Shift4Shop is a platform that delivers the important options of our favourite ecommerce website builders whereas being straightforward to arrange and market to new prospects.

Possibly better of all, although, is the truth that you should utilize it with no month-to-month invoice in any respect. Should you use the Shift4 fee gateway, you’ll by no means should pay for something besides transaction charges. You possibly can actually get a web based retailer up and working for completely no cash down. And, if you wish to increase your consumers’ fee choices, the month-to-month Shift4Shop plan that makes use of PayPal as a gateway stays reasonably priced.

Shift4Shop In comparison with the Greatest Ecommerce Web site Builders

We’ve coated one of the best ecommerce web site builders intimately in a distinct put up, and Shift4Shop made our high record for its nice customization and affordability. However, as you’ll see later on this put up, Shift4Shop has some flaws that would make it a less-than-perfect match for some retailer homeowners. Try our high options beneath:

Bluehost is our high choose total as a result of it packs a strong punch when built-in with WordPress, providing you with what seems like limitless options and performance. Prime it off with day by day backups and automated WordPress updates, and also you’ll have all of the bases coated. Begin your Bluehost retailer at the moment.

Net.com makes it straightforward to ship handy purchasing experiences to your prospects with its superior stock administration options, straightforward order success, and enormous choice of fee gateways and integrations. Begin at the moment and get 60% off an annual plan.

Shopify is one of the best all-in-one ecommerce answer, because it packs so many superior ecommerce options right into a single platform that’s nonetheless type to learners and first-time retailer homeowners. Attempt Shopify risk-free for 3 days.

Wix was made particularly for novice website builders, making it the simplest approach for an inexperienced entrepreneur to construct an expert net retailer in mere minutes. Attempt any Wix plan on a 14-day money-back assure.

BigCommerce is a sturdy ecommerce builder that’s extremely scalable, delivering superior search engine marketing and advertising and marketing instruments to retailer homeowners. Check out BigCommerce free for 15 days and improve whenever you’re prepared.

Shift4Shop: The Good and the Dangerous

Shift4Shop is a feature-rich platform that’s additionally free to make use of. We discovered that you just get entry to the majority of its options with out having to pay additional. However there are additionally a number of shortcomings that we recognized which could mitigate or negate the worth and comfort of utilizing Shift4Shop totally free.

What Shift4Shop Is Good At

Although it’s possible you’ll by no means pay a month-to-month price for utilizing Shift4Shop, you get entry to a number of standout options. From deep retailer analytics to straightforward product administration and extra, there’s loads going for this platform. Shift4Shop stacks up properly towards different choices that may simply value you $10 per thirty days or extra.

Free perpetually plan

Discovering an reasonably priced but full-featured ecommerce platform can really feel like trying to find a needle in a number of haystacks. That’s, till you uncover Shift4Shop, a sturdy answer that received’t invoice you month-to-month so long as you employ the Shift4 fee gateway and course of a minimal of $500 in gross sales per thirty days.

That’s proper—with out paying for something however transaction charges (2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction), you’ll get necessities like entry to 100 responsive website themes, a free area, free website migration, and limitless product listings, plus superior options that rival Shift4Shop’s pricier opponents. You possibly can faucet into an built-in CRM, a tax calculator, streamlined checkout in your net retailer, cargo monitoring, and an entire lot extra. Once more, all of this is accessible totally free.

For cash-strapped small enterprise homeowners, not having to pay costly upfront prices or month-to-month subscription charges means extra working capital to dedicate to a rising enterprise.

Simple setup

It’s an enormous assist for your enterprise if you will discover an ecommerce platform that helps you hit the bottom working rapidly. Past its affordability, Shift4Shop can also be designed to be straightforward for any person to arrange.

While you log into Shift4Shop for the primary time, you’ll be greeted with a step-by-step information to get all the pieces up and working. It’s so simple as selecting a theme in your net retailer that matches your model id, including your merchandise, organising delivery charges, enabling funds, and at last connecting your area.

Earlier than you already know it, your retailer shall be dwell and able to rake in gross sales.

As soon as your retailer is about up, useful popup widgets will information you thru the fundamentals of processing orders, managing product listings, and taking good care of your prospects.

Shift4Shop makes day-to-day administration straightforward, too. Add merchandise, pictures, and media to your retailer utilizing the sidebar menu or an import/export function if in case you have a .csv file of your stock. Extra superior customers can leverage the built-in HTML editor to make granular adjustments to web page code. And, should you ever get caught, Shift4Shop gives a dwell chat assist function and group boards with useful recommendation.

search engine marketing options

Whether or not you’re a massive or small enterprise, driving on-line visitors to your retailer and changing extra prospects is crucial to continued success. With Shift4Shop, you get an ecommerce platform brimming with highly effective search engine marketing options that assist enhance your ecommerce website’s visibility—and gross sales.

For one, optimizing URLs is a breeze. You possibly can customise web page names, cover headers and footers, and routinely generate canonical URLs. The built-in 301 redirect editor streamlines the method of pointing outdated URLs to new, higher pages. Whether or not you need to redirect an outdated product web page or change your web site area fully, Shift4Shop makes it easy.

To succeed in extra cell consumers, AMP pages will be enabled with the clicking of a button. Past that, sitemaps for XML, merchandise, classes, and producers are routinely generated to assist engines like google index your website. This search engine marketing toolkit helps you develop your on-line enterprise with larger ease.

Product administration

Managing your stock and product choices is a crucial aspect of any ecommerce platform. With Shift4Shop, it’s straightforward to add, categorize, and promote your merchandise.

Effortlessly add or take away merchandise to adapt to altering stock or demand. Shift4Shop’s information visualizations offer you an at-a-glance view of what’s promoting properly, what’s stagnating in your cabinets, and what’s able to be restocked. You’ll at all times have your finger on the heartbeat of your stock.

And, as we talked about earlier, including new merchandise is as straightforward as clicking the Merchandise tab on the sidebar menu and filling out a number of fields (akin to product title, SKU, variations, classes, and product description) or importing an entire batch of them through .csv file.

You get full management of organizing your stock and the way your merchandise are displayed. Use limitless product classes to create subsections for product sorts, sale objects, seasonal favorites, or different customized groupings. Drag and drop merchandise to vary how they’re sorted in your on-line retailer’s pages.

Shift4Shop is aware of that high-quality product pictures are key to driving gross sales. Due to that, they provide limitless uploads of pictures and movies, plus on-page picture options like zooming, so your prospects can get an up-close-and-personal have a look at what you’re promoting.

Throughout holidays or particular events, you may allow gift-wrapping choices to offer an additional particular contact. And, with the on-page Q&A widget, your prospects can ask questions straight by the product web page, permitting you to reply rapidly through e mail. No extra guessing video games or confusion, simply useful solutions and joyful consumers.

Analytics and reporting

Observe the efficiency and well being of your on-line enterprise over time Shift4Shop’s interactive information visualizations. You possibly can drill down into info on particular person merchandise or prospects to get deeper perception into what’s going properly and who your finest repeat consumers are.

Questioning if that huge sale occasion made a dent in your stock? Curious what number of prospects paid by bank card versus money app final month? Shift4Shop’s reviews have you ever coated. From merchandise and orders to search engine marketing statistics, the important thing particulars about your enterprise are at your fingertips.

With these user-friendly analytics and reviews, Shift4Shop offers you the ability to make data-driven choices that drive your enterprise ahead. You’ll have the insights to reward your most loyal prospects, alter advertising and marketing campaigns, or reorder in style merchandise forward of durations of excessive demand.

Advertising instruments

With Shift4Shop, you may attain new teams of shoppers by a number of totally different strategies. Faucet into its built-in running a blog capabilities to share your experience. Simply create and distribute partaking e mail newsletters to remain in contact together with your followers. Or, construct Fb advert campaigns focused to your ideally suited prospects.

Say you personal a clothes retailer and need to promote your seasonal merchandise or attire for an upcoming occasion. With the Shift4Shop e-newsletter software, you may simply design an attention grabbing e mail that includes pictures of your choices. With a number of clicks, your message is on its technique to hundreds of inboxes, probably bringing in far more income for your enterprise.

With the best instruments and message, advertising and marketing your on-line retailer to tens of hundreds of potential new prospects is inside your attain.

Cellular adaptability

Offering internet buyers with a mobile-friendly ecommerce expertise is non-negotiable as of late. Prospects need to purchase issues whereas they’re on the go, and in case your retailer isn’t optimized for cell, you’re leaving cash on the desk.

Luckily, Shift4Shop understands this and constructed their platform with cell on the forefront. Their websites’ responsive design means your on-line retailer will look simply pretty much as good on a smartphone because it does on a desktop. No pinching or scrolling wanted. Shift4Shop additionally makes use of Google’s AMP know-how to turbocharge your cell pages in order that they load lightning quick.

Even higher, Shift4Shop gives its On-line Retailer Supervisor cell app so you may handle orders, stock, website and product adjustments, and extra from wherever you might be, each time it’s worthwhile to.

Shift4Shop’s Potential Drawbacks

Whilst you’re getting loads for little to no expense with Shift4Shop, there are nonetheless some limitations we’ve recognized as probably detrimental to some retailer homeowners. Comply with alongside as we delve into these potential drawbacks and see if any of those might make extra bother for you than Shift4Shop is price.

Points since rebranding

Shift4Shop was referred to as 3dcart earlier than a November 2020 rebranding. Sadly, and far to the chagrin of its prospects, this brought on deeper adjustments past only a new model title and id.

For one factor, website speeds slowed to a crawl for a lot of after the rebrand. One person left a assessment, reporting their website pace tanked from averaging simply over one second to taking up 10 seconds to load. In case your retailer skilled these sluggish load instances, it might imply completely shedding impatient prospects who received’t wait round for a website to load of their browser. Whereas occasional slowdowns are usually no huge deal, a long-term drop in pace must be addressed.

Fixed, unannounced updates have been one other post-rebrand annoyance. Typically, these can create new bugs. However, most of the time, it’s one other supply of downtime that may disrupt your enterprise. Every replace requires Shift4Shop customers to look at their websites in an effort to make sure that these updates didn’t create new points for them to resolve.

One other loss through the rebrand was the Smartermail e mail platform, forcing prospects to discover a third-party e mail answer. For some, this additional value and problem probably got here as an unwelcome shock. Whereas utilizing a third-party e mail service isn’t an insurmountable downside, Shift4Shop’s dealing with of this modification left many shoppers pissed off.

Tough web page modifying

Whereas Shift4Shop gives a pleasant setup expertise, with loads of steerage on the way to initially tailor your website theme and components. However, when you full that walkthrough, returning to the homepage editor is oddly difficult.

Out of your dashboard, you’ll want to make use of one in every of two routes to edit your website content material. Both click on Content material within the sidebar menu, then click on Website Content material to be taken to a menu permitting you to edit the content material on your property web page, phrases and circumstances web page, menu bar, or additional pages.

So as to add or edit pages that aren’t your property web page, you’ll have to click on the confusingly titled Footer Additional Pages. Regardless of the deceptive title, this part truly means that you can edit all of your pages, not simply footer content material.

Or, to edit your homepage content material, you may also click on View Retailer on the high of your dashboard. That can take you to a preview of your homepage, however you’ll nonetheless have to click on the 4 icon within the top-right, then click on Launch Web page Editor on the subsequent display in an effort to edit the content material. That’s approach too many steps to get to such a fundamental perform in an ecommerce platform.

These unintuitive design capabilities will be very irritating. Luckily, if in case you have some technical talent or a developer in your employees, you may go for a extra direct method by modifying HTML code. However, for many website homeowners, this course of will be headache-inducing after they simply need to make little design tweaks or content material edits.

Lack of pricing transparency

Shift4Shop looks like a horny ecommerce platform for companies on a good funds. Their web site touts an end-to-end answer that’s fully free to make use of (save for processing charges). Whereas they do make point out of their $29 per thirty days paid plan for utilizing PayPal as a fee gateway as an alternative of Shift4, the model tends to lack transparency about prices.

At the beginning, we needed to do loads of digging simply to search out out what the per-transaction processing charges for utilizing Shift4 had been (they’re 2.9% plus 30 cents). And, it took making a full-fledged Shift4Shop account and beginning the setup wizard earlier than we obtained full readability on the distinction between the free plan that makes use of Shift4 for funds and the PayPal-enabled plan. We’ll talk about that intimately just a little afterward.

There may be little point out of what different facets of the platform can incur expenses to a person of Shift4Shop. A web page for the enterprise-grade model of the platform vaguely refers to a devoted Enterprise Plan, however offers no pricing particulars or perhaps a hyperlink to get extra info.

On high of that, key options—like superior website search performance or touchdown pages linked to e mail campaigns—might solely be unlocked through paid add-ons within the Shift4Shop market that may value $100, $300, or extra per thirty days.

Poor customer support

Shift4Shop markets itself as an intuitive ecommerce platform, however even probably the most user-friendly platform must be bolstered by high quality buyer assist. Nevertheless, many retailer homeowners have discovered this to be extra of a supply of serious frustration than useful help.

In response to quite a few evaluations, responses have typically taken weeks to succeed in customers (in the event that they ever arrive in any respect), even for pressing assist requests. Their assist portal alone appears to be overly difficult, and requests usually get handed from one specialised group to a different. As a rule, assist brokers seem ill-equipped to resolve technical points, steadily blaming third events or providing unhelpful responses.

After we personally contacted assist to check this out, we requested in regards to the absence of particulars for his or her pricing plans. The agent we linked to mentioned they didn’t know that info, even when pressed to double-check with Shift4Shop’s gross sales reps. It took us far too lengthy to get a easy, easy reply.

Poor buyer assist like this could have actual penalties in your companies. Unresolved points can imply days (or weeks) of misplaced income as your on-line retailer faces technical difficulties. And, for these seeking to change to a different platform, Shift4Shop reportedly makes cancellation an arduous course of and has been reported to proceed utilizing buyer information even after account closure, based mostly on evaluations from former customers.

Worldwide inconveniences

Shift4Shop is primarily constructed to serve customers inside the US. The backend, hours of assist availability, and default settings are all configured for these working ecommerce shops stateside. Should you’re, say, in the UK and need assistance from Shift4Shop’s assist, it’s possible you’ll end up ready hours for them to come back on-line to help you.

The out-of-the-box VAT setup additionally leaves a lot to be desired, although retailers can discover the Shift4Shop market for tax instruments that may higher swimsuit companies promoting overseas. Regardless, it would take a few of your invaluable time to search out the best answer for this or different worldwide ecommerce wants, like dependable world success suppliers.

Shift4Shop Plans and Pricing

Shift4Shop can basically be used totally free, with customers solely paying for the processing charges incurred by utilizing Shift4 for his or her websites’ fee gateway. However, particulars on the 2 pricing choices are scarce on the web site. Right here, we’ll dig into the precise prices and choices obtainable to you.

Eternally Free (Shift4 Cost Gateway)

The principle takeaway you’ll get from the Shift4Shop web site is that you should utilize it totally free and get full entry to the platform. That’s true (and an enormous profit to retailer homeowners), however there are some key particulars to concentrate on.

So as to use Shift4Shop with out paying a month-to-month invoice, you’ll want to make use of their mother or father firm’s fee processing gateway, Shift4. So long as you course of no less than $500 in month-to-month website gross sales by that gateway, you received’t should pay for something besides transaction charges (2.9% plus 30 cents).

On this free plan, you get nearly all the pieces that Shift4Shop has to supply. All of the highlights and options we coated above are included, plus you don’t ever have to fret about limits in your income, visitors, merchandise, or anything. You additionally get entry to the API, limitless employees accounts, and built-in running a blog capabilities to take full management of your on-line retailer’s look, content material, and administration.

It’s good that Shift4Shop doesn’t punish you or begin to cost you as you scale up. However, that $500 month-to-month threshold generally is a little bit of a hefty demand on very new ecommerce companies. Should you don’t hit that benchmark, you’ll be charged $29 for every month that you just come up quick.

However, should you’re assured about your retailer’s capacity to generate a whole lot of {dollars} every month from the get-go, there aren’t many different choices that ship the low value and wealthy function set of Shift4Shop.

PayPal Cost Gateway for Shift4Shop

One of many key limitations of the Shift4Shop free plan is that you could solely settle for a number of totally different fee strategies from prospects. The Shift4 fee gateway helps main bank cards Visa, MasterCard, Uncover, and American Categorical, plus the digital wallets Bitpay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, along with PayPal categorical checkout (however not the total vary of PayPal fee strategies).

However, if you wish to prolong extra handy choices to your prospects, you’ll probably need to pay the $29 per thirty days for PayPal as your Shift4Shop website’s fee gateway. That opens up the total array of PayPal fee choices (together with Purchase Now, Pay Later), plus extra digital wallets, Venmo, and extra, on high of normal credit score and debit card funds.

There aren’t any additional options or bonuses on this feature, however the wider vary of fee choices alone could also be price it. Trendy consumers need to have the ability to use trendy fee strategies, and pay later choices (like PayPal Pay In 4) can create extra gross sales by lowering the fast monetary burden in your prospects.

Last Ideas

After we put ourselves within the sneakers of a small enterprise proprietor, Shift4Shop is a really enticing choice. By offering free entry to a full function set, retailer homeowners can preserve prices down and scale with out concern.

Nevertheless, be forewarned about doable assist and technical points. The shortage of pricing transparency and the complications we had with buyer assist are discouraging. Which may negate all the advantages of Shift4Shop’s options and low value. However, total, we will confidently suggest Shift4Shop for younger or cash-strapped companies, and it may possibly probably work properly for many individuals who simply need a strong platform for on-line promoting that received’t value them an arm and a leg.