The Best Zoey Alternative for Your Online Business
Choosing the right B2B eCommerce platform for your business
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Zoey is a SaaS eCommerce platform built on the Magento framework, an open-source eCommerce platform, and designed with B2B online stores in mind. Mainly focussed on supporting larger enterprise-level businesses (with larger budgets), Zoey has risen to become a popular option for B2B organizations looking for an eCommerce solution.
Shift4Shop is a feature-rich eCommerce platform serving businesses of all sizes in a wide range of industries across the globe. Offering an unmatched free eCommerce solution, the company provides everything you need to start — and grow — your business. This turnkey eCommerce experience includes powerful tools to help businesses succeed — a robust website builder, product and order management, customer marketing tools, and more. Customers can choose from dozens of professionally designed, industry-specific templates, all of which are mobile-friendly, SEO optimized, and highly customizable.
If you're running a a B2B operation, then there's a long list of features that need to be available to your business in the eCommerce solution that you use. You're also likely to have a higher budget to accommodate for that more advanced feature set, so the solution that's right for you may come at a higher cost than most software designed for B2C eCommerce. However, that doesn't mean you need to be paying an arm and a leg for eCommerce essentials or, even worse, for functionality that's missing important features. As a B2B company, you need more options when it comes to customizing customer roles and experiences, managing more employees, and selling a large inventory of products.
Unfortunately, Zoey charges high prices for limited features, and even recently chose to obscure their pricing behind a quote system. While their pricing was still available, it was clear that they were ready to overcharge B2B sellers at every turn, even for features a large business would rely on — like increased numbers of staff accounts, customer groups, and SKUs. But even with everything Zoey does offer as part of its platform, you won't have access to customer-focused touchpoints like a CRM system or email marketing newsletters to keep in contact with your buyers before and after they do business with you. For functionality like this, you're forced to pay extra for expensive add-ons and integrations.
With Shift4Shop, you won't have to worry about lost functionality at higher-than-normal prices. Shift4Shop understands the specific needs of a B2B company, and includes a rich feature set for any size of business, including huge B2B enterprises. You're never limited in what you can do with your customers and how you can keep in contact with them either, since you'll also have built-in access to email marketing newsletters, blogs, a CRM and much more. And best of all, if you choose Shift4 Payments as your payment provider, you can get a fully scalable, unlimited Shift4Shop account for free.
Shipping FeaturesAlthough shipping can already be complex in typical eCommerce, B2B customers require an entirely new level of shipping complexity. Your B2B eCommerce solution needs to have real-time shipping rates available to customers, helping them make more informed decisions about cost when buying from your store. Unfortunately, Zoey doesn't have this functionality built in, relegating it to a third-party add-on like ShipperHQ. The B2B eCommerce platform you use should also give you access to built-in LTL freight shipping — another feature that Zoey makes you pay extra for in a paid add-on. With Shift4Shop's B2B plan, LTL freight shipping is built in with ReTrans Freight and real-time shipping rates are included with no extra charge.
Pricing & ValueZoey doesn't offer publicly available pricing, instead relying on a quote-based system. You'll need to contact them for a consultation before you can get an idea of what your business might be paying, but previously available information shows that you'll never be able to pay less than a few hundred dollars per month. Aside from this, you may find yourself paying extra for basic functionality, like subscriptions or recurring orders, via an expensive add-on. But with Shift4Shop, you can get unlimited customer groups, essential eCommerce features like Autoship for recurring orders, and all of the advanced functionality that B2B customers require, all built-in from the beginning — and for free.
"When our business decided to look for a new platform to host our online store, we thought that Zoey would be the perfect solution for us. The visual editor looked nice, and it seemed as if they had all the features we needed on the surface. Unfortunately, we're not made of money, and the costs of Zoey's plans plus the cost of necessary add-ons just kept piling up. Eventually, we decided to look elsewhere, and found that Shift4Shop offered more of the features that we needed at a much lower price. We haven't looked back since."
– Former Zoey Merchant
Product & Order ControlB2B organizations require much more control over inventory and ordering than the average B2C online store, meaning that the solution that they use for eCommerce needs to give them that control freely and easily. Discounting is a vital aspect of product control; unfortunately, Zoey lacks support for some advanced discounting like duplicate product requirements for discounts. B2B clients also require more customized and convenient solutions for ordering, especially since they're ordering for other businesses. Zoey locks access to crucial features like an advanced quick order form (which can use SKU and quantity to add to cart, offer pre-populated entries and more) behind a high and hidden price. With Shift4Shop, you'll have access to advanced discounting and advanced quick reordering as part of our core software.
Zoey's selection of free online store themes is severely lacking compared to the majority of eCommerce platforms, with only 7 themes to choose from. Although these themes are responsive, the small selection makes it difficult to start building a unique store that fits your brand without doing any heavy editing. As a result, Zoey makes merchants heavily rely on their visual editor to design a truly different eCommerce website. While their visual editor is impressive, any advanced editing via raw HTML or CSS is either locked or limited to specific areas on the site.
Merchants using Shift4Shop have more than 100 free themes available to build their online store with, all of which are responsive and optimized for a seamless shopping experience. Shift4Shop offers a variety of themes designed with specific industries in mind, from electronics to food, but you're free to choose any theme that best fits your branding needs. Customizing your theme is easy too because Shift4Shop core themes can be edited using the proprietary Core Theme Editor and the Drag 'n Drop HTML builder. However, if you'd like to make more advanced edits using HTML or CSS code, then you're not restricted whatsoever on that front — all of your website's code is freely available to you.
Your Shift4Shop store is ready to handly any number of customers right out of the box, and you'll save tons of time and money in the process. Our industry-leading eCommerce platform includes more features than any other solution, so you can spend much, much less on extra apps.
Zoey lacks in its number of built-in features, so it relies on its selection of over 90 apps and add-ons to make up for it. These apps come with an extra charge you will need to pay on top of your monthly fee just to use the Zoey platform.
Shift4Shop understands that eCommerce never stops, so they provide 24/7/365 technical support to merchants via a variety of channels, including phone, email, tickets and live chat. Merchants also have access to extensive documentation and knowledge base articles for self-service troubleshooting, meaning that support is available any way that you prefer, at any time.
Zoey offers it's merchants support in a limited number of ways, including documentation, community forums, new feature request forms, and support tickets. However, their support team is only available from Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM EST. If you're paying for the Advanced plan, however, you gain access to priority email support that may garner responses past those limited office hours.