Shift4Shop is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that has been around since 1997. This makes it one of the pioneering eCommerce software solutions, but how does it hold up today? Emerging as one of the most capable free eCommerce solutions, Shift4Shop is now on the radar for many merchants. Let's take a detailed look at Shift4Shop and see if it could be the right solution for your business.
- 1 What is Shift4Shop?
- 2 About Shift4Shop
- 3 Built-In eCommerce Features in Shift4Shop
- 4 Marketing Features in Shift4Shop
- 5 How Good is Shift4Shop's SEO?
- 6 Accepting Online Payments with Shift4Shop
- 7 Shift4Shop Web Design
- 8 Shift4Shop Pricing
- 9 Shift4Shop Apps and Add-Ons
- 10 Shift4Shop Support
- 11 Shift4Shop Alternatives
- 12 The Bottom Line on Shift4Shop
What is Shift4Shop?
Shift4Shop is an eCommerce platform for building an online store. It includes a website builder, shopping cart functionality, and a wide range of other features for managing an online business. It's SaaS eCommerce software, meaning it's a complete package that includes web hosting. There's nothing to install — you simply log in through a web browser to set up and manage your store. Shift4Shop is available for free with features suited to businesses of any size.
Shift4Shop at a Glance
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Type:
SaaS eCommerce platform
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Cost:
Free plan available with Shift4 Payments, paid monthly plans starting at $9.99/month
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Transaction Fees:
None
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Number of Features:
High
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Types of Products:
Both physical and digital
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Dropshipping:
Very well-supported
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Apps, Plugins, or Extensions:
Available
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Compatibility:
Built-in integrations with hundreds of types of business software, and more with apps
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Payment Gateways:
Direct integration with Shift4 Payments and over other 160 integrated payment providers
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Technical Support:
In-house 24/7/365 phone, live chat, and tickets
Trying Shift4Shop
If you like what you see in this review, it's very easy to give Shift4Shop a spin. You can sign up for a free plan without needing to enter your credit card information. You’ll never be charged unless you sign up for a paid plan or extra add-on.
About Shift4Shop?
Shift4Shop is a feature-rich eCommerce platform with a long history. Founded in 1997 as 3dcart, the platform started as an all-in-one solution for online businesses that needed more out of their eCommerce websites. Since then, the platform has continued to evolve with the times, and has now become a major eCommerce platform used by thousands of businesses around the world. After recently rebranding to Shift4Shop, following an acquisition by Shift4 Payments, the SaaS eCommerce solution is now offered for free. Shift4Shop is based in Tamarac, FL, USA.
Built-In eCommerce Features in Shift4Shop
A well-rounded set of features is important for any eCommerce platform. It determines the limit of what you can do with the software, and also affects the possibility of extra costs such as needing to install a third-party add-on. Shift4Shop does well with features, having the most built-in functionality of any SaaS eCommerce platform, with only BigCommerce coming into a close second place.
Products
Shift4Shop allows you to sell unlimited products on all plans except the $9.99/month Dropshipping plan, which has a limit of 1,000. Product types include both physical and digital. The digital download support is solid, with automatic download link emails that can be time-limited.
Inventory Management
Shift4Shop is strong in the inventory management arena. You can enter stock numbers for all products and have them automatically decrease when ordered. You also have control over when the inventory adjustment happens, so you can choose to deduct it as soon as the item is ordered, or after the payment goes through.
There is also an inventory control feature that notifies you when your inventory falls below a certain amount. You can choose the amount and also the products that notify you. Higher-level plans can also use a Purchase Order module that automatically generates a purchase order when stock becomes low. You can then send the order to your supplier.
Order Management
Order management in Shift4Shop is easy and informative. All orders are listed in your dashboard and classified based on their status, so you can quickly see fresh orders, shipped orders, orders waiting to receive payment, etc. and you can sort them as needed. You also get an email whenever an order is placed.
Shipping
Shift4Shop handles shipping very well. The software is integrated with several of the world's most popular shipping carriers, including UPS, FedEx, USPS, Royal Mail, and more. This integration allows for real-time shipping rates to show in the customer's shopping cart. Real-time shipping is extremely helpful for avoiding cart abandonment since customers can often be surprised by the shipping costs and back out of the order. The shipping integration in Shift4Shop also enables label printing, pre-filled with the customer's delivery information. This is useful for saving time and reducing mistakes during fulfillment.
Customer Service
One thing that stands out about Shift4Shop is how easy it is to get a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) for your business. This is a type of software that sets up a ticketing system in your store, so customers can submit a ticket for help if they have an issue. CRMs also log all the interactions between staff and customers, so it's a big help to have one if you want to build long-term customer loyalty.
Shift4Shop integrates with great CRM software like HubSpot, but it also comes with a built-in CRM module available starting with the free end-to-end eCommerce plan. That's a big plus, because other platforms either reserve their CRMs for more expensive plans or rely solely on third-party apps and integrations, which do have their own costs. So with Shift4Shop, it's possible to use a CRM without paying extra much earlier in the life of your business.
Dropshipping Support
Dropshipping has become big, and it's easy to see why — as a business model, it's easy to start and to maintain. In case you're unaware, in dropshipping, a business doesn't keep any inventory, instead forwarding orders to their supplier who then handles shipping directly. Good dropshipping support includes automatic order forwarding and the ability to quickly add products from a supplier's site to your own.
Shopify is the most popular platform for dropshipping, but Shift4Shop has very strong dropshipping support and should be considered a strong contender. It integrates with Doba and AliExpress to allow quick access to large product directories, but also other suppliers that aren't as well known. For example, Inventory Source. Most strikingly, though, there's a place in the Shift4Shop dashboard to set up any supplier as a dropshipper, so you can dropship via relationships you've specifically worked out with suppliers of all kinds. Shift4Shop also has print-on-demand dropshipping support through apps such as Printful, so you have a lot of options for a dropshipping business with Shift4Shop.
While Shift4Shop does offer a dedicated Dropshipping plan for $9.99/month, it’s not the only plan that supports dropshipping. Shift4Shop’s free plan is fully capable of supporting a Dropshipping business. With the ability to build a full website and access all of their built-in features, this makes Shift4Shop the cheapest way to start dropshipping on a SaaS platform – no exceptions. As an affordable platform that doesn’t skimp on dropshipping features, Shift4Shop is a great choice for young businesses.
Marketing Features in Shift4Shop
Marketing is an important part of eCommerce, so the software you use should have the capabilities to make it possible. Now let's look at the marketing tools in Shift4Shop.
As it turns out, we were pleasantly surprised by Shift4Shop's marketing tools. Mostly, it was a surprise because other software doesn't offer nearly as much. Shift4Shop provides several methods for marketing to your customers.
The promotion manager is extremely flexible and lets you designate products for a sale discount on your store either automatically or with a coupon code. These promotions can be a percentage or dollar amount discount, a BOGO deal, free shipping, and much more. Importantly, you can allow each promotion to stack with others at your discretion, so you can let coupons be used together in any combinations you want.
Shift4Shop also has dedicated modules for time-limited deals, including a Daily Deal feature to display on your website with a countdown timer. There is a Group Deal module that works a lot like Groupon, where enough customers need to buy a product within a deadline to activate the discount on it. These tend to be shared by customers who want to get their friends to participate, so this can make your store popular.
There are other ways Shift4Shop encourages your customers to market for you by word of mouth as well. Both wish lists and gift registries can be created, and you have the option to let customers create multiple wish lists (private, public, etc.). They can make shopping lists for themselves or create a public wish list or gift registry shareable on social media. There is also a very easy to use digital gift certificate creator.
Importantly, Shift4Shop also has strong multichannel and social media support. Stores can be integrated with Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Facebook Shops, Instagram, and more, so customers can buy right from these marketplaces. All these purchases go through the Shift4Shop dashboard for processing, regardless of where they came from, so it's easier to manage multichannel sales.
How Good is Shift4Shop's SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is a requirement for online stores to be competitive today. The quality of the SEO your website can have will be limited by the capabilities of your eCommerce software. So it's crucial your platform has good SEO.
Shift4Shop claims to be "the best eCommerce platform for SEO" and after a close look, we find it hard to argue with this. The Shift4Shop developers have put a lot of thought into the SEO functions. There are several SEO advantages built into Shift4Shop sites, such as:
- Google AMP for several page types
- Focus on page speed via code streamlining, deferred JavaScript, a "Lazy loading" option to let assets load when the customer scrolls to them, page pre-loading on link mouseover, etc.
- Fully responsive design
- Automatic SEO-friendly URL generation
Complementing these features are SEO tools for optimizing your site even more:
- Customize all URLs, even the auto-generated ones
- Easy meta title and description builders
- Rich snippets
- 301 redirects, both manual and automatically created when you change a URL
- Control over robots.txt
- Canonical URLs
- H1 and image alt tag customizer
- XML sitemap generator
- Analytics tools
Shift4Shop has left no stone unturned when it comes to SEO tools, so we have to agree that it's extremely powerful in this area.
Accepting Online Payments with Shift4Shop
Payment processing is another place Shift4Shop shines. Shift4, a leading payment processor with solid security, is the parent company of Shift4Shop. For this reason, all Shift4Shop stores are automatically integrated with Shift4 Payments for easy payment processing. Stores using this payment gateway can accept credit cards and digital wallets from customers, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.
If you’re interested in Shift4Shop’s free end-to-end eCommerce plan, Shift4 Payments is the only payment gateway you’ll be able to use. Shift4 Payments is only available to US merchants at this time.
For different payment processing needs, Shift4Shop also supports over 160 alternative payment gateways. These include many different types of payment methods, like digital wallets, customer financing/buy now pay later, eCheck, ACH, and more.
There are also international payment processors available for merchants outside of the US. Shift4Shop integrates with several high-risk payment processors as well, which handle certain business types that most other payment providers usually reject. Examples would be online sales of regulated products (alcohol, tobacco, etc.) or industries with high fraudulent purchase risk (like electronics or jewelry).
Shift4Shop Web Design
Much like the other capabilities of your online store, your web design freedom will depend on the eCommerce platform. This includes how unique your site can look, as well as how easy it is to create that unique design.
The quality of your web design also affects how well your store performs on mobile devices and desktop computers. In turn, this affects your conversion rate and SEO. So, web design is more than just looks.
Shift4Shop does very well with web design, offering over 100 templates in its theme store. All templates offered are free of charge. There is a wide variety of appearances and many have extra features built in, like sticky menus and product animations.
Shift4Shop themes use responsive design and are very easy to use on mobile. There are a lot of small considerations for helping mobile shoppers, like plus and minus buttons on the View Cart page, so the customer can edit quantities in their order without having to type a number. These are the type of things that are often overlooked.
Customizing Shift4Shop Themes
Shift4Shop themes are based on the Core Templating Engine, which is a framework Shift4Shop developed based on Bootstrap. The Core Templating Engine is responsible for several of the SEO and website performance advantages we covered earlier. It's also quite good for customization because it only uses HTML and CSS for web design. This is in contrast with many other platforms, such as Shopify with its Liquid language and BigCommerce's Stencil design convention.
So, any developer with working knowledge of HTML and CSS can check out the Core Templating Engine documentation and customize any Shift4Shop theme or even build one from scratch. The theme files are easily accessible as well.
But if you're not a developer, you need other tools that edit the code for you. We were pleased to find that Shift4Shop has a Theme Editor for quick CSS edits, like colors and fonts. It also has a Page Editor which is an HTML builder, allowing you to add content blocks to most types of pages on your site. Both of these editing tools show a real-time preview as you work on the site.
Overall, we think Shift4Shop provides great web design whether or not you choose to customize your template. If you do, it's pretty easy to create a unique branded look.
Shift4Shop Pricing
Shift4Shop’s pricing structure is unique from most other eCommerce platform in that it offers a free plan without any restrictions. Unlike platforms that offer a free tier that’s often a "lite" version of the full software, Shift4Shop’s free end-to-end eCommerce plan has all of their features built-in. The only requirement for the free plan is that merchants use Shift4 Payments for payment processing on their online store.
It should be noted that the free plan can only be used by US merchants, as Shift4 Payments is exclusive to the US at the moment. In the case that a merchant can’t, or would prefer not to, use Shift4 Payments, they also offer several paid plans with varying feature sets and support for other payment methods. Here are all of the "small business plans" that they offer:
In addition to these, Shift4Shop also has a Dropshipping plan with a limit of 1,000 products:
Larger businesses can also use the free end-to-end eCommerce plan, as it’s features will automatically upgrade to enterprise-level alongside sales volume. For enterprise businesses looking for a plan without using Shift4 Payments, they have the following options:
Dropshipping and B2B are specialized plans with features specific to those needs, which you keep if you upgrade out of the plan.
This huge variety of plans shows that Shift4Shop is easier both for small businesses to start on, and for larger businesses to grow affordably. Overall the platform is extremely scalable. The Enterprise plans are unique in eCommerce since all other platforms push you immediately to custom quoted pricing, which is usually at least $2,000/month right out the door.
There are also no hidden charges like transaction fees with Shift4Shop, which is something Shopify is known for.
You won’t need to worry about upgrading either – the free end-to-end eCommerce plan has no annual sales threshold. On the other hand, Shift4Shop paid plans do have online sales per year thresholds, but Shift4Shop’s revenue tier system has thresholds much higher than other platforms. It's also worth mentioning that there are so many features built into Shift4Shop plans that you may not need to upgrade at all if you’re within that sales tier. This is especially true for the free plan, as it comes with all of the features found in the Pro plan at no cost.
Shift4Shop Apps and Add-Ons
Apps, plugins, or add-ons are extra features or extensions to install on your store. They often have an extra cost, and can be developed by third parties or the platform itself.
Shift4Shop has a good app store with a variety of add-ons, including connections for other software and services. Many of them are free, while with others, the app cost actually represents the monthly fee of the third-party service provider the app connects to.
Several Shift4Shop features are also available in the app store, so you can buy them separately for your Shift4Shop website if you'd rather do that than upgrade your plan. This is something we have not seen another platform doing. In many cases, it would actually be more cost-effective to just upgrade your plan, but it's good to have this type of freedom.
A close look at Shift4Shop's app store also reveals something very important for those with budget on their mind: none of the apps are "must-have." Many are more advanced substitutes for features already built into Shift4Shop. Compare this with Shopify where apps are almost always required from the get-go, and Shift4Shop comes out to be a lot more cost-effective.
In our opinion, this is the right way to run an app store: it's full of optional extras, not core functionality that should have been built-in.
Shift4Shop Support
Shift4Shop has support available at all times, 24/7/365. Available support venues are live chat, phone call, and tickets. Their support staff is based out of their office in the US.
Enterprise-level businesses can get a dedicated support agent called a Technical Account Manager (TAM) to be their main point of contact.
Support is one of the areas where Shift4Shop gets mixed reviews. Many Shift4Shop business owners are pleased with the results while others feel that it's difficult to get help. This is true for a lot of platforms, but can be frustrating at times.
There may also be a wait time or a queue. But we do feel that overall Shift4Shop support is good, and definitely better than a lot of its competitors.
Shift4Shop Alternatives
The most similar Shift4Shop alternatives are:
Other Shift4Shop alternatives are:
The Bottom Line on Shift4Shop
If you're ready to open an online store, Shift4Shop is an extremely solid choice. The free plan, customizable software, and huge number of features make it a good platform for businesses of any size. Web design is flexible, and while support has its occasional issues, it's generally good.
Shift4Shop has been doing their homework while developing their platform since 1997 and we feel they're a very strong contender in SaaS eCommerce. Their recent software version updates have added more features and shown that they are interested in continuing to grow and expand.
We strongly recommend Shift4Shop to aspiring dropshippers or small startups, because the free plan is extremely convenient for the lowest of budgets. Most other SaaS platforms start at $29/month or so, making Shift4Shop much cheaper.
We feel larger businesses will also do well on Shift4Shop, especially with their extensive enterprise support.
Overall, we consider Shift4Shop an excellent choice for your online business.