How To Build A Free Website With Payment Options

While Square’s free plan is very generous, small business owners may need to upgrade to a paid plan as their business grows.

Square Online has the following pricing plans:

• Free: $0/month
• Performance: $29/month, billed annually
• Premium: $79/month, billed annually

The pricing above is for Square Online stores. You can integrate a Square Online store with free Square POS software, including Square For Retail, Square For Restaurants, and Square Appointments.

To sell in-person with a card reader (which will lower your payment processing fees), you’ll need the $49 Square card reader.

Related: Read our Square For Restaurants review to learn how to set up online ordering for your restaurants.

You’ll find the following features on the Square Online free plan:

• Free website builder with Square subdomain
• In-person selling capabilities with affordable Square POS hardware
• Online ordering for shipping, delivery, or in-store pickup
• Marketing and social media sales, including selling on TikTok and making shoppable Instagram posts
• Built-in inventory and shipping management
• Physical, digital, and subscription product sales
• Sales and coupon codes to run marketing campaigns
• Online forms so customers can fill out requests and contact your business
• Online appointment booking page (great for stylists, consultants, etc.)

Related: Read our Square Appointments review for more information on free appointment booking pages and other service-based business management features.

To accept payments, you must use Square Payments, the company’s in-house payment processor. You can accept debit/card cards, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Afterpay, and CashApp with Square.

You can accept payments in person with a card reader. Read our Square card reader review for more on how you can incorporate in-person selling into your eCommerce business.

Square contracts are straightforward and month-to-month, with a discount on annual contracts. There are no early termination fees, penalties, or hidden fees.

Note: There is a 30-day free trial on free plans, no credit card is required.

Shift4Shop offers a completely free plan for businesses that process at least $500/month through Shift4 Payments. If you process less than this amount, you’ll pay $29/month to use the Shift4Shop web builder.

Shift4 Payments offers custom payment processing fees for companies, and this payment processing model tends to be more expensive than flat-rate payment processing for smaller, newer businesses.

If you do not want to use Shift4 Payments, you can pay $29/month to use PayPal for accepting online payments.

Shift4Shop offers enterprise-level eCommerce store builder features, including the following:

• Free customizable website builder (with no Shift4Shop ads)
• Websites are SEO-driven, which means your site is more likely to get found in search results
• Free domain name (for the first year, then you are billed annually)
• One-page checkout, which makes checkout faster (and increases online sales)
• Physical item, digital download, subscription, print-on-demand, dropshipping, and gift certificate sales
• In-store pickup and delivery (with real-time delivery tracking)
• Sync products with sales channels like Amazon, eBay, Google, and Facebook
• Coupons, discounts, and reward points program
• Email marketing capabilities

Shift4, the company that owns Shift4Shop, also offers merchant services (Shift4 Payments) and hardware from Harbortouch. You can contact Shift4 for pricing on hardware purchases and leasing information (although Merchant Maverick typically does not recommend leasing, as you’ll end up paying more over time than if you purchase your POS equipment outright).

If you can’t afford to purchase point of sale equipment outright, read our post on equipment financing.

To take payments with Shift4Shop, you must sign up for a merchant account for at least a year and use the company’s built-in payment processor, which does not offer transparent flat-rate payment processing like Square does. Instead, the company offers interchange-plus payment processing and tiered payment processing. Neither payment processing model is suited for businesses with lower sales volumes (under $5000/month.)

Read our Shift4 Payments review to decide if this merchant services provider is right for your small business.

However, it is important to note that you must process at least $500/month with Shift4 Payments, the company’s in-house payment processor, to qualify for the free plan. Shift4 does not offer the most transparent payment processing fees, and unlike providers like Square, you get locked into long-term contracts with early termination fees.

Shift4Shop offers the End-to-End eCommerce plan, complete with enterprise-level eCommerce website builder features, on the condition that you process at least $500/month using Shift4 Payments, the company’s in-house payment processor.

Square also requires you to use its in-house payment processor, but Shift4 Payments doesn’t have the good reputation that Square has. Some Shift4 Payments customers have reported lengthy contracts, unexpected fees, and poor customer service, so make sure to read any contracts and test out the customer service for yourself before building an eCommerce site with Shift4Shop.

WordPress and WooCommerce are completely free to download and start working with. To get your website online, though, you’ll have to pay for web hosting. This can cost as little as $2/month or as much as $20/month, depending on your web hosting provider and the features you’re looking for. You may also need to pay for a custom domain.

There are free and paid WordPress plugins and WooCommerce extensions. Watch out for “free to install” integrations, as many of these integrations are free to download but cost money to start using with your WooCommerce store.

Note: The new Woo Express product costs $39-$70/month and may be worth it for an easier site installation and management process if you’re not very tech-savvy.

WooCommerce offers the following best free features:

• Drag-and-drop website builder with customizable CSS features
• Custom HTML and Javascript code embed
• Customizable product page blocks
• Several payment methods are supported, including in-person payments and buy-now-pay-later apps
• Social media sales integrations (TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, etc.)
• Free shipping management suite (with the option to pay to show customers real-time shipping calculations at checkout)
• Free custom inventory management and item tracking

Many free WordPress plugins are compatible with the WooCommerce eCommerce platform, but you should check to make sure different plugins work together before installing anything. With a WooCommerce-compatible plugin, you can start a blog, display an event calendar, show popups, start an email newsletter, and more.

To take payments with WooCommerce, you can integrate the software with WooCommerce Payments, which is backed by Stripe, a popular payment services provider. You can accept debit/credit cards, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.

From within the WooCommerce payments method dashboard, you can also enable payments by direct bank transfer, check, cash-on-delivery, and PayPal.

There are several free WooCommerce extensions available for payment methods such as Venmo, buy-now-pay-later apps such as Klarna and Affirm, Amazon Pay, and even cryptocurrency payment platforms.

WooCommerce software itself is free, but you must connect it to an existing WordPress site, and you will need to pay to host your WordPress site and for your domain.

Some WooCommerce and WordPress plugins are completely free, while others are “free to install” but then require a paid subscription. Read the fine print of add-ons before installing anything.

If you run into a problem with your WordPress site, we recommend uninstalling plugins until you find the one that is causing the problem.

With Odoo, you get one app for free, so you can get your eCommerce app without spending any money.

The paid plans are as follows:

• Standard: $31.10/user/month ($24.90/user/month with annual billing)
• Custom: $46.80/user/month ($37.40/user/month with annual billing)

With paid plans, you get access to all Odoo apps.

The best free Odoo features include:

• Free “.odoo” subdomain name and web hosting
• Create multiple free websites under one account
• Add product star ratings, customer reviews, and one-click buy buttons on single product pages
• Add related products under products based on a user’s previously viewed items or recently
• Built-in blog, social media profile connector, share button, donate button, and contact forms
• Popup page to display discounts, coupons, and upcoming events
• Service and recurring subscription sales capabilities
• No huge Odoo branding on web pages
• Create custom orders and invoices

With the extremely affordable paid Odoo subscription, there are over 1,000 Odoo add-on apps available to you. Some of the most useful apps for small business owners include:

• Real-time shipping calculations from UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL Express, and more
• In-person point of sale app
• Extensive inventory management, from manufacturing to delivery
• Odoo SMS and email marketing modules (with no contact limitations)
• Accounting, including invoice, vendor billing, and financial reports

Once your business grows, you may need employee management features like time clocks and HR management, which are also available within the huge library of Odoo apps.

To take payments with Odoo, you can directly connect to Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Authorize.net, Amazon Payment Services, and some international payment providers.

Odoo is extremely flexible. There are no contract requirements or early termination fees if you use only one Odoo cloud app. You only need your name and email address to sign up for one app.

However, once you install more than one app or use advanced functions that you need another app for, you’ll have to get a paid subscription.

Note: There is a free 15-day trial on paid subscriptions with no credit card required, so you can try adding extra apps within the trial period. If you don’t remove extra apps/paid features before your trial period is up, your website will be locked and you will be prompted to subscribe to get that information back.

Finally, since Odoo is so customizable, some users may find it a little overwhelming to set up at first.

Freewebstore offers the following pricing plans:

• Community: $0/month
• Startup: $20/month
• Pro: $65/month
• Ridge: $250/month

If you make a sale through an abandoned cart email, you’ll pay 2%-5% of the order value to Freewebstore.

You’ll have to pay for a domain on the Community plan, but you’ll get a free domain with paid plans. Freewebstore will host your website for free.

These are the best free Freewebstore features:

• Abandoned cart saver emails (Freewebstore takes a cut of successful sales if customers buy through the cart saver email)
• 10 free automated review email invites per month
• Customizable order completion and order dispatch emails
• Google Analytics, Google Shopping, Facebook Shop, Facebook Pixel, and social media profile integrations
• Allow customers to choose which language and currency they’ll see your website in
• Custom domestic and international shipping rules
• Order status notifications and tracking codes from shipping carriers

The affordable paid plans include social media selling on places like TikTok and Pinterest, plus multiple payment gateway integrations so customers have their choice of payment method.

On the free plan, you can integrate your eCommerce store with one payment gateway to accept payments. Freewebstore integrates with several, including PayPal and Stripe.

On paid plans, you can integrate with 45+ payment gateways.

Freewebstore has no early termination fees and even offers refunds if you cancel a paid plan early.