Dropshipping

Beginner’s Guide to Shift4Shop Dropshipping

Kristina Gjorgievska

Kristina Gjorgievska

Dec 15, 2020 · 10 minutes

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It’s no secret that starting your own online business is much simpler and quicker to do than it was 20 years ago. And with the advent of dropshipping, many new entrepreneurs can now start a business with very little startup capital.

Additionally, with the number of digital buyers increasing as we speak and expected to reach over 290 million by 2025 in the US alone, your chances of building a thriving eCommerce company are looking great. While it has become easier than ever to start selling online, there are challenges present in the decisions you make. Namely, what platform will you choose to sell your products from?

In the world of dropshipping online, there’s no shortage of options available to support your online business. Today, we’ll be guiding you through one such option: Shift4Shop dropshipping.

What is Shift4Shop?

Shift4Shop is an all-in-one eCommerce solution that provides merchants with everything they need to build a successful online store. Since 1997 Shift4Shop has made for a formidable option among the seemingly endless number of eCommerce platforms available with constant updates, hundreds of built-in features, and powerful hosting. Now, they support over 20,000 online stores that range from one-product businesses to huge enterprise ventures.

Recently, Shift4Shop has introduced a plan solely designed with dropshipping in mind. So, let’s dive into whether or not what they have to offer is beneficial for a dropshipping business.

Why use Shift4Shop for dropshipping?

Dropshipping has exploded in popularity, becoming one of the biggest eCommerce methods for new business owners. With that popularity has come a long list of eCommerce platforms offering dropshipping plans and features to help streamline and support dropshippers.

While Shift4Shop isn’t just for dropshipping, they’ve added functionality to their software that provides dropshippers with the features and integrations they need to run their business.

The platform stands out because of its dedicated dropshipping plan that offers merchants everything they need to build a fully-functional, profitable online store – all without transactional fees. Some of the features SHift4Shop provides to entrepreneurs are the following:

• affordable pricing
• exemplary customer service
• marketing built-in features
• convenient hosting features
• payment methods

Let’s take a look at each of them one by one.

Pricing

Shift4Shop is considered one of the most affordable eCommerce solutions. You can sign up for the Shift4Shop Dropshipping plan, or still known as 3dcart dropshipping package, and have all of the basic features you need to build a dropshipping store. The platform charges no transaction fees and includes a domain name with your account.

Their plan comes at $9.99 a month and includes the following features:

• integration with three payment processors
• listing up to 1,000 products
• a limit of $10,000 in online sales per year on this plan before you’re automatically upgraded

However, depending on the agreement length, Shift4Shop offers users the following deals:

• $5.50/month for a 3-year agreement
• $6.00/month for a 2-year agreement
• $6.58/month for a 1-year agreement
• $9.99/month for a monthly agreement

If you’d like more features and unlimited products, you can always opt for any of the other Shift4Shop plans. Here are the rest of the eCommerce plans the platform offers:

• Basic Store: $29/month
• Plus Store: $79/month
• Pro Store: $229/month
• End-to-End eCommerce: 0$/month (for US-merchants only)

Each subscription package differs in yearly sale limits, staff users, and features. Shift4Shop ensures that there’s never a startling jump in cost from plan to plan, so you won’t need to worry about breaking the bank when you upgrade. Just like the dropshipping plan, there is a discount for yearly agreements on each plan.

Shift4Shop $9/month plan vs. Shopify $9/month plan

While you may feel inclined to compare Shift4Shop’s $9/month dropshipping plan to Shopify’s subscription package of the same price, don’t rush into making a decision before getting all the information. As it turns out, the Shopify plan only includes social selling tools, meaning you can’t actually build an online store with it and you’ll have to sign up for Shopify’s $29/month plan to do that. With the Shift4Shop $9/month plan, on the other hand, you can immediately start creating your online storefront.

Customer service & support

To help keep your 24/7 online business running, Shift4Shop offers round-the-clock technical support whenever you run into an issue or have a question about the software. Their team is US-based and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (including holidays). You can reach them over the phone, through support tickets, in live chat, and via email.

Marketing features

Marketing your dropshipping store is extremely important to making any sales. Without it, your website won’t get any traffic. Each Shift4Shop plan, including its dropshipping plan, comes with built-in marketing features to help you get the word out about your business. Some of the best features include:

• SEO Tools: Edit meta titles, descriptions, custom URLs, robots.txt, and more to optimize your website for search engine result pages.
• Social Wish Lists: With this feature, customers can create wish lists to share on social media, which gets the word out about your business to all of their followers and friends.
• MailChimp Integration: Connect with MailChimp to start sending marketing emails, such as newsletters, to your customers.
• Built-In Blog: Create valuable, optimized content directly on your website without having to use a third-party blogging service.
• Google Shopping Feed: Automatically upload a feed of your products to Google Shopping, where searchers can see and buy them instantly.
• Coupons and Discounts: Create your own custom coupons and discounts to incentivize shoppers to buy from your store.

Hosting features

No matter how much traffic your online store gets, Shift4Shop’s servers will be able to support it. All plans, including the dropshipping plan, provide unlimited bandwidth so that your site never goes down unexpectedly. Even if your online store gets millions of visitors, you won’t have to worry about outages or overage fees.

Shift4Shop also provides all stores with a free secure URL backed by their shared SSL certificate. This ensures that your online store is safe and secure, giving your customers confidence when they shop with you.

Payment processing

Shift4Shopt’s dropshipping plan supports three of the most popular payment processors for online selling: PayPal, Square, and Stripe. This may not seem like many options as the dropshipping plan is their most affordable plan, meaning some restrictions have been applied.

If you’d like access to more payment processors, you’ll need to upgrade to the Basic Plan of $29/month, which will give you access to over 100 payment gateways to add to your online store.

How do I dropship with Shift4Shop?

If you’re ready to start dropshipping with Shift4Shop, follow these steps to get your online store built for selling.

1. Sign up for a Shift4Shop account

Go to the Shift4Shop login page and click on “Get Started.” Enter your contact information, billing information, domain name information, and payment details, and finish your registration process.

2. Customize your online store

Once your account is live, choose a subscription plan, and start customizing your store. Shift4Shop has over 50 free themes available to choose from, all of which are responsive for mobile devices and optimized for online selling. You can choose the one that best fits your niche or the one that best fits the brand aesthetic you’re going for.

After you’ve chosen your theme, you can add your logo, change up the colors and fonts, and create sections of content, such as dropshipping ‘About Us’ page, by using the Page Editor. All of these customization tools are built-in, so you won’t need any coding experience to create a custom look.

3. Import your products

With your store design being done, it’s time to start importing your products and making sure at the same time they’re presented to customers in the best light possible, for example, together with appealing product descriptions, good-quality images, and easily accessible ‘add-in-basket’ button. You can do this by importing each product from your dashboard along with the product details you wish to include.

For an even smoother experience, dropshipping suppliers tend to offer plugin features that allow you to integrate your Shift4Shop store with their inventory. For example, with BrandsGateway as part of your dropshipping team, you can do this by conveniently installing the BrandsGateway app from the Shift4Shop Apps section. This will provide you with effortless product import as your virtual storefront will automatically be upgraded with the items, including all future new arrivals.

4. Integrate with payment processors

Now that your products are in your store, you’ll need a way for customers to buy them. This is where payment processors come into play. As already stated above, with the Shift4Shop Dropshipping plan, you can choose to integrate with PayPal, Stripe, and Square. To enable these payment processors, you first need to create an account for each respective service. Then, connect that account to your online store, and you’re ready to go.

5. Optimize your website for SEO

The final step is optimizing your website so that you can get more eyes on your business. In the settings menu, you’ll find Shift4Shop’s built-in SEO toolkit which can help you target relevant keywords, and allow you to edit page titles, meta descriptions, custom URLs, and many more.

In this way, you’ll rank your store higher in search engine result pages, which will lead to more organic traffic. You can track your business’s progress with Shift4Shop’s built-in reporting and analytics you’ll also find on the left-side menu of your dashboard.

Dropshipping with Shift4Shop and BrandsGateway

Your Shift4Shop dropshipping store wouldn’t be complete without a reliable supplier that’ll provide you with a decent shipping time frame, high-quality products, and automated integrations that’ll enable you to benefit from real-time automatic inventory synchronization and automatic orders, among other features.

With BrandsGateway as your partner in business, you can benefit from all of these aspects and many more. In order to start building a strong relationship with this B2B2C eCommerce supplier, just follow these simple steps and you’ll be able to begin your dropshipping journey almost instantaneously:

1. Register as a customer on BrandsGateway at https://brandsgateway.com/register/.
2. Go to https://apps.shift4shop.com/BrandsGateway_p_665.html.
3. Select ‘Install App’ and install BrandsGateway App in your Shift4Shop store.
4. Choose your dropshipping package.
5. Import BrandsGateway catalog.
6. Start selling.

FAQ

Moving forward

Building your online store is just the beginning – it requires constant upkeep and attention to bring in any success. However, with the help of Shift4Shop, you’ll not only be able to create an appealing storefront, but also maintain your store by improving SEO strategies, staying on track with marketing tactics, and keeping an eye on your website’s traffic.

Learn more:

• Shift4Shop vs Shopify

About the Author

Kristina Gjorgievska

Kristina, Head of Content at BrandsGateway. Eternal inspiration: The Doors music and lyrics, Bernardo Bertolucci's timeless “Stealing Beauty”, and the dynamic and meditative Ashtanga Yoga.