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Shift4Shop (ex. 3dcart) Review (2024): eCommerce Solutions Review

A Look at Shift4Shop (formerly 3dcart)

Shift4Shop is an online store builder that has a number of great features, including unlimited disk space and email storage, a free domain for the lifetime of your account, SEO tools, a massive number of payment methods to choose from, point of sale features, and 24/7 support. The platform comes with more than 100 mobile-friendly themes to choose from and is rapidly becoming a major player in the world of online shopping.

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There are currently 200,000+ online stores running Shift4Shop. The company has been around for more than two decades, and they promise 99.94% uptime. There are no monthly fees, so this is a great platform for people that want to get started and pay only as they scale.

Free Forever Plan

Along with the Shift4Shop rebranding, paid plans have been replaced with a Free Premium plan for everyone, with a focus on payment processing instead for monetization. This makes Shift4Shop suitable for stores, from the smallest out there to massive enterprise offerings. The developers have made it easy to move over existing store platforms, so if you have a lot invested in your branding and have already written content and uploaded products, you can save that work instead of reinventing the wheel. For those who do not have a lot of time to invest, the SEO tools, easy to use site builder and other features are a must-have.

A Managed Solution

One of the best things about Shift4Shop is that it is a fully managed solution that is reliable and scalable. You don’t have to worry about putting together a website, installing an ecommerce platform, patching it and running the website – everything is done for you, and Shift4Shop will take care of the hosting, updates, security, SSL and everything else. You can get FTP access to your files if you need it, but everything is handled for you, and they offer Level 1 PCI compliance, which is bank-grade security, along with 256 bit SSL. There is no need to worry about data breaches, because they take things very seriously on the security front.

You are empowered to take extra care yourself, though; if you are worried about your employees getting access to things that they shouldn’t, you can use their role-based access control, and you can also block certain IP addresses. It’s rare for an ecommerce suite to offer so much flexibility and power.

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It is completely free to get started without time limit, so you can take advantage of this to see whether the store is a good option for you. There is no need to mess with complicated hosting or to worry about patching the script – everything is handled for you.

Importing Your Data

Perhaps the best feature of Shift4Shop is how easy it is to move over product data – and look and feel – from other platforms. You can export the product listings from most major ecommerce packages, and then transfer it to Shift4Shop with a few clicks of the mouse, saving you endless hours of typing and uploading pictures.

The end result is that you will get a good SEO enhanced, mobile-friendly website with easy social media links, all ready to go. If you do run in to any problems, it’s easy to get tech support; just raise a ticket, or pick up the phone to get quick answers. Alternatively, take a look at the detailed advice offered in the knowledge base – a lot of common problems are covered there, and that’s often all you need to get up and running.

Is it Worth the Expense?

For small business owners that aren’t used to selling online, the idea of not paying a monthly fee should be a no-brainer, especially as payment processing fees are very competitive and you’ll get a lot of useful features. You may well save a lot of money compared to many rival packages.

The SEO and social media features are a boon for store owners and should increase your conversion rate. The only downsides of the store are that some templates are premium, and support can take a little while to get back to people using the ticket system. If you prefer the convenience of firing off an email, you might get frustrated.

Overall, though, this is a great niche store builder. It is more than affordable, easy to use, and lets you make great-looking stores quite quickly. If your store grows fast, you won’t even need about thinking to upgrade, you’ll already be able to enjoy all premium features with pricing that will scale reasonably.

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