The Best CoreCommerce Alternative for Your Online Business
Choose the right eCommerce platform to build and grow your store
VS.
Established in 2001 and originally designed as purely shopping cart technology called digiSHOP PRO, CoreCommerce became a SaaS eCommerce platform in 2008 in an effort led by CEO Matt DeLong. CoreCommerce now hosts over 13,000 websites in 70 different countries and provides a suite of eCommerce products with its subscription-based service, including a site builder and payment services. The company is headquartered in Nashville, TN.
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.
Your online store needs to be available to customers wherever they are, and whenever they choose to shop. CoreCommerce hosts stores on outsourced servers belonging to another company, so when problems strike (and they do— frequently) the fix is out of their hands. You're at the mercy of another company that you have no contact with, just to get your store back online.
Shift4Shop, however, handles all our own hosting, and if an issue arises we jump on it immediately, no matter what day of the week. We don't have to contact a third party and hope they address the problem in a timely manner. And with 99.99% uptime, downtime is incredibly rare to begin with. We take our customers' success seriously, so we never hand off responsibility to anyone. Shift4Shop has your back!
Content delivery network for fast page loadsCoreCommerce lacks a content delivery network (CDN), a crucial feature that helps websites load quickly regardless of the visitor's location. Slow-loading sites drive customers away and experience SEO penalties. Shift4Shop's reliable CDN ensures fast loading for your store for shoppers everywhere.
Store admin for smooth operationsCoreCommerce's store admin is frequently described as clunky, clumsy, and hard to navigate. When you're trying to run your business, you don't need a confusing interface that takes extra time to figure out. With Shift4Shop, we've built our admin interface to be as smooth and intuitive as possible, so you can get everything done quickly.
“I tried CoreCommerce but there were just too many problems. Not to mention they advertise as having over 200 themes, but only 17 are responsive. You HAVE to use a responsive theme or get penalties from Google, so technically they only have 17 themes, not 200. I see this as deceptive advertising.”
– Former CoreCommerce Customer
Disk space for storing unlimited product imagesCoreCommerce allows you unlimited product images, but what's the point when it's constrained by limiting your disk space? You'll have to keep a constant eye on your storage to ensure you don't go over the limit. Or use Shift4Shop, and have unlimited space and bandwidth for all your products.
How do free CoreCommerce themes stack up against free Shift4Shop themes?
CoreCommerce and Shift4Shop both offer a selection of free themes for use in building your online store.
But how do they compare? Let’s analyze the differences.
CoreCommerce offers merchants a choice of 18 free, responsive themes that they can use for their online stores. This small selection isn’t helped by the limited site editor that you’ll have access to, only being free to change basic elements like colors, fonts, banners and navigation. Users report that the site editor isn’t very intuitive either, meaning there is a learning curve involved in using their program. Since built-in customization is limited, and you’re not able to preview your edited changes before publishing, you’ll need a combination of extensive HTML and CSS knowledge and luck to ensure that your site looks how you want it to.
Shift4Shop offers a huge (and still growing) selection of free, responsive themes that are unique in design and optimized for any eCommerce industry. To customize your chosen theme design, all Core themes can be edited quickly and easily with the built-in Core Theme Editor and HTML Builder. These intuitive theme editors, in combination with the ability to freely change any HTML and CSS on the site, allow merchants to fully brand, design and customize their online store to best fit their specific business needs without any added hassle or advanced knowledge required.
Shift4Shop's entire platform is built by a single, competent team with your store's success a top priority. Developers work closely together to bring you all the best features and fix any issues.
CoreCommerce doesn't just outsource their servers, they outsource much of their development as well. This causes significant delays when problems crop up— and they commonly do.
Your issues with control don’t end with CoreCommerce’s outsourced development — you’ll also be extremely limited when it comes to how you can accept payments on your online store, especially if you have specific needs. CoreCommerce offers very few payment options for international or high-risk merchants, which severely restricts any online seller in that situation.
Merchants will also be subjected to transaction fees (added by CoreCommerce on top of the usual processing fee from the payment provider), which differ depending on how much your company makes in monthly sales. These transaction fees can go as high as 2.25% + $0.15 per online transaction and can go as low as 0.15% + $0.10 if you’re bringing in more than $20,000 in sales every month. You may also be subjected to a gateway fee, which can cost up to $20 extra every month. These extra costs add up, putting an undue burden on your success as an online business. But at Shift4Shop, we don’t punish sales with extra fees.
Shift4Shop is powered by Shift4 Payments, an industry-leading payment processor that sets up in minutes and allows you to accept credit cards and several alternate payment types. Shift4Shop also integrates with over 160 payment gateways covering a wide variety of needs, so you can expand your store with numerous options such as PayPal, digital wallets, customer financing, and more. See a full list of payment providers here.
Edit your store's design with our built-in Theme Editor and HTML Builder tools, and see the changes applied right in front of you. Know immediately whether you want to keep or revert your changes — you'll have an updated preview in real time, so you always know how your edits look.
Customize your theme in the admin panel only, with no preview available. Changes take a few minutes to take effect, forcing you to repeatedly refresh your storefront in another tab until they appear. You'll have to repeat this process every time you want to see your changes, even if you decide to change them back.
