GoDaddy’s Online Store Rocks for Beginners

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 great at marketing.

Best known for its domain name registering services, Super Bowl commercials and hosting packages, GoDaddy offers 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.

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

GoDaddy Online Store Pros and Cons

Pros 👍

• Brilliant for startups
• Lots of customer support options
• Cheap and affordable cost
• Easy to use and navigate
• Plenty of management features

Cons 👎

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

Introducing the GoDaddy Online Store

Let's start simple.

The GoDaddy Online Store 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.

The GoDaddy 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 you can build relationships with customers over time.

There's no question that the GoDaddy Online Store 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
• Make buying easy by accepting all credit cards
• Support for up to 5000 products
• Start for free with no credit cards
• Book appointments with customers

GoDaddy Online Store: 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. That means paying around $25 per month when you choose to be billed annually.

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.

At $25 per month, the GoDaddy Online Store 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 huge 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 properly each month.

GoDaddy Online Store: Marketing Features

Okay, now that you know the basics on the GoDaddy store price, let's jump into a deeper 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 will be automatically integrated 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.
• Email marketing integration: 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.

GoDaddy Online Store: Selling Features

GoDaddy isn't just a marketing platform for beginners. The GoDaddy Online Store is specifically designed to encourage and support online selling. Despite the low price of the software, you still get one of the largest ranges of tools available on the market, including in-built responsive mobile design.

You won't 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 is somewhat limited. However, you do get plenty of useful options for making sales in a 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 smartphone. 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 Online Store. 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. What's more, with Online Store, displaying, promoting, and selling goods is easy.

GoDaddy Online Store: Web Design Features

Probably one of the most compelling features of the GoDaddy Online Store 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. However, you'll have the freedom to edit your appearance however you like, implementing footers, headers, logos and images without having to access the source code.

The GoDaddy Online Store 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.

Another point to note about GoDaddy is that the online store builder doesn't give you a wide variety of templates to choose from like some of the other builders out there. Basically, the system creates a website for you, skipping the part where you would typically choose a design that's suitable for your brand.

The GoDaddy algorithm supports solutions for thousands of different industries. Once you're in your account, you can then choose between about 20 different themes that alter the layout and appearance of your website.

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.

GoDaddy Online Store: Management and Security Features

GoDaddy allows you to add up to 5,000 products to your online store, which makes it a great 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.

GoDaddy recommends that merchants should probably get their site online and running as quickly as possible. Fortunately, it's easy to do that with the 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 how much an order weighs.

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 important 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 Online Store: 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 is decide 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.

The GoDaddy onboarding process for beginners 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 easily 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 for 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 completely 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 certain 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 huge 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 Online Store: 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 Online Store 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 knowledgebase 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 overcoming 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 Online Store: 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 GoDaddy Online Store 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 Online Store 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 LemonStand. 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.