Free Stuff for Small Businesses

I wanted that title to be clear, here's a bunch of free stuff, or freebies that come with stuff that I've used or just know about and thought I'd share.

These should work for any small business and I hope it helps you!

Mini disclaimer: I'm not sponsored or affiliated with any of these sites and there's no special rate or code you need from me to take advantage of these things. I've used them personally so I can vouch for how it works. I did include links but the names of the companies or the products should be super easy to search for if you don't like using links on websites. There is no tracking or anything associated with these links. I'm not sure I'd even know how to do that if I wanted to :P Happy Reading!

Free Shipping Supplies

USPS (Post Office) -

The USPS will send you free shipping supplies if you are using them to ship items. You can order them online here.

What's the catch?

You have to get the box/package that matches the shipping type you're using. Most of them are Priority Mail. They state on their FAQ's that if you ship something in a box labeled Priority Mail and use a different shipping method you'll be charged the priority mail rate. So this may or may not work for you.

UPS

UPS has some free supplies that they will send you like labels you can print on etc. However you do have to have an account and it seems the account can go inactive so it may not be worth it for some labels you can print on.

Free Online Storefront

Square Free Website

Pros

If you buy a square POS system or create a square account you are automatically able to also have a website. (POS stands for Point of Sale and not what your brain just thought.) Now this isn't the most amazing website on the planet but hey, free is free.

1. You can track your inventory in one place. Sell something in person or online and the system keeps track of the items. You can also mark items as in person only sale so if you have little things you don't want to bother with online that works.

2. Reporting! You can get reports of what sold when etc. Gives you good insight as to what's working and what isn't.

3. You can setup shipping accounts with the major carries (UPS, USPS, FedEx and DHL) to print shipping labels. You can set flat rates for different regions and base that on product specs.

4. You aren't paying any more than the current fees for credit card sales. Whereas most websites you pay for the site as well as fees for payments so one less bill and the fees just come out of the sales.

Cons

Real Time Shipping (that's where it calculates the shipping rate in the cart) does require you upgrade to a paid subscription and it's the expensive one. Currently it's $79 a month which is WAY more than other sites.

Website customization is limited on the free plan. Just starting out that shouldn't be too much of a blocker but you aren't going to be able to grow much.

Custom Domain: This is a big one, you can't connect a custom domain like "www.BooksNCrafts.com" to your square website without having a paid plan.

Image/Logo and Display Software

Canva

There's a lot of debate around Canva and it can be annoying at times to use. But you CAN use it in a limited way for free and not pay for the premium membership.

I've used it to design my logo, with a little help from other editor tools and after I was done I did buy business cards and a sign through them which is sorta the reason they provide the software. Their pricing for printed products like signs, business cards and paper bags were pretty competitive so the ability to design and adjust your logo to whatever product right on the site is really a selling point.

It's really handy to make things like signs or sign up sheets or whatever and just download and print them yourself. And you can edit and play with them making copies and editing the copy over and over with it all stored/saved online for you to go back and edit more later.

OK that may have just been me but you can do it too!

The prices for things like signs and business cards are competitive with other sites so they are winning with the ability to take what you've created and port it to a product you need/want.

Canva can be found here.

Gimp

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Which is an open source software that is free to anyone who would like to use it. It's a downloadable tool you can use to modify and edit pictures. Upside is it's free and can do a lot of really complicated things. Downside is, open source can be a little flakey at times. If you're like me and not really into doing image editing unless you have to you can learn a few things pretty quickly and eventually figure out more by flailing around aimlessly. Can be found here.

Between GIMP and Canva I haven't really needed anything else.

Video Editing Tools

You may not do video editing but if you want to do reels or any videos online like tutorials or something it's a good idea to have a video editing tool.

Davinci Resolve

I cannot recommend anything more than Davinci Resolve. Unless you're literally making a high budget movie it can do everything you could possibly want. You don't even need to make an account AND there's online training! Seriously it's really REALLY worth it.

Their training videos are extremely helpful for people, like me, who have absolutely no idea how to even start with videos. You can find them here.

Online Communication

I'm new to the online presence so I don't have a lot here. Instagram/Facebook, both owned by Meta have a Meta Business Suite you can use to create and schedule posts and reels. Which is handy. Once you have a business Instagram account and a business Facebook page it's pretty quick to link it all together and setup posts to schedule going out. I'm not sure how old it is, I still get weird errors now and then but the basics of creating a post and scheduling it to go out works.

It tries to give you insights on when your followers tend to be online as to when to schedule posts, it doesn't seem very reliable now but then again I'm VERY new at this. I'll give better feedback later but it's handy.

Also you can make a post directly in Instagram and click to share it on Facebook so that works too. But a central dashboard is handy at times.

OK that's all I have so far :) I think I'll do another post later giving reviews of what I did and didn't like about different web hosting sites. I've tried MANY and definitely have some info I can share.

Ta Ta for now!