Last Updated | August 2022

Shift4Shop is one of the best ecommerce platforms for 2022. It is a cloud-based, all-in-one eCommerce platform for online businesses. The company is an affordable platform that is easy to use and includes everything that allows you to start, run, and develop an online store. Shift4Shop has over 200 features such as communicating with consumers, sending newsletters, providing a gift registry, running an affiliate program, using a robust product review system, etc. You won’t need to buy any additional apps or themes or pay transaction fees.

Overview Of Shift4Shop

Established in 1997, Shift4Shop is one of the oldest e-commerce software platform providers on the internet. This website builder was originally named 3dcart and, in 2020, after being acquired by Shift4 Payments, was renamed and rebranded. Today this provider is known as Shift4Shop. The organization is enhancing its reputation and experience serving online sellers and introducing new features that will help grow its consumers.

The feature-rich platform includes powerful tools to help your businesses succeed and has everything from website creation to product listing, inventory and order administration, marketing, and customer management. It also provides a free plan and plans at varying price points, suitable for many businesses of all types and sizes across the globe. Today, Shift4Shop serves more than 200,000 customers. Its customers can choose from numerous professionally-looking templates that are SEO optimized and very customizable.

Whether you look at the free or paid plans, Shift4Shop was built to support the growth of your business. So if you have a growing business or plan your business to grow in the future, Shift4Shop will be suitable for you. And if you already have an existing eCommerce website, Shift4Shop has tools to help you migrate to the platform without any charges.

Who Should Use Shift4Shop?

Shift4Shop is excellent for new online companies, from startups to enterprise-level businesses. The platform’s feature-rich platform, combined with its affordable pricing structure, can fit into the most restrictive budget. The provider has a free plan and three paid plans to choose from. The fully-loaded free plan delivers enterprise-level features that appeal to every business, from startups to large corporations.

Shift4Shop is easy to set up and use, and it does not require its users to have any web design or HTML / CSS programming knowledge. Shift4Shop offers various marketing tools that will help you promote your online store. With Shift4Shop, you will get:

• Easy-to-use website builder;
• Beautiful templates;
• Affordable plans;

Shift4Shop is scalable and designed to grow your business, no matter which plans you look at. So, if you currently have a growing business or want to grow your business, Shift4Shop will be a great choice. Also, If you already have an existing website, Shift4Shop provides tools that can help you migrate your existing eCommerce website to their platform for free.

My first experience working with Shift4Shop was great. I have activated my account and launched my website within a day. Everything was simple to find, navigate, and comprehend from a beginner’s perspective.

So, keep reading this Shift4Shop review to learn about the basics of the Shift4Shop website builder and its features to see if Shift4Shop is the best website builder provider for you.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Cons:

Shift4Shop is a popular website-building platform with more than 200 features and 200,000 users. Its templates made by professionals and its easy-to-use editor are among Shift4Shop’s primary features.

 

Get Started With Shift4Shop

Shift4Shop Rating: Breakdown

To properly evaluate the Shift4Shop website builder in this Shift4Shop expert review, we conduct a thorough and continuous testing of the platform. We examine its functionality, evaluate its work across devices, and estimate the risks through the testing process. To get the most accurate results from the testing, we use specific parameters. So, here are the ones we used in this Shift4Shop brand review.

Ease Of Use (Is It Easy To Use Shift4Shop?)

Shift4Shop has put a lot of thought into building the back-end of the e-commerce platform so that anyone can use it to start an online store. It’s user-friendly, and the flexibility and quality of the tools it provides are excellent. It’s simple to sign up for the platform, and learning how to manage it doesn’t take long. Everything in the online store builder is quite simple to understand, and the quick design bar allows you to adjust elements of your website design without having to update the HTML.

The first step in setting up your account is to go to shift4shop.com and click on Pricing on the homepage.

Next, you should choose the plan you want. As said before, Shift4Shop offers a free plan but, unfortunately, is only available for merchants in the USA, so if you’re not in the USA, you will have to choose one of the paid plans.

Once you choose the plan you want, you should set up your account and fill in your information.

Firstly at the top of the page, you can see the plan you’ve chosen or change it for another one if you wish. Then, you should provide basic information that includes your contact information such as email, and phone, then billing information such as first name, last name, company name, country, address, city, state/province, and zip/postal.

Next, you should fill in your domain information, such as migrating one you already own or adding a new one, and payment details such as card name, number, CVV, and expiration date. Then you should agree to Shift4Shop’s terms and conditions and click on Get Started.

Once you register your account, you can start using the setup wizard to build your site. The wizard guides you by setting up your company details, such as product categories, adding products, and shipping before launching the store. The wizard will also allow you to personalize invoices, including the invoice logo, numbering system, and invoice terms.

First, you should add your store’s name and the types of products you want to sell. Next, you will get a set of available themes for your site. The process of selecting and customizing a theme is straightforward. Then, you have access to your dashboard. Shift4Shop offers a clean and intuitive dashboard, and it was easy to find, navigate and customize my storefront and add products and images. Existing orders, product inventory, and customers are displayed on the dashboard. Shift4shop’s dashboard includes the View Store button that allows you to open a new window and the changes you’ve made on your site.

Next, in the menu, you have access to Orders, Customers, Products, Reports, and Marketing.

Shift4Shop is a website builder and allows you to edit more than 100 templates using CSS and HTML. Products, pages, categories, and blog posts can all be added. Adding a product is simple, and there are various alternatives available. You can either import a file containing your product database or add each product individually. Fill in the product title and description fields before dragging and dropping several photos. You can add multiple options from the same page in your admin, such as color or size. You can also highlight regular and discount pricing on a product page and tag products for standard or free shipping. In addition, Shift4Shop lets you sell digital or physical goods.

Shift4Shop Value For Money – Pricing & Plans

Shift4Shop offers a variety of four different subscription plans, aside from the free plan. The plans come with great features and are suitable for eCommerce businesses. The paid subscription plans range from $29 to $229 per month. Let’s look at the plans and what they offer, so you can get the needed information needed to make a purchase.

If you go with the free plan, you will only have to pay your transaction payment processing fees, which can be processed through your chosen integrated payment processor.

Because the free plan is only available to U.S.-based merchants, the international users will have to purchase one paid plan. Unlike the free version, these plans include a growing number of features and capabilities and no additional transaction costs. Auto-shipping, autoresponder email campaigns, pre-orders, back-in-stock notifications, and other automated features are included in the most expensive plan, Pro Store. Shift4Shop paid plans also allow testing the platform and using the plan for free for the first month.

Regardless of the plan you choose, from the free End-to-End to the top-tier Pro, each comes with a robust set of features. You can also migrate your e-commerce website if you currently have one on a different platform for free.

Shift4Shop is one of the most potent free website builders available. It has excellent features and performance, and its built-in PayPal integration keeps payment processing costs to a minimum. Shift4Shop is a perfect option for online sellers trying to cut costs. So, we gave Shift4Shop a 9.7 for the price to value ratio.

Templates (Design Flexibility)

All of the store themes that Shift4Shop offers are free, and there are more than 100 themes available to its users. Shift4Shop categorizes its themes under Apparel, Art, Books, Fashion, Electronics, Food & Drink, Health, & Beauty, etc.

The themes from Shift4Shop are intensely focused on displaying a wide range of products on your homepage, which may be an issue if you don’t offer many different things. So, if you want to sell a small number of different things, you might want to look into other website builders.

It’s nice to know that it’s simple to try out different options and that Shift4Shop’s themes automatically adjust to different screen sizes. As a result, your customers can easily purchase from your business, whether using a computer or a mobile phone.

Let’s look at some of the themes that Shift4Shop offers.

The Coffee Lover theme is a subtle yet strong theme built on Shift4Shop’s unique Core Template Engine, which offers lightning-fast website load times, complete mobile device adaptability, SEO friendliness, etc. Your customers will be greeted with your photos promoting promotions, new arrivals, top sellers, or whatever else you add to your site. The most significant navigation is found in the header menu, with additional room in the footer for more pages. The theme colors are brown and tan with plenty of whitespaces to make your online store visually appealing.

The Hayway theme is simple and well-organized. This theme has blue and orange colors, and sellers can use the large banners at the top and middle of the page to showcase their best products or upcoming sales. This theme features a large visible search bar in the middle of the home page’s header, making it easy for customers to navigate your store. Hayway’s seamless animations and transitions create a professional and engaging experience for any customers on both the home page and product pages.

Shift4Shop offers a variety of themes for free that are easily customizable. You can change and customize your theme whenever you want, and all of them have a mobile-friendly design. So, we give Shift4Shop a 9.7.

Features and Tools

Shift4Shop offers a variety of features that are tailored to help you improve your website and customer experience. Shift4Shop also has many powerful out-of-the-box features that will help you attract more traffic to your products and are suitable for social and mobile online commerce. The Shift4Shop features enable users to create an eCommerce site that will reach its utmost potential.

1. Useful Tools

Shift4Shop offers an extensive set of useful tools to help you customize, secure, and improve your website and make your customer’s experience pleasant. Shift4Shop provides your domain name that is renewed each year. You also get transparent monthly upgrades. In addition, Shift4Shop provides an SSL certificate included with all online stores. Also, Shift4Shops provides a built-in RMA system (Return Merchandise Authorization) that enables you to create selectable choices for customers to tell you why they want to return their product.

2. Security

Shift4Shop website provides all the security technologies you need to keep your site safe. Shft4Shop is PCI certified and secure with a guaranteed 99.9% uptime and 24/7 monitoring. Your website’s data is safe and secure with Shift4Shop because it includes daily data backups if you delete any file that you might need to restore.

Shift4Shop also provides DDoS Attack Protection and Mitigation. Your online store is protected from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks with Cloudflare’s mitigation and protection approach, protecting your site from every kind of attack.

In addition, Shift4Shop provides an IP Blocking Security Feature. If you need to block someone from reaching your site, you can use this feature or prevent employees from accessing the store’s orders.

3. App Market

Shift4Shop provides an app store with more than 350 add-ons available to choose from. It includes some apps that can be pretty useful. Also, connecting an app with your Shift4Shop store is easy.

You will find free and paid integrations arranged in various categories within a drop-down bar for easy browsing. You can find apps in mobile commerce, Cart abandonment, Order management, Email marketing, Dropshipping suppliers, product feeds, SSL certificates, Sales tax software, and Inventory management. You can also download Zapier and choose from 1,500 additional apps to connect to your store.

If the apps you need aren’t already accessible, Shift4Shop also has a RESTful API that your developers can use to create new integrations. Many apps in the store have user reviews and ratings, so you can see what other people think of them. Some of their most popular integrations from Shift4Shop are Mailchimp, Aweber, eBay, Amazon, Facebook Shop, Google Analytics, PayPal, QuickBooks, Xero, Walmart, Square POS, etc.

4. Social Media Integration

Shift4Shop allows you to sell through your social media platforms and makes it easy to sell on Facebook. All of the provided plans come with $50 ad credits. You can use social bookmarking capabilities to promote your online store on other social media sites.

With Shift4Shop, you can create customizable buy buttons from your dashboard and add them to social media posts to allow customers to shop directly from your posts or profile pages. You can also use HTML buy buttons to embed shopping cart functionality into any web platform that accepts HTML code.

5. Blog

Shift4Shop provides built-in blog tools you can use to inform and entertain your customer base and boost your SEO. The blog feature is also excellent for drawing more traffic to your website. Your customers can subscribe to your blog and receive updates whenever you release a new article.

6. Business Features

Shift4Shop has all the business features you would expect from one of the best ecommerce solutions. Shift4Shop enables you to create and customize your online store from a selection of free and premium themes. Then you can improve your site with SEO, marketing features, or Facebook Store integration.

Marketing

Shift4Shop includes many excellent marketing features for your website you can access from your dashboard. All of the plans have Single-page checkout, Google customer reviews, Upsell and cross-sell, Saved carts, Returns RMA, and CRM tools. Coupons and discounts, Group deals and daily deals with countdown timers Wish lists, gift registries, gift certificates, Customer questions and reviews on product pages, and Abandoned cart notifications. Email marketing newsletters are available on the Plus plan. The Pro and End-to-End plans include a waiting list, back-in-stock alerts, and autoresponder campaigns.

Shift4Shop also provides an in-built affiliate marketing program, rewarding every customer with a commission if they refer additional customers to your online store.

Selling Online

With your Shift4Shop store, you can manage your inventory. Robust inventory management tools are turned on by default and automatically track your products with every order. Shift4Shop allows you to set up alert emails to remind you to resupply when your products are sold-out, and you can set up what happens to your products if it runs out.

If you operate a physical store in addition to your online store website, Shift4Shop offers a built-in module on all plans. It’s compatible with Stripe and USAePay. You can also activate seamless integrations with POSitouch and Harbortouch or use other POS systems, including Square Register and GiftLogic.

In addition, Shift4Shop supports international eCommerce, with around three dozen global credit card providers and digital wallets, and international shipping options.

Shipping Tools

Shift4Shop offers various shipping tools on all of its plans, such as real-time shipping, the ability to print labels, tax display, and split shipments for multiple locations. With the Plus and Pro plan, your Shift4Shop store includes FedEx hold-at-location (HAL) and FedEx returns. With the Pro and End-to-End plans, you get in-store pick-up options, and your customers have access to the delivery estimate previews and shipment delivery notifications.

Payment Getaways

Shift4Shop supports payments with Shift4 Payments, a built-in payment processor. If you choose the free End-to-End eCommerce plan, Shift4 Payments must be set as your default payment processor. If you opt for a premium plan, you can choose from more than 160 different payment options, giving you and your customers the flexibility to select the payment methods you want.

PayPal, Stripe, Square, and Authorize.net are some of the most popular payment processing solutions. Other available checkout options include Visa Checkout, Masterpass, Apple Pay, Google Pay, financing and pay later options, Bitcoin, and on-file customer payment information.

SEO

Shift4Shop provides built-in SEO tools that help to optimize your products and website. Shift4Shop total SEO system gives you the power to rank higher on Google within a short time. That includes SEO-friendly URLs that contain long-tail keywords, customizable Meta descriptions, search-friendly navigation structure, social share buttons, customizable headings, image alt tags, and Google Analytics integration. Other SEO features include sitemap builder, email campaigns, gift cards, and affiliate referrals. Furthermore, your product pages will automatically be compatible with Google AMP for optimal Google Rankings. Also, you can connect to Google Analytics and view your store’s statistics from your dashboard.

Performance

All of Shift4Shop stores are powered by Cloudflare. With the Cloudflare integration, you will have fast and most secure content delivery. Cloudflare is a content delivery network with a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. Shift4Shop has PCI-certified eCommerce that guarantees the performance and security of your online store.

1. Speed Page

Shift4Shop, powered by Cloudflare, delivers all the website content faster through its expansive network of advanced data centers worldwide. Cloudflare’s CDN reduces load times and improves the reliability of your online business by caching and delivering website content closer to users and load balancing traffic. The provider has web hosting facilities with multiple data centers and points of access across the country. We tested the loading speed of Shift4Shop, and the website created with Shift4Shop took 1.85 seconds to load fully, which is excellent.

You can also have faster speed with Argo Smart Routing, provided by Shift4Shop. Cloudflare’s content delivery network uses Argo technology to analyze and optimize routing decisions in real-time, ensuring that consumers avoid traffic and disruptions when visiting your site. With Cloudflare’s network routing, you may expect typical request speeds of 9 milliseconds.

2. Uptime and Response Time

From its initial inception to hundreds of millions of transactions, the platform is equipped to handle whatever your online store requires.Shift4Shop offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. I ran an automated check on a website to test its uptime to guarantee it was still online, and Shift4Shop performed great. The site stayed up and running at all times. In addition, Shift4Shop performed very well in the response time testing.

Based on the tests performed and the results, we give Shift4Shop a 9.6 for performance.

Help and Customer Support

You can easily access Shift4Shop customer support and ask whatever questions you want because it provides you instant chat support on every page. Shift4Shop customer support is available 24/7, every day of the year, to users on all plans. Besides the live chat, you can access Shift4Shop’s customer support via email and phone. Their customer support is fast and incredibly helpful, and you always get a quick response. You can also submit a support ticket directly from your store admin or the Shift4Shop website. Shift4Shop provides community support forums that can help and support their users, and the users can also share their own experiences and knowledge. The Shift4Shop agents regularly offer help and responses there.

In addition, the eCommerce platform provides an online Help Center and a knowledge base with numerous tutorials, articles, and helpful resources. And there, you will be able to find the answer to most questions you might have related to site design, customer management, products, marketing, settings, etc. Shift4Shop also provides an extensive blog and has various guides that can help you.

Shift4Shop also gives you the option to contact experts that you can search by name. These expect are willing to partner with you on your design, marketing, and development needs.

Shift4Shop Example Sites

Look at some of the websites created usingShift4Shop to get a clearer sense of the platform. These are real-world websites that real businesses and people have created utilizing its simple editor.

Under the Carolina Moon (Online Store)

Under the Carolina Moon is an online store that sells apparel. The company uses a minimalist design with chic colors like cool grays and teals. Their store is focused on their clothes and accessories, so they let their product photos be the central attraction in the site’s design.

Unicus Decor (Online Store)

Unicus Decor is an online furniture store. Its site has an elegant design, stylish and sophisticated. It has elements like a long black category bar, an animated drop-down menu, and a profile-filling photo of high-class interior design.

Faucets + Fixtures Overstock (Online Store)

Faucets + Fixtures Overstock is an online store that sells faucets and sinks. The store’s website has a sleek and efficiently designed website that immediately shows customers what they sell. The site has light black color with bright orange accents.

Shift4Shop Review: Summary 

Shift4Shop is one of the most excellent all-in-one eCommerce platforms. Shift4Shop is best suited to users with moderate technology knowledge and stores with a wide range of products and product options. The mild learning curve of Shift4Shop appears to be well worth the investment, given the amount of power and control you have over your store, and once you get the hang of it, everything will be straightforward. Shift4Shop is also an excellent option for entrepreneurs who want to enter the market quickly.

Shift4Shop offers paid plans and a free one that is only available in the USA. If you sign up for the free plan, you will only pay a transaction fee and access to Shift4Shop’s marketing, product management, and CRM features. The paid plans that Shift4Shop provides are affordable. Also, there are no transaction fees, and you get unlimited products for all plans.

Shift4Shop provides a set of robust and flexible eCommerce features that can be used in a variety of ecommerce company models. Shift4Shop delivers a vast array of payment processing gateways and easy payment integration. Also, the marketing and SEO tools it provides are excellent. In addition, Shift4Shop provides various ready-made apps that will help you improve the design of your website. There are many modern free themes available on the theme store, and all of them are mobile-friendly and responsive to all devices and browsers. Shift4Shop is also very secure and protects your website from viruses and malware.

So, if you are still not convinced that this is the best website builder for you after reading our Shift4Shop expert review, we always recommend that you test it out before making any decisions. And it will only take you a few seconds to sign up for your account.

Shift4Shop User Reviews

While doing this Shift4Shop brand review, I found many Shift4Shop customer reviews online, and after spending some time reading customer reviews, and comment threads, here are the most common Shift4Shop reviews.

There are many positive tools that Shift4Shop offers, and most of the Shift4Shop reviews I read were positive. Most of its users liked that it was easy to use and that Shift4Shop provided many features. However, I pas a few negative Shift4Shop customer reviews saying that its software is not the easiest to learn to use.

There were many positive Shift4Shop reviews regarding the affordable plans it provides. And the USA users that we’re able to take advantage of the free End-to-End plan find that it offers an impressive array of features for the price. The customers also liked Shift4Shop’s Out-Of-The-Box Features. The provider offers various features at every price point. However, some customers found the add-ons expensive.

Some of the customers weren’t satisfied with the themes provided by Shift4Shop. While they are all free, they felt like the themes aren’t bad, but they aren’t stunning either.

The opinion of the customers was divided regarding customer service. Some customers claimed that Shift4Shops customer agents had a slow response time, but most of the customers were satisfied with the customer support agents.