Just like with a regular website, you need a domain and a web host.
The domain is the website name itself, which is also the address you must enter in the browser to bring up the shop. The web host is the place (on a server) where you have your files. You can read more about the difference between domain and web hosting here.
The three major free webshop systems
The three webshop systems we will look at are, as I said, open-source. This means that a great many developers help each other to further develop and correct errors on them.
WordPress was born as a blog system. This means that the shop part itself is an addition / extension. The next system is Magento, which is by now an old system. The last system is prestashop, which, like Magento, was born as a shop system, and therefore only a website with a webshop is used.
WordPress as an online store
WordPress is the most used website system, and is used for over a third of all websites today.
As I said, it was primarily developed as a blog/homepage system, and this also means that it is very strong for content marketing and the blogging part, which is very important for webshops today.
It’s a really good system
To use for your shop if you don’t have that many products. When you get over many 100 products, it starts to have its limitations on speed.
The shop part itself is a so-called plugin that you install.
The most popular shopping plugin is Woo-commerce. It is installed with just a few clicks, and then you have all the functionality you need for a standard shop, such as order management, stock management, check out flow, automatic customer emails, etc.
If you want to create a medium-sized store, with many products, without having great programming skills, I would choose prestashop. It can certainly also be used with a very large number of products, but it requires a bit of adaptation.
The big chrome-plated solution with a lot of options is Magento. A large shop system you can grow with for many years to come. It is, on the other hand, a bit heavy to dance with.