Shift4Shop Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons

• Shift4Shop is a long-standing e-commerce platform that was founded in 1997 out of Tamarac, Florida.
• The experts at Forbes Advisor rank Shift4Shop as one of the best e-commerce platforms for small businesses—particularly for its robust free plan.
• Shift4Shop is a leading competitor of Shopify and with a laundry list of features and tools that e-commerce businesses need, it’s easy to see why.
• In addition to its e-commerce website builder, it also offers an array of tools to help online retailers market their brand and sell more products, such as a built-in email marketing newsletter, a promotions scheduler to automate sales, a built-in blog and numerous integrations for added versatility.

Pros

The main advantages of Shift4Shop are twofold. First, it’s feature-rich, offering the unique tools and functionalities that an e-commerce business needs, such as social wish lists, gift certificates, discounts and coupons, abandoned cart saver, dropshipping integrations, a gift registry and more. Second, it’s competitively priced, making it a good value for price given its long list of quality features. It offers a free plan for businesses that process at least $500 per month in sales and a premium plan for $29 per month.

Cons

It’s worth noting that there are a few disadvantages of Shift4Shop. As appealing as its free plan is, it does require users to process a minimum of $500 per month, which could be prohibitive to new e-commerce businesses that are in the early stages of launching. It also means that the free version is not a means for new users to test-drive the platform and build out their e-commerce infrastructure.

Aside from the limitations of the free plan, it’s not the most user-friendly option on the market. In our experience, it was not very intuitive and felt glitchy. For example, there were a number of instances where buttons we clicked on the site were not responsive. Another thing worth mentioning is that many users report that its customer support needs improvement. However, in our experience with its live chat support, our issue was resolved quickly.

Shift4Shop is a low-cost, high-value platform. It offers one of the most comprehensive free e-commerce plans on the market. It includes access to all of the Shift4Shop features, such as its large template library, its drag-and-drop site editor, unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth, abandoned cart saver, order management (including order notifications), built-in email marketing CRM systems, the ability to connect to integrations and more. However, there are a few caveats to the free plan. First, it requires that users process a minimum of $500 in sales per month, and users must use the Shift4Shop payment gateway (which charges a transaction fee).

For those who do not yet meet the minimum threshold of $500 in sales per month or want to save money in transaction fees, Shift4Shop’s basic paid plan, which starts at $29 per month, grants full access to all features; plus, they have their choice of payment processors.

Shift4Shop is a feature-rich e-commerce platform that is best known for its drag-and-drop website builder that rivals the leading e-commerce website builders, such as Shopify. However, it’s a lot more than a site builder. It also offers e-commerce businesses the tools they need to easily sell online, such as a shopping cart, product and inventory management, order management, a variety of marketing and SEO tools, and a library of integrations to further expand the capabilities of an online store.

Website Builder

Shift4Shop does not entirely function as one would expect. Only certain sections of a web page can be customized from the site editor. While this is commonly the case for product libraries and listings, this is different for aspects, such as the home page hero banner and call-to-action buttons. Instead, users have to customize these elements off-page.

Order Management

Shift4Shop automatically tracks and manages orders that are placed online, by phone or in person. The standard tracking process includes the following stages: new, processing, partial, shipped, cancel, hold, declined and unpaid. It also gives users the ability to add a stage for quotes. Within the order list, it displays the invoice number, order date, name label (if applicable), total price, status (e.g., shipped) and the ability to edit or print the order.

Product and Inventory Management

Shift4Shop offers comprehensive product and inventory management tools to help businesses more effectively manage their stock and keep up with sales. Its interface is a bit dated, particularly when adding a new product. However, it does offer a number of helpful features, such as the ability to search for a product by its name or code, product tags for easy identification as well as the ability to clone a product, access product stats and filter products by category, distributor or manufacturer.

Marketing and SEO Tools

Shift4Shop includes built-in marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) tools to help businesses increase their visibility online and land more sales. For example, it has a promotion manager where users can set up promotional offers, such as two-for-one deals or discounts. It also has SEO tools to help sites get found in organic search, a newsletter builder, shopping engine plugins (i.e., Google Shopping Feed, Google Product Listing Ads, Bing) and Facebook Ads.

However, some of these features do feel a bit light. For example, the newsletter builder is a bit disappointing for anyone who has used an email marketing tool, such as Mailchimp, as it’s text-based and overall very simplistic, unless you want to build newsletters using HTML.

What’s nice about Shift4Shop is how easy it is to sign up for its free plan and quickly start building an online store. To register, it’s a simple three-step process. First, users must input their business name and their industry. In the second step, users are prompted to select a theme from a curated collection of themes relevant to their industry. Upon doing so, users will then be asked to provide their basic contact information, such as their name, email address, business address and phone number. Note that you will be required to verify your phone number and email address before gaining access to your new account.

After successfully verifying your phone number and email address, you will then be redirected to your new account dashboard. In our experience, the setup process was a bit glitchy. For example, the registration process does not ask users to input a password, but upon first accessing the dashboard, it asked us to input a current password in order to create a new one. The issue was resolved within a couple of minutes using its live chat support, but it wasn’t the best user experience.

In our experience, Shift4Shop’s ease of use is a mixed bag. There are some features, such as product management, that are very user-friendly; meanwhile, there are others that are antiquated (such as its newsletter builder), lacking (such as its SEO tools), or worse, very unintuitive (such as its website builder).

In general, those who expect Shift4Shop to offer a very beginner-friendly way of quickly building out a professional e-commerce website might be disappointed. This is because Shift4Shop involves a learning curve—and because it’s not intuitive, the process of learning it can be something of a headache for new users that is comparable to WordPress.org.

There are a number of built-in security measures in place to help uphold the safety of your site and integrity of its sensitive data. In terms of the security features that a user has control over, there aren’t as many as we would prefer to see. It has the standard two-factor authentication and the ability to add users, but not a ton beyond that—and even the user roles are limited.

For example, users can add new administrators; however, there are no other role types, such as contributor or author. This can be limiting, if not risky, for businesses that have multiple users involved in their web management.

Customer support is available 24/7 via phone, live chat and email. In our experience, its live chat support, which is available from the user dashboard, was quick to assist and helpful in resolving our issue. Old user reviews frequently note that support needed improvement. However, that seems to be an issue Shift4Shop has more recently resolved as newer reviews are more positive.

If your sales exceed the cap on any of the paid plans, you will automatically upgrade to the next plan tier. Shift4Shop doesn’t specify if this is done without notice, so it’s best to pay careful attention once you are near those thresholds. And remember, only U.S.-based users can utilize the free plan.

	Shift4Shop	Shopify	Ecwid	Squarespace
Forbes Advisor Ratings
Starting Price	Free with $500 processed per month or $29 per month with no minimum	$29 per month (billed annually)	Free; $14.08 per month (billed annually)	$23 per month (billed annually)
Free Trial Length	15 days	Three days	Not available	14 days
Transaction Fees	None	Varies by plan, starts at 2.4% for in-person transactions (Advanced plan)	None	3%
Drag-and-Drop Site Editor	Yes, though very limited	Yes	Yes	Yes
Product Limit	Unlimited	Unlimited	Starts at 100	Unlimited
Themes and Templates	100-plus	12 free themes and 100-plus premium themes	40-plus	100-plus
Free Domain Name	Yes	No	No	Yes, with annual plans
Multichannel Selling	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Accept Recurring Payments	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes, via Subbly plugin
Dropshipping Integrations	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sell Online Courses	Yes	Yes, via an app	Yes	Yes
Sell Digital Downloads	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Abandoned Cart Recovery	Yes	Yes	Yes, with the Business plan ($29.08 per month if billed annually)	Yes
Coupons, Discounts and Gift Cards	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Email Marketing Tools	Yes, though limited	Yes, via Shopify Email	Yes	Yes
Site Migration Service	Yes	No	No	No
Customer Support	24/7 via phone, email and live chat	24/7 via phone, email and live chat	24 hours Monday through Friday via chat	24/7 via live chat email
Learn More	–	On Shopify’s Website	–	On Squarespace’s Website
Read Reviews	–	Read Shopify Review	Read Ecwid Review	Read Squarespace Review

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Shift4Shop vs. Shopify

Shopify is a leading competitor of Shift4Shop and that’s because the two e-commerce website builders offer very similar feature sets at similar price points. The main difference between the two is that Shopify is easier to learn than Shift4Shop, as it’s generally more intuitively designed.

Granted, unlike Shopify, Shift4Shop offers a free website migration service, so businesses with an existing e-commerce site can take advantage of this service and have their site transferred to Shift4Shop for free. It’s also worth noting that Shopify has a fairly small selection of free themes, whereas Shift4Shop has over 100 free themes. Another factor that can make a difference is that Shift4Shop does not charge transaction fees, whereas most of Shopify’s plans do.

Shift4Shop vs. Ecwid

When comparing Shift4Shop to Ecwid, a major difference is ease of use. Ecwid is a very user-friendly website builder, making it a good choice for web design beginners looking for an easy way to build an online store. Along with Shift4Shop, Ecwid offers a free forever plan; however, it differs from Shift4Shop’s free plan in that it does not allow users to connect a custom domain. Instead, they must use an Ecwid subdomain (e.g., yourbusinessname.ecwid.com). This free plan provides a good opportunity for new users to test-drive the platform; however, it is not suitable for business use, as it does not appear professional (or credible) to use a third-party subdomain.

Shift4Shop vs. Squarespace

Squarespace may be best known as being one of the best overall website builders; however, with its list of ecommerce features and functionalities, it’s also a leading e-commerce platform. In comparison to Shift4Shop, it is far easier to build an online store with. On the other hand, Squarespace does not offer as robust e-commerce management features, such as product management and inventory tracking. For this reason, Squarespace is likely the better choice for small businesses setting up a new online store, whereas Shift4Shop is better for existing businesses looking for an online e-commerce platform to build and manage inventory, sales and contacts.

Shift4Shop is the perfect e-commerce platform for business owners on a budget who expect a lot out of their provider. You can’t beat the features offered with its free plan, especially if you don’t care who processes your payments—just that you get paid.

In our opinion, Shift4Shop is lagging behind the competition in terms of ease of use. It’s just not as user-friendly as leading solutions. However, it does offer a long list of e-commerce solutions that can make an impact on certain online sellers. Plus, it is one of the most cost-effective platforms for e-commerce businesses with high sales volume, as its plans have no transaction fees, nor does it limit the number of products a business can sell.