Shift4Shop vs Sitecube Website Builder
Choose the right eCommerce platform to start and grow your business
VS.
Sitecube, a software company founded in 2006, currently sells technology for building websites using HTML 5 or Flash. According to their own website, they designed this solution specifically for small businesses and “independent professionals.” Sitecube’s tools cover a range of eCommerce website needs, including SEO, image galleries, and even extensive animation. Sitecube’s goal with all their products is to make everything as simple as possible for people with less experience in both business and technical matters.
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.
Many website builders offer tools and services that take care of the most essential tasks for running an online store. However, this does not make them full-fledged eCommerce solutions. Sitecube offers these basic features and little else, severely limiting what you can do. However, they do stand out with an emphasis on graphics and sound, pushing users to add animated intros, flashy button graphics, music integrations, and sound effects. All this is largely because Sitecube’s program is not specifically for creating online stores, but for building websites in general — and flashy, excessive ones at that.
On the other hand, Shift4Shop offers a wide range of features, design possibilities, and apps that were all designed with eCommerce companies in mind. We are serious about providing a complete solution specifically for online retailers, and we strive to give people anything they might want to create a beautiful, successful store.
eCommerce featuresTo sell online successfully, you need a variety of features and tools to help you manage all aspects of your business, including inventory, customer service, shipping, returns, sales tax, and more. Unfortunately, Sitecube only has an extremely stripped-down shopping cart, and despite the number of special visual effects you can add to your site, your online store itself will be extremely primitive. Shift4Shop, however, has hundreds of built-in features to cover every aspect of eCommerce we've listed — and more. Plus, we also frequently add new features to help merchants keep up with the evolving demands of online customers.
Number of products and pagesSitecube caps the number of products your store can carry at 1250 and your categories at 25. This might not sound like a big deal to smaller businesses, but limiting your inventory like this can seriously hold you back and stunt their growth. However, Shift4Shop lets you sell unlimited products even on our free plan. That’s one less obstacle on your path to success.
“Sitecube ‘has it all’ in the least pleasant meaning of the term. An obsession with tacky animation? Barely any room for customization? Outdated technology? They’ve got all this and more. Yikes.”
– Ex-Sitecube customer
Technical supportNegative stories about Sitecube’s bizarrely belligerent technical support are abundant. Shift4Shop knows that you only call when you need it the most, and our highly-trained tech experts are ready to provide you with excellent service. We’re available to answer your questions any time and any day, and we can assist you with problems big and small.
Sitecube and Shift4Shop offer free templates for your online store, but which ones are the best? Let’s note the differences.
Sitecube offers some nice-looking free themes, but one immediate flaw is visible right away — Sitecube still advertises the use of Adobe Flash, which is not only deprecated, but seriously vulnerable to exploits. Using Flash nowadays would expose your site to danger from hackers, and there's no point to using it anyway, as no modern browsers will even support it. Sitecube does offer themes based on HTML5 as well, which will at least work properly and safely. However, the selection of themes is quite small, and users report that they're quite hard to customize. Combine all this with Sitecube’s insistence on prioritizing an overuse of animation and media players, and you find that this platform’s themes tend to produce websites that are difficult to take seriously.
Shift4Shop offers a huge collection of free themes, each with their own unique designs, and we are constantly adding more. These modern and professional templates cover a wide range of moods and styles so that any client can find one that best suits the tone of their brand. We never use outdated or dangerous plugins like Flash, and all our templates are responsive, so they work perfectly on mobile devices. You'll have extensive options for customization through our built-in Theme Editor and HTML Builder tools, and if you're good with HTML and CSS, you can even edit the code directly. Shift4Shop lets you control just about every aspect of your website’s look.
Shift4Shop comes with Shift4 Payments built right in, so you can accept credit cards and several alternate payment types right away. We also integrate with over 160 other payment methods — check out our long list of eCommerce payment gateways.
Sitecube isn’t a dedicated eCommerce platform, so they only let you enable PayPal, 2Checkout, and a few others. This means you won't be able to offer your customers additional options like digital wallets and other in-demand payment methods.
Shift4Shop knows that eCommerce businesses need to rank high on search engines, so we provide all the SEO tools you’ll ever need. Learn more about our SEO features today.
Sitecube’s SEO features are limited, and they only get less useful over time. Google constantly changes their standards, and Sitecube doesn’t keep up.
The information on this comparison page that was created by Shift4Shop was believed to be accurate as of 11/1/2013.
