Free Online Store — What's Actually Free, and What Always Costs Money

A free online store is easy to start, but in Switzerland you can almost never run one without any cost at all. "Free" usually means a billing model: instead of a subscription you pay a commission, instead of a licence you pay for hosting, instead of money you put in your own time. This article shows what's genuinely free for a Swiss merchant, based on price lists read on 30 September 2026, what always costs money, and the point at which a free start stops paying off.

We rely only on vendor price lists and help pages, Meta's own documentation, Handelsverband.swiss/NIQ/GfK data, and Swiss law. Free-plan terms and prices change often — check the current price list at the linked page before you decide.

Free online store: what can be free, and what always costs money

A store is made of several layers, and each one has its own bill. One or two of them can be free. Never all of them.

Can be free:

• the store software — WooCommerce and PrestaShop are open source; you download the code with no licence fee;
• the start on a cloud platform — a free trial or a free plan from a SaaS vendor;
• a design template — platforms carry free templates alongside paid ones; on Shopify only templates outside the free pool cost anything.

Always costs money:

• Payments. Every payment processor takes a cut of the transaction, whether or not the store pays a subscription. Rates published on 30 September 2026: Stripe Switzerland — 2.9% + CHF 0.30 for a Swiss card, with TWINT via Stripe at 1.9% + CHF 0.30; Shopify Payments on Shopify's Swiss plans charges TWINT at 1.75%–1.35% + CHF 0.30 depending on plan; PostFinance Checkout charges a one-off setup fee of CHF 199 plus CHF 14.90/month on its All-in-One plan, with transactions at "2.5%, at least CHF 0.20." On a CHF 100 order paid by Swiss card or TWINT, that's roughly CHF 1.65–3.25, depending on the processor, the plan and the method (from TWINT on Shopify Plus to a card on Shopify Basic at 2.95% + CHF 0.30). The full comparison is in payment gateway fees.
• A domain. Your own address costs money at the registrar every year. On every free plan, check whether it allows a custom domain, and whether that requires a paid tier.
• Time. Setup, photos, product copy, order handling, returns and updates — you either do this work yourself or pay someone to. In open source, add ongoing technical maintenance, which a SaaS subscription bundles in.
• Delivery and returns — shipping cost falls on the buyer or the seller; no platform covers it for free. In Switzerland, note that online purchases carry no statutory right of withdrawal at all (KMU portal, SECO) — any return policy you offer is a voluntary, contractual one, not a legal obligation.

So the useful question isn't "can I build a store for free" — it's where on this list you pay, and whether you pay a flat amount or a percentage of sales. A flat fee is predictable but still bites in a month with no orders. A percentage doesn't hurt at the start, but grows with your turnover.

Free trials and SaaS plans — state as of 30 September 2026

SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms are stores on subscription: the vendor runs the servers, updates and security, and you pay for access. We cover that model more broadly in the guide to SaaS. Most of these vendors don't keep a permanent free plan — only a trial period. What follows is the state on the day the price lists were read.

Shopify Switzerland: 3 days free, then CHF 1/month for 3 months

Shopify's Swiss pricing pages (German, French; Shopify has no English-language Swiss page) read: "3 Tage kostenlos testen, danach CHF 1/Monat für 3 Monate" — 3 days free, then CHF 1/month for 3 months, with no card required for the trial. After the promotion ends, the chosen plan's regular price applies — Basic at CHF 29/month billed monthly, or CHF 21/month billed annually; the page doesn't state the VAT basis.

The same Help Center caveats apply as elsewhere: "The length of your free trial can vary based on different factors", and if it ends before you pick a plan, "your store is paused until you choose a paid plan." During the trial the store is private and checkout doesn't work until a paid plan is chosen — meaning you can build and test a Shopify store for free, but you can't sell on it.

What you pay on top: Shopify Payments is available in Switzerland, and on the Basic plan a standard online card costs 2.95% + CHF 0.30, while TWINT costs 1.75% + CHF 0.30 — noticeably cheaper than a card. If you connect an external gateway instead, Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee of 2% on the Basic plan (falling on higher plans to 0.2% on Plus) on top of the gateway's own commission. Apps and premium templates outside the free pool also cost money.

Wix: a free plan that can't accept payments

Wix's plans page describes the Free plan as "No credit card required," with hosting and a drag-and-drop editor included. "Accept payments" and "eCommerce," however, sit only on the Core, Business and Business Elite plans — the Free and Light plans don't have them. On the free plan you can build a site and a catalogue, but to actually take a payment you need a paid plan. We're not quoting Wix's CHF prices: the pricing page is geo-priced and no CHF figure was confirmed.

Squarespace: the mechanism is confirmed, the CHF price is not

Squarespace's Basic plan charges an online-store transaction fee of 2%, falling to 0% on higher plans — a currency-independent fact. Squarespace has no free plan, only a 14-day trial. Its CHF price is geo-priced and we couldn't confirm it.

Ecwid: no longer has a free plan

Older guides still describe "Ecwid's free plan for up to 10 products." According to Ecwid's current pricing page, there is no free plan any more: the cheapest is Starter at around $5/month, limited to 10 products. Ecwid publishes no CHF price, so the figure stays in USD. Ecwid states plainly: "we don't charge any setup or transaction fees on any of our plans" — the platform takes no cut of sales, which doesn't exempt you from the payment processor's own fee.

What you give up on a free plan

Before you add your first product on any free SaaS plan, check four things:

1. Can you accept payments — on Wix, no; on Shopify, not during the trial.
2. Can you connect your own domain — an address on the vendor's subdomain is harder to migrate later without losing links.
3. What are the limits — product count, order count, storage for images.
4. What extra fees apply to sales — a platform's own commission (like Squarespace Basic's 2%) or a surcharge for an external gateway (like Shopify Basic's 2%).

On a paid subscription, this same checklist becomes a question about what the vendor guarantees — uptime, backups, how it responds to an outage. We cover what to look for in that kind of agreement in a separate article on SLA agreements in SaaS services.

Open source: WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Shopware and Medusa — no licence fee, not free to run

WooCommerce describes itself as "the free, open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress," with "no platform fees, no revenue share" (WooCommerce pricing). PrestaShop's open-source version is free the same way. Shopware's Community Edition is free under the MIT licence, and Medusa's core is MIT-licensed too — except for the Enterprise Edition files called out in its own ENTERPRISE-LICENSE.md. This is genuinely free software — but software is only one layer of a store.

To run a store on any of these, you need:

• hosting — WooCommerce's own estimate is $25–350/month for most stores;
• a domain and an SSL certificate — Shopify bundles SSL into the subscription; in open source you arrange it yourself, usually through your hosting provider;
• extensions — WooCommerce quotes $29–299/year each; the ones a store actually needs, like subscription billing, are often among the paid ones (WooCommerce Subscriptions runs $279/year);
• updates and security — the engine, theme and plugins need updating and testing after every update; a SaaS vendor does this for you, here it's you or your contractor;
• time to configure — payments, shipping, tax, terms and the template are your own setup work.

There are also paid middle grounds, none of them priced in Swiss francs: PrestaShop and Shopware publish euro prices, Medusa US-dollar ones. PrestaShop Hosted costs €29/month with no commitment, or €24/month billed annually, excluding VAT, with a 14-day trial and 50 GB of Gandi-provided hosting; the vendor states you can "recover all your ecommerce data" if you cancel. Shopware's paid plans start with Rise at €600/month excluding VAT, and the vendor says its pricing depends on your gross merchandise value. If you need a headless storefront instead, Medusa Cloud starts at $29/month (Develop), rising to $99 (Launch) and $299 (Scale), with a flat 0.0% fee on sales and overage charges past the plan's usage limits. Magento Open Source is distributed under the OSL-3.0 licence; Adobe Commerce's own licence price is not publicly confirmed — ask for a written quote if you're considering it.

Open source makes sense when you want full control over code and data and have someone to handle the technical side. As a free starting point for someone with no technical background, it's usually more expensive than SaaS — not on the price list, in hours.

Facebook and Instagram Shops in 2026

A shop on Facebook or Instagram is the most common association with "selling for free": the profile is free and the customers are already there. The reality in 2026 is different from what older guides describe.

According to Meta's Business Help Center: "As of September 2025, Shops on Facebook and Instagram now use website checkout," and "Payment processing has been discontinued for Shops. You can no longer conduct transactions in your Shops on Facebook and Instagram." Since September 2025, a purchase in a Facebook or Instagram Shop therefore ends on the merchant's own website, and in-app payment processing has been switched off entirely — this applies internationally, not to one market.

The practical takeaway: Facebook and Instagram are a sales channel, not a free store. You can display products there, talk to customers and drive traffic, but the order and payment have to happen somewhere else — your own online store.

A marketplace instead of a store: you pay commission, not a subscription

A second "no subscription" route is a marketplace. The cost mechanism runs the opposite way from a SaaS store:

• no flat subscription for the storefront — the cost only shows up once you sell something;
• a commission on every sale per the marketplace's own fee schedule, worth adding up alongside payment and delivery costs for a single order;
• traffic comes from the platform — you don't have to build it from zero, but you compete on price and terms in the same search results as everyone else;
• the customer belongs to the platform — it owns the communication, reviews and selling rules, and you have limited say in how you appear next to competitors.

In Switzerland, Ricardo's help centre states: "Die Erfolgsprovision beträgt 8–12 % vom Verkaufspreis, abhängig vom Produkttyp", with a "Maximalbetrag: CHF 290.–" — an 8–12% success fee depending on product type, capped at CHF 290, with free listing except for vehicles from CHF 3,000. Galaxus runs two partner models, a merchant programme and a supplier model; its commission rate isn't publicly confirmed.

How large is this market? Per Handelsverband.swiss, with NIQ/GfK and Swiss Post, Swiss consumers spent CHF 15.8 billion on goods online in 2025, up from CHF 14.9 billion the year before (+6%), and per Eurostat (geo=CH, sourced from BFS), 85.5% of individuals aged 16–74 bought online in the last 12 months in 2025. Online shopping is mainstream in Switzerland, and the same report names Digitec Galaxus the year's big winner and says marketplaces held their position.

At low volume, a commission usually comes out cheaper than a subscription. As sales grow, the total commission eventually overtakes the cost of running your own store — and that crossover point is worth calculating, not guessing.

Free online store — when it's enough, and when it stops paying off

A store creator is a platform where you build a shop from ready-made blocks, no coding required — Shopify and Wix both work this way. A free plan or trial has one good purpose: test an idea cheaply. A handful of products, a simple template, one payment method and one delivery method are enough to find out whether anyone will actually buy.

When a free or cheapest plan is enough

• you're testing whether a product sells and have a handful of listings;
• you sell occasionally, at a small enough scale that VAT registration isn't yet a question;
• you don't need integration with inventory, accounting, or a marketplace;
• you accept the look-and-feature limits of the plan you've chosen.

A reference point for small-scale selling

Swiss VAT law sets a reference point for a different situation — a mail-order or distance seller (domestic or foreign) that reaches CHF 100,000 of annual turnover from small consignments must register for Swiss VAT, with registration applying from the month after the threshold is crossed (MWSTG Art. 7(3)(b) and MWSTV Art. 4a, per the Federal Tax Administration). This is specifically a VAT-registration trigger for mail-order sellers, not a general small-business threshold — whether and when you need to register a business at all in Switzerland depends on other federal and cantonal rules not covered by this figure.

If your sales are approaching that threshold, you're running a business, not a test — and it's worth calculating whether commissions, external-gateway surcharges and the limits of a free plan now cost more than an ordinary subscription.

Obligations don't disappear on a free plan

A free store doesn't mean fewer obligations. Under UWG Art. 3(1)(s), anyone selling through e-commerce must give clear and complete identity and contact details, indicate the technical steps to conclude the contract, provide a way to correct input errors, and confirm the order electronically without delay. These duties apply regardless of what you pay for the platform — and regardless of the fact that, unlike in the EU, Swiss law gives online buyers no statutory right of withdrawal at all. The full list of a Swiss online shop's legal duties is in how to start an online store.

When a store creator stops paying off

Signs that a free or cheapest plan is starting to cost more than it saves:

• surcharges on sales (platform commission or external-gateway fee) add up to more than the gap between plans;
• you're hitting a product or order limit, and every next step means a plan change;
• you need an integration the plan doesn't include — with a marketplace, an accounting system, a warehouse;
• handling orders takes you longer than the automation on a higher plan would cost.

If you want to compare specific platforms against these criteria, see our e-commerce platform comparison or try the which e-commerce platform quiz.

When to move to a paid plan, and how to take your data with you

Moving from a free plan to a paid one on the same platform is usually simple — pick a plan and pay. Switching platforms entirely is harder, because what matters then is what you can export. That's worth asking before you add your first product, not on moving day.

What vendor help pages confirm you can export (state as of 30 September 2026):

• Shopify — customers, orders and products to CSV (customers, orders, products);
• Ecwid — products, orders and customers to CSV (exporting orders);
• PrestaShop Hosted — the vendor states you can recover all your store's data when you cancel.

CSV moves data, but not everything: URLs, redirects, reviews, the template and integrations still have to be rebuilt. How to change platforms without losing your search rankings is covered in store migration, and the step list is in the migration checklist. Who's responsible for your data in a cloud service, and what to ask the vendor, is covered in cloud security.

When should you move to a paid plan? In short: when the free plan stops allowing sales (trial ended, no payments), when sales surcharges exceed the gap to a paid subscription, or when you need your own domain and integrations. What that will cost in your specific case is something you can check in the online store cost calculator — it compares platforms, integrations and payments in a few minutes. All our articles on choosing a platform sit in the platforms section.