GoDaddy Ecommerce

• Social Media
• Third-Party Apps
• Themes
• Product Placement Features
• Security
• Payment
• Additional Features

For being a basic e-commerce service without a lot of scalability, there are many good things about GoDaddy. GoDaddy was one of the more affordable services ($29.99 per month after the month-long free trial period) that offered quite a lot of pages.

Social Media

While GoDaddy doesn't say anything about social media on the e-commerce website, we did find that it was possible to embed social media buttons into your product descriptions. While we didn't find any functionality for social media marketing, we did like the button feature.

Third-Party Apps

Another feature of GoDaddy is that it is easily integrated with some third-party apps. We did find that there are shopping cart options available. It is also easy to implement Google Apps with your GoDaddy account. Additionally, it is possible to integrate eBay into your GoDaddy e-commerce store, opening up the possibility for selling items in an auction format.

Themes

We found that all the standard GoDaddy website themes (300+) can be outfitted with e-commerce, making it one of the most flexible platforms in terms of themes. Also, there are analytics features included and your e-store can be integrated with Google Analytics. We found, however, that GoDaddy's interior analytics were not as good as other e-commerce providers.

Product Placement Features

GoDaddy also has some pretty good product placement features. In addition to the unlimited number of products you can place, there are also some sortable features that make it useful from a marketing standpoint:

• Cross-Selling: If customers have an item in their shopping cart, they can see other similar items that they might like to buy.
• Virtual Showcase: You can sell your items by category, groups, etc., making virtual "departments" in your online store.
• Ratings and Reviews: Lets customers rate the products that you sell.

Security

We did have some questions about GoDaddy's security, but these were answered in the support page of the website. GoDaddy offers a shared SSL certificate for its e-commerce stores. You can set administrator privileges for users who access different sections of your store. Finally, GoDaddy is PCI compliant.

Payment

Payment with GoDaddy is also easy. You can easily integrate credit card payments (Visa, American Express, Discover, MasterCard) and PayPal as payment gateways for your customers.

Additional Features

Some providers that offer similar prices limited the number of products that you could sell, as well as your monthly storage and bandwidth. With GoDaddy, you get the following:

• Unlimited product placement
• Up to 10 images per product
• Payment with credit cards and PayPal (other third-party integrations are available)
• Coupon codes and other marketing tools
• Unlimited storage and bandwidth
• Adjustable shipping rates

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• Scalability
• Transaction Fees
• Reporting
• App

Scalability

We do have some concerns about GoDaddy. GoDaddy is not very scalable. While it charges a nice flat rate for its monthly services, there were no options for upgrading or downgrading your service.

Transaction Fees

Another issue we had with GoDaddy was the high transaction fee. We feel like the transaction fee charged by GoDaddy is one of the highest in the industry. There is a 2.9% + $.30 transaction fee for every purchase at your e-store. For a high-dollar purchase, this can quickly cut into your overhead. In addition, we found that GoDaddy also lets customers use Stripe as a payment. While the payment fee is still 2.9% + $.30, we found that Stripe was probably not a good solution for businesses that needed money quickly. Stripe takes seven days to transfer money to your business's bank account.

Reporting

There were also some issues with reporting. For example, we couldn't find support for customized reports for sales. There are some great reporting tools, including the dashboard, but we found that users might need to depend more heavily upon Google Analytics to get a good picture of what is going on with their GoDaddy-powered e-store.

App

GoDaddy websites are optimized for mobile browsing. However, at this time there is not the option to build an app that also interacts with your online e-store. In this day and age, you really need a great app to reach your e-store customers.