
Wrapping Up
There you have it. 40 must have digital marketing tools. What do you think? Are there any we missed or do you have any experience with one of them?
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