GoDaddy Ecommerce Review (2023): Is The Best Online Store Builder for Beginners?

Are you interested in building your brand with a GoDaddy Online Store?

You've come to the right place.

GoDaddy is one of those brands that has rapidly become synonymous with ecommerce and online hosting. You might have heard the term “GoDaddy” before you even knew that you wanted to sell products and services online. Why? Because GoDaddy is excellent at marketing.

Best known for its domain name registering services, Super Bowl commercials and hosting packages, GoDaddy ecommerceoffers a lot more than most people realize.

Sure, you can use GoDaddy to design a website, buy a domain name, and even set up some web security features too. However, in 2014, GoDaddy also released a new eCommerce functionality to complement their existing portfolio – the GoDaddy Online Store Builder.

Since we're pretty much all about ecommerce here, today we're going to be looking at the new features of that online store, and how effective it really is for getting you started online.

Introducing the GoDaddy Ecommerce

Let's start simple.

There's no doubt, GoDaddy Ecommerce is a solution designed to help business owners set up a digital presence and begin selling as quickly as possible.

Similar to the rest of the GoDaddy portfolio, there's no credit card required to sign up. You can start building your store for free, complete with support for up to 5,000 products, and ten images per product too.

GoDaddy's online shop is intended to simplify the process of getting started online. Just as businesses have begun to rely on GoDaddy to make hosting and domain name purchasing easy, they want to offer the same streamlined experience for online selling.

According to GoDaddy, you can maximize sales through the online shop using things like a convenient auto-builder that optimizes your site to appear in Google searches. Additionally, social media and email marketing tools are built into the experience so that you can build relationships with customers over time.

There's no doubt GoDaddy Ecommerce has a lot to offer. The question is whether this eCommerce shopping solution is right for you.

Some of the features available include:

• Mobile ready performance
• Automatic SEO optimization
• You can accept all credit cards
• You can sell up to 5,000 products
• Start for free with no credit card details required
• Book customer appointments
• The use of GoDaddy's new feature, InSight (more on that in a bit)

GoDaddy Ecommerce Pros and Cons

Let's look at the most important benefits and drawbaks of GoDaddy Ecommerce.

Pros 👍

• Brilliant for newbies
• Lots of customer support options
• Cheap and affordable cost
• Easy to use and navigate
• Plenty of management features
• InSight, the newly added marketing feature.

Cons 👎

• Very limited functionality
• Not very scalable
• Not a lot of integration options.

GoDaddy Ecommerce: Pricing

Obviously, there's a lot more than just a budget to consider when you're choosing an online shopping and selling vendor. However, most merchants do have a budget to consider, so you're going to want to know how much you can expect to pay on GoDaddy's Online Store.

As we mentioned above, signing up for a trial of the service is totally free, but you will need to upgrade to the ecommerce plan if you want to sell online. Now, depending on the package you choose, your fee will vary. It could be anything from $9.99 per month for a basic plan to $16.99 a month for the Commerce plan or $29.99 for the Commerce Plus plan.

The one-month free trial is a really nice touch, in our opinion. A lot of the shopping solutions, available online today, are reluctant to give any kind of free trial, so a whole month is an excellent way to try before you buy. Of course, you won't be able to use all of the functionality that GoDaddy has to offer until you create a full account – but that's to be expected.

Every GoDaddy plan offers the choice for POS (for a supplementary cost), as well as GoDaddy Payments, which is GoDaddy's internal payment gateway.

At $16.99 per month, the GoDaddy Ecommerce is one of the cheaper options on the market for ecommerce and online shopping. This means that you probably shouldn't expect to get a vast number of advanced tools and online apps. However, you will have more than enough to run a small or mid-sized business with ease.

Another note to be aware of is that GoDaddy won't charge you any transaction fees. The amount you pay for your credit card transactions with customers will be related to your payment gateway. This means that you're going to have to check the transaction fees for the company that you choose to work with to make sure that you're budgeting each month properly.

GoDaddy Ecommerce: Marketing Features

Okay, now that you know the basics of the GoDaddy store price, let's jump into a more in-depth overview of the features that you're going to access for your money. GoDaddy's Online Store is all about getting you noticed online and improving your chances of sales. Operating on the cloud, GoDaddy offers features that get small businesses and beginners to their first sale faster through incredible marketing tools.

For instance, the online shop you design and implement with GoDaddy automatically integrates with Google My Business. This basically means that you'll appear on things like Google Maps, and you'll be able to provide useful information on how to contact your company at the top of the search when people look for your company’s name.

Other features include:

Search Engine Optimization

Obviously, where your site appears in the online rankings is going to make a significant difference to the performance of your digital business. Things like the GoDaddy website builder ensures that you can automatically improve your rank on Google, Bing, and Yahoo with insights into things like high-value keywords and back-end optimization strategies.

Social Media Integrations

It takes more than just an online store to stand out online today. GoDaddy allows you to add an extra impact to your shop by connecting straight to your social media pages. You can promote and sell products directly from your Facebook business page and make changes to your website that come with notifications for your social media pages too.

Additionally, GoDaddy's Online Store encourages all business owners to link their store to their Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other social media accounts. Although you can't necessarily sell directly on every platform, you can improve your chances of recognition and, therefore, potentially increase conversions too.

It's also worth mentioning that GoDaddy deeply integrates with Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, and Instagram. This ensures your profiles are as complete and current as they can possibly be. Plus, you'll receive action plans through InSight (more about that below) to help you make the most out of these networks.

Email Marketing Integrations

Aside from connecting with customers through social media, you'll also have the option to accelerate your client's path to purchase through email. Getting into your customer's inbox boosts your chances of nurturing conversions. What's more, with the Website Builder from GoDaddy, your eye-catching emails are less likely to be relegated directly to the spam folder. You can even check things like your open rates and click-through rates in the admin section of the software.

Google Your Business

GoDaddy makes it easy to claim your Google my Business listing. Within seconds you can register your brand with Google Maps to help customers find you more easily. You can also use this feature to look at customer reviews left on Google itself or on other social media accounts.

Connecting with Customers

You can access customer messages from your dashboard and send messages back. This is a great platform for keeping in touch with your clients and building lasting relationships with buyers.

GoDaddy Ecommerce: Selling Features

GoDaddy isn't just a marketing platform for beginners. The GoDaddy Ecommerce is specifically designed to encourage and support online selling.

You won't, however, be able to directly sell across multiple channels. Although there's support for Facebook, that's about it for now. Additionally, other features, like reporting, are somewhat limited. However, you do get plenty of useful options for making sales in the digital world.

For instance, your customers can:

• Check out quickly with a streamlined mobile checkout experience to reduce swipes and taps for your mobile customers.
• Order easily with credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, or even PayPal. The more options your customers have, the easier it is for them to convert.
• Appreciate flawless performance: With the GoDaddy website design tool, you can rest assured that your store will work flawlessly on all devices.

GoDaddy even allows users to easily manage their orders and make updates from their smartphones. Companies will also have the option to send text messages to their clients when new orders and appointments are confirmed.

That's right – you don't have to stick to selling physical products alone with the GoDaddy Ecommerce. There's also the online appointments feature that allows customers to book sessions with you if you're a tutor, mentor, or something else. You'll even be able to accept payments for services through your booking system.

With GoDaddy, merchants have the power to sell whatever they want in the environment that works best for them. You don't have to sell physical products if you don't want to; there's also the option to offer whitepapers, videos, and webinars too.

Marketplaces

If ecommerce is your priority, and you want to utilize one of the many online marketplaces, this feature will unquestionably come in handy. You can sell your wares on the most popular marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart.com, Jet, – just to name a few. If you're worried this might make inventory management more complicated, never fear, you can control all that from your dashboard.

GoDaddy Ecommerce: InSight Features

GoDaddy has developed a new feature, InSight, to help customers optimize their online presence. They describe it as your ‘silent business partner’ because of all the fabulous tools it brings to the table.

GoDaddy’s InSight monitors your site’s every move, including daily metrics like site traffic, customer reviews, and social engagement. It also provides info to fuel your marketing strategies. For example, how your business compares with your competitors. It analyses every detail of your site’s performance and presents this data in a way that's easy-to-view, from the convenience of your GoDaddy dashboard.

InSight is comprised of three parts;

1. InSight score: Using in-depth integrations with social media platforms, GoDaddy measures the activity of your site against your competitors, and then rates your business in comparison to others in your niche. InSight also uses this same data to recommend relevant solutions to help you improve your performance.
2. Data-driven recommendations: The data derived from your on-page analytics is turned into practical advice on how to improve. Info is drawn from over one million GoDaddy customers to build in-depth action plans for a more long-term solution. These are presented in a template format for you to use, which you can access from your dashboard.
3. Metrics: GoDaddy monitors the growth of your site and compiles reports. It follows your sales numbers, site statistics, bookings, and social interactions to give you a well-rounded view of what's going on.

GoDaddy Ecommerce: Web Design Features

Probably one of the most compelling features of the GoDaddy Ecommerce is its web building software. Basically, you have the freedom to build a store that's perfect for your brand and customers, without having to worry about stuff like complicated coding.

When you sign up for your GoDaddy account, you'll get a layout template that's based on the industry that you select for your account. But, you'll have the freedom to edit the appearance however you like. For instance, you can implement footers, headers, logos, and images without having to access the source code.

The GoDaddy Ecommerce makes editing and building a customized store easy for beginners. However, it might not be the ideal offering for you if you're looking for something that you can really get in-depth with. There's no comprehensive solution for editing CSS or HTML. However, you can potentially add custom sections with HTML if you want to make little changes.

Historically, GoDaddy didn't offer users much in the way of website templates. However, businesses now have more than 100, totally re-designed templates to choose from. Some even come with industry-specific copy and images!

Notable web design features include: 

• Help with managing your website's visuals and with making its functionality as streamlined as possible.
• Contact Forms
• Back-ups and restore settings – If things get deleted or lost, you can retrieve all your work.

As mentioned above, the themes are all mobile responsive, which makes getting started with the right solution. If you choose a design and decide later on that you'd rather change to something different, GoDaddy also gives you the freedom to go back and edit however you see fit.

There's plenty of freedom to change a page or section on your eCommerce website, update the style of your text, change your photos, or do anything else that you like, for that matter. Additionally, your online store will always be optimized to give users the best experience when they're browsing.

Another feature that’s coming soon is the ‘Members-Only Access' pages. These will make it easy for you to provide customers who have paid for membership exclusive access to members-only content.

GoDaddy Ecommerce: Management and Security Features

GoDaddy allows you to add up to 5,000 products to your online store, which makes it an excellent tool for small to mid-sized companies. You'll also be able to add multiple variants to your products, including products in different sizes and colors.

The great thing about GoDaddy's online shop for beginners is that you only need to add a single service or product to your system to get started and publish your website.

As we've touched on previously, you can manage everything through one centralized dashboard. Below are some of the features that can be accessed through the panel;

• Email Campaigns: You can create and manage your email marketing campaigns from here. This easy access makes the whole process quicker and easier, especially for someone who hasn’t dabbled in email marketing before.
• Analysis of marketing campaigns: Look at the productivity of your individual campaigns at a glance. With this info at your disposal, you can decipher which campaigns are worth running and which aren’t.
• Answer customers: You can reply to customer emails and social media posts from your dashboard. Also, from here, you can manage your blog, appointment reminders, and automatic messages for when you're not at your desk.
• Customer Insights: This feature allows you to track customer purchasing history, create unique customer lists for promotions, and also manage your ‘members-only’ content.

GoDaddy recommends that merchants should probably get their site online and running as quickly as possible. Fortunately, it's easy to do that with Online Store technology. Once you've published your website, you can update your payment and shipping methods. GoDaddy automatically sets PayPal up as your payment method, to begin with, but you can change that if you want to.

Additionally, the default shipping method with GoDaddy is free shipping, but you can change that if you're selling anything online besides services and digital downloads. After all, you want to make sure that you're charging your customers properly for shipping costs.

When it comes to shipping products to customers, GoDaddy offers a bunch of options, including the choice to add a flat rate to the solution per order – or you can pick weight-based shipping. Weight-based shipping will adjust the amount your audience needs to pay based on the weight of the order.

Finally, as well as giving you plenty of choices on how you want to ship to your customers and accept payments, GoDaddy's Online Store also helps to make your web presence more secure too.

Since your eCommerce website is likely to become one of the most essential things in your life, the GoDaddy brand knows that you're going to want to protect it. Fortunately, your store will come protected with a Secure Sockets Layer attached already. This can save you some money on the extra costs usually required to keep a store secure.

GoDaddy Ecommerce: Ease of Use

If you've ever considered setting up an online store before, then you'll know that even the tools with the best selection of features won't be much good if you can't figure out how to use them. For beginners in the digital world, opening an online shop can be a daunting and overwhelming experience. However, if you're thinking about selling a service or product, all you need to do is add the items that you want to deliver to your store and set up a payment method.

From there, the most complicated thing you'll have to do with GoDaddy as your online store decides how you want to ship your products or deliver your services. The whole experience is perfect for beginners, and you can even add or remove products as you see fit.

GoDaddy's onboarding process is particularly strong. Your site is automatically generated for you based on your answers to the questions asked when you create your account. Once you sign up for your free trial, you're automatically sent to the theme editor, where you can begin playing with your shop's design.

If you feel like you need some extra guidance, you can quickly go back to the dashboard and look at the “Getting Started” section.

The Getting Started guide is one of the best things that GoDaddy has to offer ease of use. Clearly, the company knows that it's catering to beginners. That means that using the Getting Started Guide makes it easy to move through the basics of setting up the online store quickly and simply.

Even without the Getting Started Guide, you'll have no problem figuring out how everything works. The advanced settings for your product pages are located in the tabs at the bottom of the page, so you can ignore them entirely if you want to. You can even track your inventory as you go, so you make sure that you're not adding duplicate pages.

Implementing things like coupon codes is pretty straightforward too. You'll be able to make your discounts apply specifically to a specific product or category. It's also possible to ensure that codes become active when a minimum order total is reached.

Ultimately, running your online store with GoDaddy is about as simple as possible. If you've never tried dealing with an eCommerce store before, then you're going to love the experience that you get with GoDaddy. Unfortunately, if you are a little more experienced, then you might find GoDaddy somewhat lacking in functionality.

On the plus side, if there's anything specific that you think your online shop is missing out on with GoDaddy, then you could always consider adding integrations and add-ons to the mix.

Although there aren't a vast number of integrations available, you can access things like:

• Google Analytics for reports and website insights
• Salesforce for robust CRM support
• Spree Commerce for enhanced eCommerce features
• SurveyMonkey to help learn more about your customers
• Etsy to improve your multi-channel marketing campaigns

GoDaddy Ecommerce: Customer Service and Support

Last but not least, let's take a look at the kind of customer support you can expect from the GoDaddy Ecommerce experience. GoDaddy delivers things like live chat support, 24/7 phone lines, and a dedicated Twitter account, so you'll usually be able to find the answers to your questions relatively quickly.

Like a lot of website building tools, GoDaddy also comes with a knowledge base that you can rely on for finding answers to critical questions. Although there are some parts of the GoDaddy knowledgebase that are pretty outdated, you should still be able to find most of the assistance that you need here, if you prefer to take a DIY approach to overcome your issues.

One thing that is particularly impressive about the GoDaddy customer support experience is how much community assistance you can get.

There's a Community Forum available from GoDaddy, where users can go to ask basic questions about how the software works, and what they can do to improve their chances of selling. Additionally, there's also a System Status Report page where you can check the status of any outages that might be occurring with the GoDaddy service.

GoDaddy Ecommerce: Our Verdict

Ultimately, GoDaddy might not be the most advanced option for your online store, but it's an excellent way for beginners to get started with selling online. If you're new to the concept of online shopping for your clients, and you want to launch an eCommerce business with as little confusion as possible, then GoDaddy will help you to get started quickly.

The addition of InSight is a brilliant one. It adds a real sense of control to the management of your website. From the data analysis to reporting to contact with the consumer, InSight is an incredibly valuable feature for people building an online presence.

The GoDaddy Ecommerce is easy to use and great for making admin as user-friendly as possible. You can create the kind of store that speaks to your target audience, with very little confusion. Additionally, there are plenty of ways to integrate your store with things like your social media and email marketing campaigns to improve your chances of long-term conversions.

Unfortunately, everything about the GoDaddy Ecommerce is incredibly basic. If you're looking for a way to customize your store down to the finest details and implement your favorite software into the mix, then you're just not going to get that with the GoDaddy Shop.

If you want to grow a brand that really stands out online, you'll be better suited to a scalable and hosted offering like Shopify or BigCommerce. GoDaddy's Online Store really is just a basic offering for beginners that don't have a lot of requirements to jump into online selling.

Still, it's worth having a try of GoDaddy to see what you think. The trial is absolutely free, and you don't have to give any card details, so you can get started with minimal stress.