E-commerce is in demand nowadays. The Internet business area is rapidly growing and provides its users with a lot of possibilities. Shopify has made a revolution in e-commerce which really helped small businesses to rise. Shopify was the first e-commerce software platform that allowed amateurs to establish beautiful and fully functional online stores. However, progress and time don’t standstill. In today’s blog, we will discuss a great Shopify alternative – Shift4Shop.
Why move to Shift4Shop?
Shift4Shop is a perfect replacement for Shopify, but it also has even more features for a reduced cost. Most actions are free so you will no longer have to pay for every unnecessary step. Basically, switching to Shopify would be the best measure to take for you. In addition, Shift4Shop will provide you a lot more tools and functionality, which will make operating your business a lot easier.Shift4Shop will provide you with much more tools and features which of course will ease the process of running your company and clients serving. We have prepared an article to make the transition of your business as comfortable as possible, with no client or data loss.
Transition
Now, when you are acknowledged about the advantages of Shift4Shop, we would like to present some tips, or better to say, instructions for the transition of your business.
First and the most obvious step, you have to register on the Shift4Shop website. It’s totally free so there will be no problems here.
Secondly, you have to decide whether you want to transfer existing products from your current platform to Shift4Shop. In case your e-shop is new and doesn’t have much stuff on it, you could skip this part as it would be easier for you to recreate them manually.
To begin, transfer existing items from your Shopify store to Shift4Shop.
Your Comma Separated Values file will either be downloaded through your browser or sent to you, depending on how many items you have. After you acquire the CSV file, you’ll need to make a few changes to the headers in the document to meet Shift4Shop’s structure.
The amount of settings you can have per product on Shopify is limited, that’s why you will need divide certain items into multiple listings. For instance, a guitar shop may have acoustic guitars with a number of variations of a brand, price, material, type, and color. Although guitars vary a lot, the merchant will have to divide the product as Shopify only supports three alternatives per product. With Shift4Shop you will no longer have a need to separate product listings like this because this platform provides unlimited settings for a product.
Next, you have to transfer your goods or services to Shift4Shop. Depending on the complexity of your items, you may need to import numerous CSV files. You may begin by importing a CSV file of your products into Shift4Shop. If your items have any settings or options, you will need to provide a separate CSV for each one.
Working with CSV files might sound quite frightening at first, but it’s not as tough as it seems to be. If you’re familiar with them, you’ll find them highly useful for saving time over making several manual adjustments. At this stage, you should also think of setting up shipment and payment processes.
You may face some difficulties if you were using Shopify Payments. If so, you’ll need to think of a new payment method to accept credit cards as Shopify Payments wasn’t made to be used outside of Shopify.
Now we are coming to the design stage. Firstly you have to add numerous supplemental pages such as “FAQ” or “About Us”. You won’t be able to move them to Shift4Shop as you did with your data and products though. You don’t need to worry as you can replicate them within half an hour. After adding some information and content pages you will be working with the most exciting part of the transition process. Now you have to think of what your e-shop will look like. You can add colors, pictures and shapes, and fonts. Feel free to create your own unique design with Shift4Shop!
The final step is launching your brand new e-commerce on Shift4Shop and telling your customers about it! You could use newsletter services to ease this process. Before activating your website, you will need to adjust a domain to it. Now, after doing all this work, you are ready to go!
Shopify development services
In case you need someone to help you with the transition process, we highly recommend contacting Shopify development services. Makebecool is the best option for you as they have had 70 various partners, 500 thousand products, more than 1 million orders, 150 thousand users from all over the world. These are just numbers but they still gain your attention, right? We have posted a link to their official website below so you can get consulted about migrating your business.
https://www.makebecool.com/services/migrate-to-shopify
