Free Business Software Anyone? Free Software: Seek and Ye Shall Find James Maguire
The old proverb says "Seek, and ye shall find," and that's certainly true of free software. You might ask: why is it free? In many cases, the free download is a limited version of a company's premium product. A firm gives away a free version hoping that happy customers will decide to upgrade to the paid version. Or, a company distributes a free program to draw traffic to its site. Sometimes freeware carries ads, so it's actually a source of income for whoever gives it away.
Offering a freebie is a popular sales tool, and so the following list is just the tip of the iceberg. But you'll find a little something for every online business need in this list.
Free Software Downloads
On-Site Search
Fusionbot The company's free on-site search tool has limitations — it indexes no more than 250 pages, and only auto-indexes once a month — but the price is right.
Google On-Site Search Plenty of small sites use Google's free on-site search tool. But it doesn't offer much control for site owners, and it doesn't allow you to see which words users are searching for.
PicoSearch If you're willing to include ads along with your on-site search results, the PicoSearch tool is free.
Shopping Carts/E-commerce
osCommerce A free open source e-commerce platform robust enough to build your entire online storefront. The catch: you'll need some programming skills to get it up and running.
PayPal Shopping Cart/Merchant Account The payment processing company offers a free shopping cart bundled with a free credit cart account. (Of course, if a shopper makes a purchase on your site, you'll be charged a percentage of the total and a transaction fee.)
Mal's E-commerce Mal's free shopping cart is popular and easy to use, and has likely prompted many people to upgrade to Mal's eight-dollar-a-month premium service. You'll need to supply your own credit cart merchant account with the cart.
Vstore Vstore (for "virtual store") provides everything for a budding merchant: the products, the merchant account, the Web site. It's all free, but it's all completely controlled by Vstore. Merchants earn a modest commission on sales.
AdSense Buddy A statistics package to help the people who use Google's popular pay-per-click service manage their campaigns. Monitor your campaign without needing to login to Google.
ViArt Shop A shopping cart and content management system (CMS), along with an integrated help desk. This free version has database restrictions.
Sequoia Open Source ERP 0.8 This is a Java application, compatible with major operating systems. It's designed to manage an integrated e-commerce, inventory and supply chain infrastructure.
AFCommerce Shopping Cart 2 An open-source store-building program. Along with the free storefront software, the company offers its development services, which is presumably how they make money.
Toolbars
Google Toolbar The search giant's popular toolbar offers at least one piece of business intelligence to people who use it: it allows site owners to find out the relative page rank of competitive sites. Which sites in your category are the top dogs?
Alexa Toolbar Similar to the Google Toolbar but arguably better for business use. It offers more specific ranking of sites, and it shows some of the sites that link to a given site.
eBay/Auction Tools
Auction Submit Helps you submit your goods to eBay as well as to Yahoo or Amazon.
Turbo Lister eBay's own basic auction management software.
Auction Speller This utility provides the most common misspellings of items on eBay. The theory is that these misspelled listings won't be found by many buyers, and so can be bought for a cheaper price. So, for example, it allows buyers to find laptops listed as "labtops."
Counters/Web Analytics
OneStat Hit Counter More than a simple hit counter, the free OneStat counter provides information about visitors and will track unlimited Web pages.
StatCounter A free counter that allows you to analyze how visitors use your site.
Comparison Shopping
SmartShopper Designed to help online shoppers, this desktop tool compares prices from numerous e-tailers.
ActivShopper 1.2 A tool bar plug in for Internet Explorer that compares prices from many e-commerce sites to help users find better prices.
Security
TraceAssure 1.6 This security software prevents fraudulent sites from obtaining your personal data as you enter it in financial and retail sites.
Steganos LockNote Secure your business documents on your hard drive using LockNote. To access them, double click and enter your password. No password, no access.
Zone Alarm This firewall monitors data flow over your Internet connection to guard against hackers. Personal use is free. For businesses the software costs $19.95.
HTML Editors
Alleycode This free HTML editor claims to be feature rich and lets users at all levels of expertise build their site.
NVU Pronounced "N-view," for "new view," this Web-authoring tool allows you to build your site without having to know any HTML.
Next week we'll continue our look at free business software, focusing on tools for remote access, photo editors, video conferencing, and other tools designed to help you build your e-biz on the cheap.
