Shift4Shop is proud to announce Version 12 of
our robust and powerful eCommerce platform
The constant growth and development of eCommerce means online business owners have to keep up to date, or risk falling behind competitors. Since your online store can only be as good as your eCommerce platform allows, Shift4Shop is dedicated to constant improvement to help our merchants stay ahead of the game.
As part of our mission, Shift4Shop is proud to announce Version 12 of our robust and powerful eCommerce platform. Thanks to valuable feedback from our Shift4Shop merchants, we've added new integrations, enhanced existing features, improved and expanded on our website template selection, and much more.
So, what's new in Shift4Shop Version 12? Read on to discover our exciting new additions and features!
Facebook Commerce is Facebook's platform for creating a Page for your business and selling products through Facebook Shop. Shift4Shop Version 12 is fully integrated with Facebook Commerce, so you can grow your business by selling more on Facebook.
Add products to your Facebook Shop directly from your Shift4Shop store with automatic synchronization. Product names, pricing, images, and complete information are included in the synch, so there's no manual work needed to add your products to Facebook.
All your sales through Facebook are imported into your Shift4Shop store so you can manage everything from within your Shift4Shop Online Store Manager. You won't need to handle your sales separately on both platforms, so you can improve your reach without increasing your workload.
With Facebook Commerce's rich product information, your products will appear in more searches across Facebook Shop, so new customers can find your brand more easily. Facebook's in-depth product search matches all your product details against the search keywords shoppers use.
Having a Facebook Shop is also key to selling on Instagram, which will further boost your brand's visibility. Add links to products directly to your Instagram posts, which will connect with that product's listing in your Facebook Shop, allowing customers to buy your products right from their Instagram feed.
Our new Facebook Ads Manager provides a streamlined way to create, manage, and track your Facebook Ads from within your Shift4Shop dashboard. Once you've completed the onboarding process for our Facebook Commerce integration, you can start using the Facebook Ads Manager to control your Facebook Ads without having to leave your Shift4Shop Online Store Manager.
The built-in Facebook Ads Manager allows you to set up your Facebook Ads using the same ad creation interface you'd see in Facebook itself, except directly accessed through Shift4Shop. You can create and preview your ads, allocate budgets for them, and track the progress of each ad just as you could on Facebook.
Our Facebook Ads Manager makes it even simpler to save time managing your business, as it once again reduces the number of different administrator dashboards you'd need to log into for handling the various aspects of your eCommerce workload.
Google Analytics is one of the most important tools any website owner can use, especially for eCommerce. It allows you to analyze your web traffic and learn crucial details about the people visiting your website — where they came from, how they interact with your site, and how long they browse. Google Analytics V4 is the newest version of Google Analytics and brings even more enhancements to this essential tool.
Artificial intelligence is central to Google Analytics V4's ability to analyze traffic activity on your website and provide you with insights. Machine learning allows the AI to improve its results based on the behavior it observes, so it can anticipate the actions customers are most likely to take. This can help you identify customers your business is likely to lose, so you can take action to retain them.
The better your understanding of your customer base, the better you can serve them — and the more your business can grow. Google Analytics V4 uses multiple data identifiers to help form a more complete overview of each customer's actions and lifecycle of relations with your business, and no longer divides your measurements by the device or platform your customers are using.
Google Analytics V4 provides more control over your Google Ad audiences, allowing even better ad targeting and a higher return on investment. Conversion data is also enhanced with information on conversions originating from ads in apps, and more. You'll also receive automatic alerts to data trends in your website, so you can act on a trend you might have otherwise overlooked.
Thanks to its usage of AI and machine learning, Google Analytics V4 is less reliant on cookies. The goal as stated by Google is to allow data collection while remaining compliant with changing privacy laws that may further restrict the use of cookies on a visitor's computer. You'll continue to get the insights you need even if privacy laws become more restrictive.
Kount is an industry-leading anti-fraud solution that effectively stops fraudulent transactions before they can harm your business. Shift4 Payments and Kount have teamed up to bring this high-quality protection to all our merchants on the free End-to-End eCommerce plan.
Kount is capable of recognizing both criminal fraud and "friendly fraud," so it's equally effective at stopping the use of stolen credit cards and preventing unwarranted chargebacks from customers.
Kount's AI-based automation uses several data points to help determine if a transaction is fraudulent, and to continue to refine its anti-fraud rules to ensure even better protection in an evolving landscape
Kount prevents fraud without causing friction to legitimate customers, and even has a system for identifying good customers to provide them with an even smoother checkout
Thanks to its complex anti-fraud AI, Kount produces up to 70% fewer false positives than other anti-fraud solutions, so legitimate transactions can go through without issues.
With Shift4Shop Version 12, merchants using Shift4 Payments have access to new transaction reports that provide information and management capabilities. In addition to their other capabilities, these reports can be exported to CSV, printed, or saved to a PDF.
This dashboard lists all credit card transaction types including Authorization, Sales, Capture, Fraud Reject, and Refunded. You can filter them by date range, transaction type, and card type used. You can also view details on each transaction and perform any actions that may be necessary, such as rejecting a transaction or whitelisting a fraud false positive.
The Batch Summary Report provides complete transaction records in one place, sorted by batch. They can be filtered by date presets or date range. You can click each batch for more details about the individual transactions within that batch.
The Deposit Report provides a complete record of deposits made to your bank account within a timeframe you can specify, and includes the banking information, amount, and the batch and deposit dates.
The Chargeback Report shows the status of any chargebacks your store may have received, and in Version 12 can also be exported to CSV like other reports.
Our Hosted Invoice Page allows you to set up a complete online invoicing system for your customers! Customers can view and pay their invoice right on your website, see all the details including order information, amounts, and status, and download the invoice and receipt as PDF files.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) specifies several requirements for ensuring businesses are accessible to everyone. While a physical business may require a wheelchair ramp, an online business needs to be accommodating in its own way — primarily, they need to be accessible to people with impaired vision. This means appropriate font sizes and color contrasts, and code structure that's compatible with text-to-speech website reader software.
It can be difficult to check your website for ADA compliance yourself, but now, all Shift4Shop themes have been adjusted to ensure they are ADA compliant right out of the box. This takes yet another burden away from business owners, who can now rest assured that their site meets ADA requirements.
It's getting more and more popular for restaurants to have an eCommerce website. The demand for delivery was rising even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced most businesses to move online, restaurants among them. In response to this increase in demand, we've released a wide variety of new templates for restaurant websites, ready to use as-is or customized to any degree. These templates are all free and include all the advantages of our other themes, like ADA compliance, responsive design, SEO-friendly structure, and more.
These templates are all free and include all the advantages of our other themes, like ADA compliance, responsive design, SEO-friendly structure, and more.
Shift4Shop Version 12 includes several upgrades to your site's checkout, providing an enhanced experience to your customers.
Some online stores simply don’t need to use shipping at all — such as those that only sell digital downloads. You can now hide the Shipping Information section from your checkout through your settings, so customers won’t wonder why you need shipping information for a digital product.
Nothing catches a customer’s eye like the word "FREE," so free shipping will be called just that at checkout, rather than listing a price of $0. You can also edit the verbiage in your Store Language settings.
Don't want to accept customer comments at checkout when they place an order? You can turn this field off, while still allowing for internal comments on orders between you and your Staff Users.
Shift4Shop Version 12 includes built-in free Address Validation for U.S. addresses, improved ZIP code handling, and Google Address Autofill.
We've upgraded our WordPress plugin for full compatibility with the newest version of WordPress, meaning you can bring eCommerce to your WordPress website! Connect the plugin to your Shift4Shop store to embed products anywhere on your WordPress site and/or add a group of products to your WordPress sidebar. You can find installation instructions in our Knowledgebase or check out the Shift4Shop WordPress plugin page.
Your Shift4Shop store also has some new ways to keep you informed of certain important events.
When a new version of Shift4Shop rolls out, you're probably eager to know when your store has received the update. Our new Version Update Notification is an email that will be sent to you when that upgrade happens!
When you log into your Shift4Shop store, the system records your computer's IP address and city of origin for the purposes of comparing it against future login attempts. If someone logs into your store from a different city than usual, you'll receive an email to let you know just in case you didn't authorize the login. It's another way of keeping your business safe!