| GoDaddy Online Store standout features | |
| Support |
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| Uptime | 99.97% |
| Best for | Small online sellers looking to set up quickly |
| Strengths |
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| Weaknesses |
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| Promotion | 30-day free trial |
What Are the Pros and Cons of GoDaddy Online Store?
GoDaddy Online Store is an attractive option for entrepreneurs starting an e-commerce business. ADI and hundreds of templates make it easy to build an e-commerce website, even for beginners. The marketing and support features create a one-stop platform for all sellers. However, it is most suitable for small businesses needing a simple, no-frills online store without much customization. Read on to find out what works and what does not.
Pros of GoDaddy Online Store
- Simplicity: I like how easy it is to build a store using GoDaddy’s ADI. Besides answering a few questions, you don’t need to code or anything else. If you only need a user-friendly site to sell stuff, GoDaddy makes it easy.
- Multiple sales channels: You can connect your website to various platforms, including Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, Facebook, and Instagram. It also integrates with Google, allowing you to promote your products using the Smart Shopping Campaign. I especially like that it syncs inventory and orders automatically on the GoDaddy dashboard. That makes it easy to expand your market and manage your channels in one place.
- Extensive marketing tools: GoDaddy allows you to do all your marketing from one Dashboard. You can send emails and post customer reviews directly from your store. The SEO Toolkit comes with a paid plan that includes keyword suggestions and results page rank tracking. I especially like its integration with Instagram and Yelp, allowing you to manage marketing campaigns from the Dashboard.
- Robust customer support: GoDaddy Online Store users get the same level of customer support GoDaddy extends for all its offerings. You get 24/7 support through live chat, phone, and social media. If you don’t want to wait for answers, you can opt for self-service options. It has an active community, extensive blogs, tutorials, and a help center ready to offer solutions to most questions.
- Affordable: GoDaddy’s Commerce plan gives you everything you need to start selling fast. The $24.99 per month renewal is less than what you pay for most website builders. However, note that the plan doesn’t come with a custom domain — that’s a separate transaction. Even then, GoDaddy Online Store plans are pretty competitive.
- Industry-specific themes: You don’t need to choose a theme for your store, as the ADI will generate a website for you, but you can if you want. GoDaddy has a catalog of free mobile-friendly themes appropriate for over 1,500 industry types. You can change your theme even after publishing your site, which is cool.
Cons of GoDaddy Online Store
- Limited customization: GoDaddy makes it easy to build a website, but it doesn’t let you customize much of anything on the page. You can add and move sections of a page, reorder and add pages, and limit what you can put on them. But GoDaddy does not provide access to the source code, so custom code is not in the cards either. GoDaddy will disappoint if you want to get creative with your site. Additionally, once you build your site on GoDaddy, there is no way to transfer it as-is to another hosting service.
- No third-party app integration: Website builders typically come with third-party app stores to supplement whatever features they lack in-house. GoDaddy doesn’t have one; the only third-party app integrations are for online appointments, namely Zoom and Cronofy. GoDaddy provides basic features to run an online store but leaves little room if you’re looking to improve your site’s functionality.
- Limited SEO features: While GoDaddy’s SEO Toolkit comes with paid plans, it’s pretty basic. You can only edit the title and meta description. Since there’s no way to add a third-party SEO app, you can’t improve your site’s searchability. In my opinion, that is a significant drawback for small online stores fighting for search engine attention.
Store Design
GoDaddy has put in every effort to make its website builder the go-to platform for SMB online stores, making it as intuitive as possible. There is practically no learning curve.
You can have a working site within a few minutes of signing up for a free or paid plan. While experience in website creation is a plus, even the greenest solopreneur can get one up and running by answering a few questions. I tried creating one, and it took two minutes to develop a mockup.
GoDaddy uses its ADI to tap into a pretty comprehensive content library to populate a website on pre-built templates. It chooses the appropriate theme for your industry that you can change at any time. GoDaddy offers more than 300 free themes, so you can take your pick from a wide pool.
The right-hand sidebar contains the tools for changing a site’s appearance and structure. You put in the nitty-gritty details by adding your logo, modifying the theme’s color and font, and rearranging the sections. There is also the option to edit the text and images and even add videos.
If you find yourself lost anyway, the platform is quick to jump in with suggestions and helpful hints. It didn’t take very long to explore all the options open to users. After trying a few different themes, I felt that while they were not the best-looking ones, they were clean and responsive. I especially liked the color profile slider tool because it showed me different options.
Overall, I found the design options quite limited, which is not necessarily bad. For example, the owner of a hardware supply store can have a nice-looking online site up and running in minutes. Having too many options, in my opinion, can sometimes throw a wrench in the works. In that aspect, GoDaddy helps you avoid analysis paralysis.
That said, some people might find the minimal design control of the GoDaddy website builder frustrating. So if your goal is to create a unique, mind-blowing site for your online store, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Product Upload
GoDaddy site dashboards are mobile-functional in almost every way. The one exception is adding digital products, which you can only do from a desktop. However, you can add physical products on both desktop and mobile.
Adding physical products uses a different process from adding digital products. In either case, you can upload one video and up to 10 images (not more than 10MB each) in JPG, JPEG, or PNG format.
Additionally, digital product listings can have up to 10 files, each not exceeding 2GB. Anyone ordering a digital product gets a download link they can use up to three times.
Initially, GoDaddy Online Stores used to impose an upper limit of 5,000 products total for physical and digital products. However, the new Commerce Plus now offers unlimited uploads.
GoDaddy also allows uploading products in bulk by using a Starter Template and saving it as a CSV file. But it does not work for digital products.
Source: Digital.com
The bulk upload function limits you to 1,500 physical products, only uploaded 100 items at a time and only one image per product. While you can add more images manually, there is no export option.
You can use stock media or photos from your connected Facebook or Instagram when you add images. It is also possible to upload images from your cloud storage, desktop, or mobile device.
You can upload images up to 5000x5000px but the maximum display is 1920x1080px; uploading videos from YouTube or Vimeo is another option. If you upload more than three Vimeo videos, you must connect your GoDaddy account with a free Vimeo account. A paid Vimeo account is needed to upload more than 10 Vimeo videos a day to your store.
Note that when you add video, GoDaddy has to republish the entire site to display it. Therefore, you might want to uncheck the box to render the video if you plan to upload more than one per editing session.
Abandoned Cart Recovery
There’s nothing to write home about the abandoned cart feature of GoDaddy, but it does the job. Online sellers can recover some of the lost revenue from the average 69.82% of carts abandoned.
GoDaddy sets up the abandoned cart email notifications by default. You can configure the settings to enable or disable email notifications and also specify how long after to send the email. You cannot change the preset message, though, which is another example of the customization limit imposed by GoDaddy.
Whether you send notifications or not, GoDaddy will provide you with a list of abandoned carts and their history for review. That can help you identify issues and gives you a chance to address them. For instance, if you notice most people leaving after seeing the shipping fee, consider offering discounted or free shipping.
SEO
The SEO kit is part of all Website+Marketing plans, including the free version. Here the main goal is to optimize the homepage by inserting relevant on-page keywords or phrases.
Setting it up requires answering a few questions specific to your product or service offerings. You will be able to create your page title, page description, headline, and homepage content. It also encourages you to add image descriptions to enhance your SEO.
But when it comes to customization here, you can only change the text. Images, fonts, and orientations are not editable. It also lacks options, such as tweaking the sitemap URLs and 301 redirects commonly found with other SEO tools.
The keyword optimization is somewhat basic and doesn’t tell you much. You must connect your GoDaddy account to your Gmail account to track search metrics.
Payment Processing
GoDaddy does not impose any transaction fees, irrespective of the payment method you use. However, you still pay payment processing fees for credit and debit cards.
GoDaddy Payments is a built-in payment processing platform to accept payments online, over the phone, or in person. It also accepts Apple Pay and makes it easy for you to add GoDaddy Point of Sale.
Naturally enough, GoDaddy recommends its native payment method. However, the plus point is that you have other choices for accepting payments.
You can connect your store to credit card payment processors, including PayPal business account, Square, and Stripe. GoDaddy connects PayPal Express by default. Also, you can enable and set up offline payments if you want to accept cash, check, or bank transfer.
Go to your store’s Dashboard > Commerce > Payment Methods to set up your payment method. You can select as many options as you want. Some payment options come with fraud prevention tools, so take the time to learn more about each option.
GoDaddy makes it easy and cost-effective for online merchants to get paid.
Mobile Support
All GoDaddy online stores are mobile-responsive, which displays well on mobile devices. However, the more critical aspect of mobile capability is online store management. You can run your business from anywhere on the globe (as long as you have internet connectivity) when you set up your store and download the free GoDaddy mobile app. With the mobile app, you can do the following:
- Build, edit, and update your online store
- Upload new products (physical only)
- Manage inventory
- Manage orders
- View, manage, and accept payments (requires GoDaddy Payments)
- Sell anywhere using the GoDaddy card reader POS or by creating a QR code
- Post on social media
- Get sales alerts
- View reports
- Access site metrics
- Communicate with customers
Inventory Management
You can manage your products by using the Inventory & Options tab for each product. It’s also possible to track inventory, specify the available quantities, set a low inventory alert, and allow back orders. Product options will enable you to offer varieties and how your customers can choose. Add-ons are freebies or services you can provide with each product.
As with most features of GoDaddy Online Store, inventory management is essential. There is no option for dropshipping, but it syncs automatically across sales channels, which is an excellent feature for a small online store.
Email Marketing
You can launch an email campaign directly from the Dashboard > Marketing > Email Marketing. GoDaddy provides suggestions, and you can create a new email. However, before you can access this feature, you need to set it up in Dashboard > Settings > Email Marketing.
Fill in the fields, and you have 25,000 sends available with the free and Commerce plans. The Commerce Plus plan comes with 100,000.
You can start with a preset email layout or build your own. Add your content, choose your recipients, then decide when to send it. You will get a preview of your email on desktop and mobile before you send it out.
You can choose to track clicks, which is enabled by default. GoDaddy also allows you to segment your email list for more personalization.
GoDaddy’s email marketing feature is simple and easy if you use the templates. Building your own takes more effort and creativity, and it still does not give you much design control.
It does lack the advanced options provided by dedicated email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Additionally, you have limited design control over your email layout. But it gets the job done, and all from one Dashboard.
Reporting and Analytics
The GoDaddy Online Store Reports section provides basic information. You get sales trends and payment reports; the latter is only available if you have a GoDaddy Payments account. You can choose to get sales reports by day or hour and by online and in-person sales.
However, you can also get click rates from email marketing and abandoned cart history, but you need to look for those in other parts of the Dashboard. For site performance analytics, you will need to connect your account with Google Analytics.
There was some mention of a GoDaddy InSights introduced in 2019. It should’ve been exceptionally helpful and made Google Analytics unnecessary. Since I could not find it on the online store I created it may no longer be available.
I don’t particularly appreciate that I must go rooting around for critical report data, and many other users may echo this sentiment. That’s an issue GoDaddy should consider addressing. That’s what you can currently expect from your GoDaddy online store.
Shipping Options
GoDaddy allows you to offer basic shipping methods. These include free shipping, in-person pickup, and local delivery that you can specify for each product. You can also add Carrier Calculated Shipping Methods for international and domestic orders. These are limited to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and UPS. GoDaddy online store owners get a discount.
When someone buys from your store, it automatically calculates the shipping cost based on your specifications. You can offer free shipping, a carrier-specific rate, or a flat fee for the product. There is also an option to print shipping labels by setting up an account with ShipEngine.
GoDaddy doesn’t make a big deal about its website security, treating it more as a standard feature. However, data security via SSL and PCI DSS is present for all store owners from the free plan up.
If you sign up for GoDaddy Payments or other payment processors with fraud detection, you have reasonably good protection from hackers. The level is what you would reasonably expect from most e-commerce platforms. That said, exporting your data as a backup can’t hurt.
GoDaddy offers the same robust customer support for all its products on multiple channels. It provides live chat, phone, SMS, community, and help center support. The company does not offer email support.
- Chat: The chat option is always available and very responsive.
- Phone: You can request a phone call if the live chat with an agent does not solve your issue.
- SMS: Text messaging is also an option, and it is available 24/7.
- Community: Posting a question on the GoDaddy Community gets you some great insights and advice; you can also join events and meet resource speakers.
- Help Center: When all else fails, search for answers to your questions in the GoDaddy Guides through numerous articles, how-to guides, and video tutorials.
You can go straight to live agent access by going to this link.
Compare GoDaddy Online Store Alternatives
GoDaddy is temptingly easy to use for e-commerce, but competitors such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, PinnacleCart, Wix, and WooCommerce offer more flexibility. We took our time looking closely and doing research on each company and obtained objective information about each to help find a platform that works best for you.
See how GoDaddy Online Store compares to other top-tier e-commerce platforms that the team here at Digital.com recommends:
Frequently Asked Questions About GoDaddy Online Store
How many products can you have on GoDaddy?
Is GoDaddy an e-commerce platform?
How do GoDaddy payments work?
What’s the difference between Shopify and GoDaddy?
Are GoDaddy websites secure?
How I Rated GoDaddy Online Store
I test e-commerce providers based on the following factors:
- Value: What do you get for each plan — and does it hit that sweet spot of cost ratio to features?
- Ease of use: Is it simple to use the platform with intuitive tools, familiar interfaces, and supportive tutorials or tours?
- Features: Does the platform offer tools that support your business, including marketing integrations, plug-ins, reporting, and management? How effective are the features?
- Security: Which measures does the platform take to protect your business? Does it offer Payment card industry (PCI) compliance and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates?
- Support and improvements: How well does the platform help when you need it? And will it continue to grow with your needs?
Learn more about our review methodology.
