Shift4Shop Review: Trailblazers or Just a Hot Mess?

While many of these features were part of the original 3dcart offering, the rebranding as Shift4Shop has seen some improvements in functionality.

A few new features and bonuses — like a gift card program — have been added.

Let’s see if these features are enough to get you and your business fired up!

As an ecommerce business owner, you may not need a physical store, but an online presence is essential — you need a website.

Shift4Shop’s site builder allows you to build niche-specific sites for all kinds of physical products, without any coding skills.

While this caters well to stores taking their business online, if you’re a service-based business, you might struggle to create a website.

Shift4Shop also includes themes that are mobile responsive and optimized for sales to simplify the process.

You can create “About Me” pages, change your website’s language, and upload and categorize all your products as needed.

The Core Template Engine has some attractive features:

The Core Theme Editor that works alongside the Template Engine allows you to customize the color scheme and design of your website.

You can use built-in presets, alter individual elements, or reset your chosen theme to default at any time.

This editor lets you access the files that make up the theme, but it’s not available across all themes, so advanced customization might not be available to you.

Another important area that Shift4Shop supports your ecommerce needs is through its product management dashboard and capabilities.

The software helps you add, edit, manage, and track products with:

Curated customer and user experience (UX) lead to better user journeys which improve your conversion rate.

However, users have stated that Shift4Shop’s interface needs improving — the dashboards are overpopulated and customization is difficult.

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They also include integration with Alvara — a popular sales tax solution.

One of Shift4Shop’s biggest selling points is its abandoned cart recovery capabilities.

Part of the 3dcart procurement deal was access to Shift4 as a payment provider.

Shift4 allows users to:

This is as good as it sounds — but only if you’re an American-based company using their free plan.

If not, you’re stuck with one of their pricier options, buying expensive plug-ins and upsells to achieve the same level of customization and automation.

They say that you can run your business from your device, but full customization options require a desktop — and often a coding or web-design expert.

This tool is feature-heavy, and there’ve been complaints of glitches and difficulty navigating the software platform — issues that are exacerbated when you work on a phone.

This looks like an attractive offer, but many of these come standard as part of competitor platforms, most of which have their own integrated and intuitive analytics and reporting.

Shift4Shop includes a built-in blog, giving you access to content marketing, but no user-friendly guidance on how to create one.

They also include access to a Facebook Shop where you can list and sell your products — but no guidance on policy or use, and no mention of Instagram, where 81% of users go to search for products.

The Shift4Shop ecommerce platform has many offers, but each is missing something:

If you’re savvy about digital marketing, you’ll know that the ability to build and use a sales funnel is an expected feature on digital marketing platforms — unfortunately, Shift4Shop doesn’t yet have that capability.

Look elsewhere if you want to make use of funnel marketing and more complex automation that increases your conversions.

Shift4Shop has gone through many updates on its platform, but the oversights in marketing and SEO cannot be ignored.

Shift4Shop will assist you in registering and owning your domain name and covering the annual renewal costs.

If you choose to move to another service provider, there’s no indication whether Shift4Shop will retain your domain name or allow you to take over the renewal payments.

Much of the information in the support documents are outdated —  the manuals, tutorials, and FAQs are from when the tool was still known as 3dcart.

While the tool is seemingly feature-rich, there are some basic features, like integrated analytics and automation, that are sorely lacking.

Shift4Shop might call itself ecommerce rocket fuel, but the inconsistent support for their customers has them left in the dark.

A criticism of many other ecommerce platforms is the strict limitations set on their free plan — if there’s a free plan at all.

Shift4Shop has its version of a free plan, which has full, unlimited access to all of its features and templates.

However, there’s a catch.

To use the forever-free End-to-End plan, you have to also make exclusive use of the Shift4 payment processor — which has had some suspect behavior flagged by third-party reviewers.

If you’re not willing to put your reputation at risk (and we don’t blame you), then you’ll have to use one of the 3 paid plan options — which are pricey.

This offer is also limited to US merchants only, so if you’re a global customer, you’ll have to pay a premium for even basic access to Shift4Shop.

$229/month for the expensive Pro Store plan still doesn’t get you access to all the features, and you’re limited to $1,000,000 in sales per year.

These pricing plans are complicated and not scalable unless you’re willing to risk using the unreliable Shift4 payment processors.

Users have mentioned that they’re constantly prompted to purchase upsells and add-ons to solve poor software functionality and limitations.

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That’s right, we have a free option too, but this one is actually free — systeme.io has no hidden agenda that puts your reputation on the line.

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Included in the plan you get the following features:

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