9 Insanely Valuable & Ridiculously Inexpensive Services for Your Business
There’s nothing better than using a tool, app, or service for your business that makes your workflow 10x easier—except a tool, app, or service which does exactly that but also at a very affordable price.
We love finding hidden gems that provide us with big value at little cost, so in this post, we’re sharing our top finds with you! These are all tools that we use on a regular basis and love because not only do they get the job done, but we don’t have to shell out a lot to use them.
Ready to find out which tools we love that pack a big punch at an accessible price point? Read on.
9 Insanely Valuable & Ridiculously Inexpensive Services for Your Business
TheChecker
We love keeping a clean and tidy email list and if you’re growing an email list of your own, learn from our mistakes and keep your email list neat and tidy, too. There are so many bot emails, spam traps, and catch-all addresses that clutter up email lists and the longer your email list has been growing without a routine checkup, the more of these spammy addresses you likely have on your list.
To rid our list of these irrelevant (and possibly damaging) email addresses, we use The Checker. It checks through our email list to identify low-quality addresses and gives us the ability to remove them from our list. Before we used The Checker, our list was full of spammy, low-quality emails that we were reaching out to weekly with our email list which was skewing our deliverability rates and lowering our open rates. After using The Checker to keep our email list free of the low-quality addresses, our deliverability rate has improved and our open rates have skyrocketed!
For a more in-depth overview of how The Checker works and to see our results after using it on a test list, check out our Top 5 Email Verification, List Cleaning & Validation Services Compared article.
And not only does The Checker work super well but it also costs us next to nothing! You can purchase 1,000 credits (which will allow you to check 1000 emails) for just $5.20 which, compared to other email verification services we’ve tried, is super reasonable. The credits also get cheaper the more addresses you check so they can really go a long way.
OpenPhone
To get a telephone line for your business nowadays, you don’t have to get an entirely separate phone—you can just use an app!
OpenPhone enables you to create a separate phone number for your business and run it from your current device so you don’t have to manage another device or give out your personal number to customers, clients, or suppliers. You can even set up toll-free numbers and set office hours within the app!
Their pricing is simple: Either $10 per number per month for an individual user or $10 per member per month for a team of people—both for unlimited talk and text. Compared to the cost of setting up an actual business phone line and it doesn’t even come close!
Ten bucks per month for an entirely different phone number that allows you to run business communications through your personal device without giving out your personal number is a no-brainer as far as we’re concerned. If you need a business phone number, it’s worth looking into OpenPhone.
Rewind
You’ll never regret having a backup of your online store. In fact, you’ll probably regret not having one more than you ever would regret having one, so make sure you’re never in that position and just back up your online store if you haven’t already.
We recommend using Rewind because they’re easy to use and they offer some seriously low pricing. They integrate directly with Shopify, BigCommerce, Quickbooks, and MailChimp so you can save yourself from some pretty catastrophic situations just by having it installed.
The pricing starts at $9 per month which, when you think about how it stores incremental backups of your data so you can revert back to it at any time and also consider how much of a lifesaver that can be when you’ve accidentally deleted products, suffered a malicious attack, or even if you’ve just installed an app that conflicts with other areas of your site causing data to be removed—it’s completely invaluable.
So for $9 per month you can have the peace of mind that even if your data gets completely wiped, you can recover your site to the last downloaded backup and be back up and selling in no time at all. It’s another no-brainer for us, and a tool that can solve some pretty major disasters!
For a more in-depth look at Rewind and everything they can do for ecommerce businesses, check out our Rewind Review.
CloudApp
A major part of running an online business includes communicating with your team whether you actually have employees or even contractors, freelancers, suppliers, etc. but usually the communication happens digitally rather than face-to-face and that can create some barriers.
When communicating through emails, Slack channels, or other messaging platforms, things can easily get lost in translation. CloudApp helps entrepreneurs communicate more efficiently through digital means by providing easy-to-use tools. With CloudApp, you can take and annotate screenshots, easily record videos, take screen recordings, and it’s super inexpensive to use. They offer a free plan or you could opt for their $9 per month Pro Plan. If you’re continuously communicating with designers, developers, or manufacturers, this tool can save you a lot of time and hassle!
This is also a great tool to use to solve customer inquiries. Since you can use CloudApp to create photo or video demonstrations, it’s a useful way to answer questions, provide instructions, and demonstrate features without having to explain everything in an email. Plus, when you provide annotated images or screen recordings, customers tend to really appreciate the extra effort and it makes your interaction with them feel more personal which often gives them a positive impression. So, not only does it make your life easier but it also makes your customers happier which is a win-win for everyone!
ShortPixel
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, reducing the size of your website’s images is one of the easiest and best things you can do to help your site run faster and, in time, improve your SEO.
Faster sites retain visitors for longer and when visitors aren’t bouncing away, that indicates to search engines like Google that the website is high-quality which can help it rank higher in search results. Reducing the file sizes of your images using a tool like ShortPixel is a quick and easy way to speed up your site.
All you have to do to get started is run your images through ShortPixel before you upload them to your site or integrate the ShortPixel plugin into your WordPress site and you’re ready to go! Plus, the actual quality of your images won’t be affected so they’ll still look the same but all of the miscellaneous information that’s stored behind-the-scenes for each image will be reduced. This means that there’s not as much to load up every time a visitor accesses one of your site’s pages so each page will load faster!
ShortPixel offers a generous free plan and their paid plans start at $4.99 per month, which, if you run an image-heavy site (think of all the product photos you have!) that takes even a couple of seconds to load one page, then it’s dollars well spent to improve user experience.
UpDown.io
Your website is only making money when it’s up—not when it’s down.
We mean that quite literally. If your website is down that means visitors can’t buy products from you which means you’re not bringing in any revenue. What kind of ecommerce merchant wants that?!
So it should go without saying that it’s important to know if and whenever your website goes down so you can fix it. UpDown.io is a tool that keeps a close eye on your website so if it ever does goes down, you’ll instantly be notified and can start taking steps to fix it.
You can use UpDown.io no matter what kind of website or ecommerce store you have—whether it’s a WordPress site or a Shopify store, for example—and it’s super inexpensive to use. We’re talking dollars per month per site.
This is an especially important tool to use if you’re running promotions like Facebook Ads and are putting in hundreds or thousands of dollars to drive traffic to your site. Because if your site goes down, not only are you losing out on sales but you’re also paying for ads that can’t convert into sales which is a super inefficient and costly situation. Plus, it can cause people to lose trust in your brand when they try to access your site and nothing shows up or it doesn’t work properly.
For how little it costs, it’s an important safety net for your site that you can just set and forget and know that it has your back in case anything goes wrong.
Carrd
We love a tool that just works and does what it says it’s going to do and does it well. That’s why we like Carrd.
Carrd (Carrd Review) is a one-page website builder that gives you the tools to create a functional website at any time. Since they’re one-page websites, Carrd is often used to create landing pages or portfolios but you really can create anything with it—it’s up to you! They offer a vast range of features including custom domains, forms, Google Analytics, widgets and embeds, as well as payment processing, starting at just $9 per year. They also offer a free plan which allows you access to their core features and up to three sites, if that’s more your style, too.
Starting at $9 per year, you can create a beautiful one-page site (seriously, their templates are gorgeous) and the site can be fully functional and built out to suit your needs. So whether you just need a simple site to capture emails or are looking to create a landing page for a product to add on to your current website platform, you can use Carrd to create it. It’s one of the best tools of its kind on the market, and yet it’s still super inexpensive for what it offers.
DNS Made Easy
Part of your website’s infrastructure is the Domain Name Systems (DNS) which essentially acts as the phonebook of the internet to connect internet browsers with internet resources like websites. When you set up your website, you’ll typically have a generic DNS assigned to you but most generic DNS are pretty slow by the internet world’s standards. By slow, we’re talking milliseconds here, but in the online world where every second counts, milliseconds can be the very thing that costs you valuable customers, revenue, and profit in the long run.
Because of this, we recommend using a more premium DNS than a generic one, and even the more premium ones aren’t necessarily that expensive. DNS Made Easy is the DNS service we recommend setting up on your site because it’s one of the best and it starts at just $5 per month (and there’s a free trial too or you can even pay-as-you-go if that option works better for you).
Considering your DNS is one of the foundational aspects of your store’s infrastructure, that’s a small price to pay for a reliable and fast connection! Plus, when you set up with one of the best DNS services on the market, then it’s something you never have to worry about again. If you just get it set up right once then you’re done and you’re using the fastest DNS out there!
Check out this DNS Made Easy Review to learn more about the specifics of their service and why a premium DNS is better for your website.
Anytime Mailbox
All businesses need a mailing address—it’s something that you’re required to list on things like your store policies or email newsletter, plus if you’re working with suppliers, manufacturers, designers, banks, etc. you’ll likely need to receive some mail from time to time.
Since most ecommerce businesses aren’t operating out of a standalone office, you might not want to be listing your home address as your business address. After all, what if customers start turning up at your door?! It’s just not safe practice.
What you can do is use a mailing service instead! Services like Anytime Mailbox act as your personal mail and package forwarding system so you just have a web portal where you can access all of your mail.
How it works is Anytime Mailbox will notify you when you have mail and you have the option to request that they forward it to your real address or you can have them open it and scan the mail and send it to you digitally.
It just makes handling your business mail so much easier, plus it can help keep it separate from your personal mail, too. And, unlike a P.O. Box, you don’t have to actually drive to your mailbox to get your packages or letters or wait until you’re back from a trip—you have access to everything that comes into your mailbox online!
Prices start at $6.99 so if you’re a digital nomad who needs an address to send your mail to or if you just need a business mailbox to make your life easier, then you need to check out a mailbox forwarding service like Anytime Mailbox!
Conclusion
We hope this roundup has shed some light on some of the most useful but inexpensive services we think all ecommerce entrepreneurs will get some value out of! With these services, you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck without having to stretch your dollars too thin.
