Shift4Shop (formerly known as 3DCart) is an ecommerce website builder that many users love for its extensive customization capabilities. With a versatile shipping setup and scalable hosting, Shift4Shop is an excellent platform to help build your online store and start selling immediately. By looking at the good and the bad, let’s find out if Shift4Shop is the right website builder for you.
Comparing Shift4Shop to The Best Ecommerce Website Builders
Compared to other ecommerce website builders on the market today, Shift4Shop made it onto our top list due to its limitless customization capabilities. Shift4Shop offers complete control over your ecommerce website by allowing you to personalize each element or develop things from scratch with complete coding freedom.
We reviewed dozens of ecommerce website builders on the market and narrowed them down to the top eight. We looked at each option to see who it’s best for, what features to consider, and how to find the best option for your needs. Want to scope out all of your options? See all of our top picks here.
Shift4Shop: The Good and The Bad
Just like for all ecommerce website builders, there will be good and bad features to consider. After extensive research, we found that Shift4Shop offers excellent features that most users are happy to continue using, with only a few drawbacks. Let’s take a deep dive into both sides of the spectrum before you decide.
The Good
Excellent Customization: Shift4Shop lets you create a fully customizable and responsive website through its comprehensive design software. Within its design software, Shift4Shop offers you access to its core template engine, which lets you produce highly customizable website themes. All Shift4Shop’s themes come with benefits such as Google AMP-enabled product pages, AJAX implementation, deferred JavaScript and CSS, quality-of-life features for shoppers, and fully conversion-optimized checkout.
With a flexible drag-and-drop HTML editor and a core theme editor, you can completely customize your theme design as much as you want. You can change colors, typography, text, and buttons. You can also preview every change in real-time, and the changes won’t be visible to the public until you confirm and save them.
Easy to Build: Needing to know how to code or having design skills is an issue of the past with Shift4Shop’s easy-to-use website builder that helps you create a flawless website in just a few hours. You can build various websites with Shift4Shop, from arts and crafts and apparel to hardware and electronics, Shift4Shop’s website builder gives you all the tools you need to build quickly and efficiently. You can optimize code for quicker loading times, add sticky menus for convenience, or even add product image animations for a special touch.
After building the base of your website, you can easily add an unlimited number of products, so you can start selling your inventory immediately. You can also edit your store language and homepage and add extra pages, such as an about us page or a blog section for additional SEO.
Versatile Shipping Setup: The shipping features on an ecommerce website builder should be as comprehensive as possible, and luckily Shift4Shop offers a simple and versatile shipping setup that lets you display real-time shipping rates to your customers. Not only that, but you can connect your store to several carriers, including USPS, Canada Post, UPS, and FedEx, with more options for international carriers and print pre-filled labels right in your dashboard. You also have the option to set up custom shipping types, such as free shipping, flat rate, and local delivery.
Shift4Shop becomes even more versatile by supplying multiple ship-to-address functionalities, so customers can split orders among other recipients.
Management Functionalities: Shift4Shop offers incredible management software to help you manage your orders and products all in one secure place. This software offers a complete toolset to help you manage orders and products without the need to monitor your store. For order management, you get access to tools like new order notifications, a convenient dashboard, full details on every order, status updates for customers, and advanced automation rules, to name a few.
You can streamline your inventory catalog by organizing each product into an at-a-glance list. You also get access to necessary tools such as bulk import and export, unlimited product images, videos and dynamic zoom, unlimited categorization, and detailed product reports.
Scalable Ecommerce Hosting: If you are looking for reliable and managed web hosting for your ecommerce website—look no further than Shift4Shop. With a 99.9% uptime guarantee and being PCI certified and secure, Shift4Shop’s web hosting is an excellent addition to the overall builder platform. With this specific web hosting, you get a domain name with yearly renewals free of charge, monthly transparent upgrades, 256Bit SSL certificate, FTP access to files, and daily backups.
Cloudflare currently powers all Shift4Shop online stores, which offers a global content delivery network, DDOS attack protection and mitigation, and overall faster speeds with Argo smart routing.
Mobile Commerce: Flexibility is one of the core elements of Shift4Shop, and what would it be without its mobile commerce features. Powering your online store with Shift4Shop allows you to tap into the mobile market with responsive online store design for any device without sacrificing any functionality on desktop. Each theme design is built to maintain speed, convenience, and conversion no matter the device you are buying or selling from.
Shift4Shop makes it possible to run your entire store from your mobile phone or tablet and accept mobile payments with just a few clicks.
The Bad
Customer Support is Lacking: Customer support is always an integral part of any software or platform, and unfortunately, this is the first drawback we found for Shift4Shop. According to many user reviews, Shift4Shop’s customer support was severely lacking, especially for customers outside of the US. One user claimed that after experiencing some issues that left their customers unable to checkout, they put in between 3-5 hot tickets to get the issue fixed as soon as possible and didn’t receive a response for days.
Many other reviewers claimed that when they did reach customer support, the representatives were rude and unhelpful by only giving general advice, especially for technical inquiries. We found the majority of these reviews stemmed from users not getting the appropriate technical support that they needed.
Requires Multiple Add-Ons: Unfortunately, to reach maximum functionality, most online stores built through Shift4Shop will require multiple add-ons, even for basic elements you might assume would be already built in but aren’t. For example, if you want to add a shopping cart to your online store, you will need to install software to make this happen. If you want to increase your SEO, you will need to install a buy button on the backend of your website for customers to check out more conveniently.
If you sell products that often need replenishment and want to benefit from a subscription tool, you will have to install subscription software to access this functionality. While it’s excellent that Shift4shop offers these capabilities, installing too many excess tools can cause your website to run slower than usual or sometimes even crash entirely.
Difficult-to-Navigate Interface: Ever since shifting from 3DCart to Shift4Shop, many users found that the interface became increasingly difficult to navigate, with a high learning curve. A few users felt the infrastructure was outdated, which made changes very hard to do without putting in a lot of effort and time. To make matters slightly worse, Shift4Shop’s customer support team was not helpful in these instances, leaving customers completely stuck and unable to build their website.
Shift4Shop Pricing and Options
Shift4Shop offers three paid pricing tiers that scale with the size of your business and website needs. Shift4Shop also offers a feature-rich free version that includes free themes, fraud protection, and migration assistance. Here is a quick overview of the additional pricing plans:
Basic Store
- $29 per month. Includes two staff users and unlimited bandwidth.
Shift4Shop’s Basic Store pricing plan is perfect for an online store that doesn’t need complex features but needs room for around $100,000 in sales per year. The plan is quite generous despite the affordable price point, as you get access to features like advanced product options, inventory control, multiple ship-to-checkout, report and dashboard, and 3dfeedback. You also get most of the payment processing functionalities and marketing features for SEO purposes.
Plus Store
- $79 per month. Includes five staff users and customer groups.
Shift4Shop’s Plus Store pricing plan is an excellent option for busier online stores that need the space to sell around $250,000 worth of sales per year. The Plus Store plan gives you access to features like product Q&A, product comparison, purchase order module, and FedEx returns. You also get SEO stats, email marketing newsletters, and an abandoned cart saver to improve your overall marketing efforts.
Pro Store
- $229 per month. Includes 15 staff users and advanced search.
Shift4Shop’s Pro Store plan is suited for enterprise-level businesses looking to sell upwards of $1 million worth of products per year. The Pro Store plan offers advanced shipping features like recurring orders, in-store pickup, delivery estimate preview, and pre-orders. This plan also features more in-depth marketing tools such as waiting lists, back-in-stock alerts, and autoresponder campaigns.
Shift4Shop Experts
If you need help designing your website, boosting your SEO, or developing custom codes for your online store, Shift4Shop offers a resource to help you find well-reviewed experts in various fields.
Shift4Shop lets you search for experts by name or field in all areas of the ecommerce space. However, there is also a list of industries you can find experts in, including marketing, web designers, developers, and photographers.
All you have to do is search for a name or find an expert that you think would be most helpful for your business. Shift4Shop makes it easy to find experts by creating detailed profiles for each one.
When you click on an expert’s profile, you will find their business name, expertise, reviews, project rates, location, and an overview of their work. You can also read more about the expert and their experience and qualifications.
Project rates depend on how experienced the expert is, but Shift4shop’s expert prices usually start at $25 per hour and increase per project. It’s important to keep in mind that some of the experts on Shift4Shop’s website are entire firms or agencies and not individuals.
Shift4Shop Dropshipping
Shift4Shop can help you connect with dropshipping suppliers to help improve your shipping strategies and change the way you handle your merchandise.
Shift4Shop can make it easier to implement dropshipping into your business strategy by connecting you with a distributor and handling all the nitty gritty. Shift4Shop lets you send and receive automatic emails from distributors and gives you the distributor’s address for shipping calculations.
Not only does Shift4Shop connect you with distributors, but it also calculates accurate shipping rates and dropshipping automation with built-in integrations and lets you work with aggregators, which will help you find a slew of vetted suppliers through a single system.
Speaking of aggregators and distributors, Shift4Shop offers a list of dropshipping suppliers that you can connect with straight away, including:
- Doba
- Worldwide Brands
- AliExpress
- InventorySource
Shift4Shop will ensure the entire dropshipping process is inexpensive, there will be less of a supply chain hassle, and it will be easier for your business to grow.
The best part is that the dropshipping process through Shift4Shop is completely free, and there will only be fees depending on the dropshipping supplier you choose.
How Shift4Shop Ranks
Shift4Shop ranks on our top list because of its limitless customization, ease of build, and flexibility. With a versatile shipping setup, incredible management functionalities, and even secure web hosting, many users are happy to invest in Shift4Shop to build their website.
Here is a short overview of the best ecommerce website builders:
- Shopify – Best ecommerce website builder for most
- Web.com – Most powerful fulfillment & inventory features
- Wix – Best for beginners
- BigCommerce – Best for rapid scaling
- Squarespace – Best for showcasing and selling creative work
- Weebly – Best for small stores that want to stay small
- Shift4Shop – Best for limitless customization
Summary
Overall, Shift4Shop is a decent ecommerce website builder for most users because of its limitless customization and ability to give the user complete control over their website.
With additional services such as experts and dropshipping, you can create a fully personalized website that not only looks great but can assist you in selling and shipping your products with ease.
