6 Course preselection
Classroom project webshop software
Preselected candidate solutions for building for free your own webshop
- You may propose something else
- You have to decide yourself which one you will use.
- It's not a matter of picking "the best one". Be accurate in registering the stengths and weaknesses.
Classroom project candidate webshops
The e-webshop’s proposed here are candidates you can use for your class-project.
They have NOT been selected because they are the greatest e-commerce applications. If going for a real project later on, you will have to use other criteria then the ones we used here – which are pure practical considerations to let it work at no cost and without ICT team support in a class context.
- A ‘free’ version should be available. Free is actually never free...in case you would want to use this later on professionally
- Public cloud flavor: we don’t want to bother with server infrastructure, hosting e-commerce software, managing webservers – so only a ready for use solution is an option – a one stop solution.
- No ICT skills required. It should not be necessary to have HTML / CSS knowledge to build the e-webshop
Introduction
To build your prototype website, webshop for this course, we will be using easy to use, public cloud website/webshop builders.
Choose from below preselection. You can choose what you want. Take in account of course what you want to achieve. Before you start, make sure you understand the limitations related to each choice you make. In case your productselection limits what you wanted to achieve, you bypass this by providing the design for that or you build non functional screen examples.
For example, if the webshop you select can only have 5 products in the free version, you implement those as examples as well as you can, and you provide in your design a detailed design of the product catalog structure as it should be in an ideal world.
Suggested Products
Weebly
Website:
Read the product reviews at:
- Overall reviews:
https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/reviews/weebly/our-review
https://www.websitetooltester.com/en/reviews/weebly-review/ - e-commerce aspects review: https://www.websitetooltester.com/en/reviews/weebly-review/online-store/
Features overview
Understand the limitations of the free version:
Warning: at this moment (2110/2015) the dutch version of the pricesheet mentions 5 products max in e-commerce for the free version, whereas the english version of this page has a blank, so gives the impression e-commerce is not avialable. Test this out to check if indeed there is a different sales & pricing strategy depending on countries.
Demo & training suggestions
- Generic manual / help / index: https://hc.weebly.com/hc/en-us
- Specifics on e-commerce and setting up a webshop: https://hc.weebly.com/hc/en-us/sections/200282928-Commerce
Jimdo

Website
Read the product reviews at:
Overall reviews:
https://www.websitetooltester.com/en/reviews/jimdo-review/
https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/reviews/jimdo/our-review
https://www.websitetooltester.com/en/reviews/jimdo-review/
https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/reviews/jimdo/our-review
Specific e-commerce overview: https://www.websitetooltester.com/en/reviews/jimdo-review/online-store/
Understand the limitations of the free version:
Have a look at following chart to understand the limitations in the domain of SEO, number of products in your catalog, etc. when going for this product
Demo & training suggestions
Specific on e-commerce: https://support.jimdo.com/store/store-setup-guide
Wix

Read the product reviews at:
- Overall reviews:
https://www.websitetooltester.com/en/reviews/wix-review/
https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/reviews/wix/our-review
https://www.top10bestwebsitebuilders.com/reviews/wix - Specific e-commerce overview: https://www.websitetooltester.com/en/reviews/wix-review/online-store/
Understand the limitations of the free version:
Have a look at following chart to understand the limitations in the domain of SEO, number of products in your catalog, etc. when going for this product.
Although in the free version you can't have a webshop working, you can actually set it up - the only thing which will not work is the shopping basket check-out process. So this makes this one actually a good choice for your prototype. (Please double check if this is still the case, this was the situation in 2014 before their new major software release !)
Demo & training suggestions
- https://www.wix.com/support/html5/
- Specific on e-commerce: https://www.wix.com/support/html5/wixstores/