Times change, and services change with them. Many web hosting services feature online store options, and many e-commerce platforms include web-hosting and website-building tools. Likewise, 3dcart has shifted with the times, and that includes a name change: the e-commerce service is now known as Shift4Shop, following an acquisition by Shift4 Payments. In practical terms, this means that 3dcart’s features and pricing, which were pretty standard in the marketplace, now offer a robust free tier. While its overall feature set still isn’t quite as deep as our Editors’ Choice picks, Shopify and Wix Stores, Shift4Shop may prove attractive to shopkeeps on tight budgets who want to add a product inventory and shopping cart to their websites.
Shopping Cart Packages
Shift4Shop offers four pricing tiers, starting with its $29-per-month Basic plan. It, like all Shift4Shop’s plans, lets you sell unlimited products, and enjoy unlimited monthly data transfers, free domain registration (for a year), zero transaction fees, 24/7 customer support, a Facebook store, a built-in blog, product reviews, phone orders, application programming interface (API) access, point-of-sale (POS) support, and other features. Unfortunately, Basic limits you to $100,000 in sales per year, and just two user accounts.
Despite those restrictions, the Basic tier is a comprehensive package that stacks up well against Shopify and Wix Stores. The former has transaction fees, but no annual sales limit with its $29-per-month Basic plan; the latter lacks transaction fees and annual sales limits with its $23-per-month Business Basic plan.
With Shift4Shop’s $79.99 per month Plus package, you receive five staff accounts, access to a customer-side product comparisons, blog subscriptions, abandoned cart savers, email marketing, and daily deals. At this tier, you can sell up to $250,000 in goods per year. The $229-per-month Pro plan gives you 15 staff subscriptions, email auto-responders, gift registries, loyalty programs, recurring orders, pre-orders, and priority support, with a maximum of $1 million in sales per year. There is an Enterprise-level tier of service, but pricing is only available via quote.
Like Pinnacle Cart and Shopify, Shift4Shop offers a free trial period—15 days, to be exact. As a result of the acquisition, the e-commerce service now has an entirely free tier. Think of it as the carrot to entice users to use Shift4 Payments; it offers all the features of the company’s Pro plan, but without a monthly subscription. It also removes staff account caps and sales volume limits, technically making it better than the Pro plan (though, you pay a 2.9 percent + $0.30 transaction fee). Ecwid is one of the few e-commerce competitors that offers a free plan, and it falls far short of Shift4Shop in terms of overall features.
Building a Shift4Shop Store
It’s easy to sign up for a Shift4Shop store. First, the service asks for your store’s name, and the types of products that you plan to sell. This results in a small list of preset themes to get you started. Then you enter your name, address, email address, and phone number. After this, the process then stalled for us, saying that a site was created, but it didn’t forward us to the new page. A slight speed bump there. Replicating the sign-up process with a new email account (since the other one was now listed as taken) brought us to the dashboard.
The dashboard displays information about existing orders, product inventory, and customers. When we first visited the dashboard, the site launched a window that contained a nine-step wizard to help us select a template, add products, and define payment options before launching the store. We could also dig deeper through each menu for Orders, Customers, Products, Reports, and Marketing. The wizard walks you through setting up your company information, and it also lets you customize invoices, including the logo that appears on the invoices, the numbering system, and invoice terms. The first time you click each section, pop-ups highlight each page’s major features. We found that incredibly helpful.
Shift4Shop offers a website builder and the ability to customize the more-than-100 templates via CSS and HTML. You can also add products, pages, categories, and blog posts. Here’s where the experience stumbled. The drag-and-drop editor is obtuse, and not aimed at the neophyte website builder. Dragging simple sections is possible, but editing each section is separated into different menus, instead of being available all in one place.
For example, section editing is done in the Content section, while switching themes is done in the Settings section. When editing our theme, we clicked the Carousel to change the image, only to have the dashboard open inside the theme editor (that’s because Carousel images are located in the Design section). It’s just amazingly unintuitive compared with GoDaddy Websites + Marketing and Wix Stores.
There are several options for adding products. You can import a file containing your product database or individually add each product. You can add images, mark standard and sale pricing, and tag items for standard or free shipping on a product page. As with PinnacleCart, Shift4Shop lets you sell digital or physical goods.
We had the choice of using an existing domain, registering a domain through Shift4Shop and letting the company act as my domain registrar, or using a generic domain name assigned by the site. For the purposes of this review, we used the latter, which gave us a .shift4shop.com domain that began with a long alphanumeric string.
Shift4Shop supports add-on tools, such as tax calculators and marketing tools, and integrates with accounting software (Intuit QuickBooks), fulfillment systems (Shipwire), email-marketing services (Constant Contact), chat apps (Olark), and affiliate-marketing tools (ShareASale). Shift4Shop also lets you link to a Facebook page where customers can directly purchase items and share your products. You manage Facebook sales through your dashboard.
Customer Experience and Dashboard
As a seller, you must pay attention to the shopping experience. After all, customers who can’t easily find the pickles on your site will go elsewhere. Fortunately, our Shift4Shop storefront was easy to navigate from a buyer’s point of view, from selecting a product to checking out.
On the seller’s side, Shift4Shop’s dashboard displays the transactions in a logical format, making them easy to track. Back orders are possible with Shift4Shop, too. Like most other shopping cart tools, Shift4Shop also keeps track of how many products you have left before something goes out of stock. You can also see daily sales totals, new orders that have come in, new orders to you need to fulfill, and monthly sales statistics. Considering the plans vary by site visits and products sold, you need to regularly check your Reports page to track your usage.
Shift4Shop integrates with 100 other payment gateways, such as Authorize.net, BitPay, Dwolla, and PayPal. By default, the platform offers PayPal and Stripe. For this review, we set up PayPal Express Checkout. Remember that PayPal sets its own credit card transaction fees. Shift4Shop also supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, MasterPass, Pay With Amazon, and Visa Checkout.
Finally, Shift4Shopt offers an extensive collection of video tutorials, which are clear, easy to follow, and readily accessible. The e-commerce service also has 24/7 phone support, and live chat that is fast and incredibly helpful. In fact, when looking in the site builder and pondering how to change themes, the live chat representative quickly came to our aid. Shift4Shop is helpful overall, even if its site builder tools are poorly designed.
A Nice Mix of Advanced Features
Compared to other shopping cart software, such as the top-notch Shopify or Wix Stores, Shift4Shop isn’t the shiniest option, but it offers high-quality reporting tools, gift certificates, live chat software, and other notable features. In addition, Shift4Shop’s free tier is a terrific option if you’re on a tight budget, even if it locks you into Shift4 Payments.
Unfortunately, Shift4Shop’s website site builder has a confusing layout, which makes the service fall behind the competition in terms of ease of use. Although we consider the Editors’ Choice tools more robust and more user-friendly options, Shift4Shop’s price points demand that you at least give it some consideration—if you’ve had significant website builder experience.
For more on e-commerce, check out Building an E-Commerce Website: 8 Technical Aspects You Need to Know and How to Secure Your E-Commerce Website.
Fahmida Y. Rashid contributed to this review.
