Tools to Run a Small E-Commerce Business

A small e-commerce business owner can take on many jobs — from marketing, sales, human resources, information technology, and development. This can be overwhelming for many small business owners. Fortunately, there are some terrific online tools to help you perform just about any company task. Below, we’ve compiled a list of online tools to help you run a small e-commerce business. All of these tools are relatively inexpensive, and a few are even free. If your favorite one isn’t listed, be sure to include it in our comments below.

1. Slack

Slack is an internal messaging app for your team. It features real-time messaging, file sharing, one-to-one and group conversations, online images and video, rich link summaries, and integration with services you use every day. You can get a free account for 5 integrations and 10k message searchable archive. The paid plans start at $6.67 per user per month.

2. Asana

Asana is a tool for team tasks and conversations. You can organize your tasks into shared projects for your initiatives, meetings, and lists. This way, you can keep conversation with tasks, instead of scattered across e-mails. This helps you visualize your team’s goals and milestones with calendars and dashboards. And, you can get started for free. Paid plans start at $21 per month for 5 users.

3. Wave

Wave offers a platform of financial applications, for small e-commerce businesses with nine employees or less. The tools include: invoicing, accounting, payroll, payments, and more. To get started, accounting, invoicing, receipts, and personal finance applications are free. The payroll application starts at $9 per month, and the payments application is 30 cents plus 2.9 percent per transaction.

4. Insightly

Insightly is a customer-relationship management system for small e-commerce businesses. It helps you manage contacts, organizations, partners, vendors, and suppliers. This tool allows you to see everything about your contacts — including their background, email history, important dates, and projects in which they’ve participated. Insightly also incorporates project management features, such as creating tasks and milestones, automated reminders, project views, and event reports. It’s free up to three users. The standard plan is $7 per user per month.

5. Trello

Trello is a collaboration tool to organize projects. It uses boards, lists, and cards to create projects and develop your workflow. You can create lists filled with cards, used with a team or by you. It allows you to drag and drop cards, and reorder as needed. Therefore, you can follow your project as the board updates in real time. Better yet, it’s free. Premium plan is $5 per user per month.