GoDaddy Ecommerce Examined: A Critical Review of the Platform [2024]

Two factors immediately stood out when we started using GoDaddy: its affordability and how fast you can get a website up and running.

After we tried it in practice, we understood why people use GoDaddy. They use the platform because it is quick and easy to set up and maintain. GoDaddy lets you build a professional website, sell products and services, and accept payments online and in person in no time.

Of course, GoDaddy is more than a website builder. GoDaddy also provides domain registration, web hosting, and online marketing. So, when you build your online store with this website builder, your domain registration and web hosting are also taken care of.

Key Features and Functionality

GoDaddy has four e-commerce plans, which range in price from $11.99 per month to $49.99 per month if you sign up for an annual plan. The plans include the following: a website builder, e-commerce-optimized templates, built-in payment processing, built-in SEO, analytics, essential email marketing tools, and an online appointment builder.

GoDaddy Review. Pros and Cons

Godaddy Review. Pros

1. GoDaddy websites are fast and reliable, with incredible loading speeds.
   
2. GoDaddy is also a web hosting company. It has the expertise required to ensure that all GoDaddy websites are secure, with an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate.
   
3. GoDaddy is straightforward to use – we can attest to this fact.
   
4. GoDaddy has a free plan that lets you play around with the platform before you commit to a plan.
   
5. GoDaddy is good value for money, being one of the cheapest website builders.
   
6. GoDaddy offers excellent customer support, with 24/7 telephone availability.
   

Godaddy Review.Cons

1. GoDaddy is only suitable for small online businesses; the platform doesn't allow scaling.
   
2. A GoDaddy website is quick and easy to build but has limited customization options. You will be disappointed if you have a creative flair and want to personalize your website.
   
3. GoDaddy doesn't have an app store, which limits your ability to personalize your store.
   
4. If you want to sell online, you must upgrade to one of the e-commerce plans.
   
5. GoDaddy doesn't offer order and email automation.
   
6. Some of the e-commerce features are lightweight compared to other ecommerce platforms.
   

GoDaddy Review. Overview of Pricing Plans

GoDaddy has four website builder pricing plans plus a free trial.

Basic

The cost is $11.99 per month if billed annually. This plan offers basic blogging functionality, and you can accept online payments and run recurring classes. You can have image galleries, videos, and audio on your website. Other built-in features include social sharing and GoDaddy Insights. All websites are mobile responsive.

Premium

The cost is $21.99 per month if billed annually. This plan offers unlimited connected social media platforms, unlimited social media posts and replies from your GoDaddy dashboard, and up to 25,000 marketing emails sent per month, plus advanced appointment scheduling tools.

Commerce

The cost is $24.99 per month if billed annually. With this plan, you can sell up to 5,000 products, get up to 25,000 marketing emails sent monthly, and leverage social media. There is no limit to the number of social media platforms you can connect to or the social media posts you can make or receive. You now also have access to advanced appointment scheduling tools.

ECommerce Plus plan

The cost is $44.99 per month if billed annually. With this plan, you can sell unlimited products, and send up to 100,000 marketing emails monthly. You can now access automated sales tax calculations and auto-populated tax forms. You can also accept up to 1,000 orders per month via marketplaces.

In-Depth GoDaddy eCommerce Review

GoDaddy Review. Ease of Use

Based on our own experience, GoDaddy is super easy to use. It is the ideal option for anyone who needs to get a website up and running quickly. GoDaddy offers pre-designed templates that are e-commerce ready, but the easiest way to design a website is to use GoDaddy’s Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) which quickly creates a website for you. All you need to do is answer a few questions, and the ADI will create a website for you in a few minutes.

Other aspects of a GoDaddy website are also easy to manage from the dashboard, which features built-in marketing tools to enable SEO tracking and analytics.

GoDaddy's ease of use is one of its outstanding features.

GoDaddy Review. Design and Customization Options

You don't need any coding skills to build a website with GoDaddy. If you decide not to use the ADI, you can use GoDaddy's themes and intuitive editor to build your website, which is also easy.

GoDaddy Review. GoDaddy themes

GoDaddy has more than 100 professionally designed templates. They are all mobile responsive; you can find one for any industry you are interested in. In addition to the ADI, you can use the intuitive drag-and-drop editor to create a website according to your needs.

Using this product, our team has discovered that GoDaddy themes are easy to install and change. Both are done with just one click. It's possible to input your information and then click through different themes to see how it will look, which makes choosing the suitable theme easier.

However, it's important to remember that not all themes are created equal regarding e-commerce features. Make sure you know what e-commerce features you need for your website, and then choose a theme with those features.

All the themes include the standard sections that users have become accustomed to, like About Us, Contact, Privacy Policy, Services, Products, Blog, Meet the Team, etc. When you build your website, you can add unique sections according to your business needs.

You can add sections and change their positions, but you can't change anything in a section by deleting or adding something like a block of text or an image.

As you can gather, there is little room for creativity. While you can simply drop your personalized content and photos or videos into the boxes indicated by your chosen theme, you can't customize it in any way.

If you can't live with this limitation and want a fully customized website for your needs, there are better choices than GoDaddy. On the other hand, if you just want to get something simple up and running as quickly as possible, GoDaddy is your answer.

GoDaddy gives you a choice of different styles in its Theme Customizer. To be clear, your chosen theme will regulate how your entire website will look, while a template controls how a single page will look. So, within a single theme, you can have different templates.

All GoDaddy’s themes are mobile responsive, so you can see what your theme looks like on a mobile screen when you use the Preview mode.

Unlike other platforms like Wix, you can change your mind about your theme anytime with no adverse results. When you change to another theme GoDaddy will automatically re-populate your website with all the relevant information, including products and content.

GoDaddy Review. E-Commerce Features and Capabilities

Based on our observations, the Basic GoDaddy plan gives you basic e-commerce capabilities. You’ll get a basic email, appointments, and payment functionality. This plan lacks SEO, so if you want to sell, this is not viable.

In fact, you can only create a fully functional online store with the Commerce and Commerce Plus plans.

Products

On the Commerce plan, store owners can sell up to 5,000 products, which increases to unlimited products on the Commerce Plus plan.

GoDaddy offers quite several product options and variants. Product options refer to size, material, and color; variants are combinations of these options, like a white cotton blouse, or a green wool cardigan. GoDaddy allows 3 product options and 100 variants.

If you want to sell services like online classes or consultancy services, GoDaddy’s Premium plan will be adequate, but if you want to physical goods on your online store, you can only do that if you are on one of the two advanced plans.

The Premium and the higher plans also allow you to offer recurring events and communicate with customers about them.

Abandoned cart features

GoDaddy also provides abandoned cart features that enable online store owners to send an automated follow-up email when a site visitor chooses a product but still needs to complete the purchase. The feature allows for a discount code to be included in this message to encourage visitors to complete their purchases.

Payments, Transaction Fees, and Shipping

GoDaddy has its own, built-in payment gateway called GoDaddy Payments, which charges a credit card processing fee of 2.3% + 30c per transaction. However, this service is only available in the United States. Other than that, GoDaddy doesn’t charge any transaction fees.

You can use an external payment gateway if you are outside the United States or don't want to use GoDaddy Payments. GoDaddy offers integration with three external payment gateways: PayPal, Stripe, and Square. Please note, Square is only available for users in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the UK.

Shipping

GoDaddy store owners can offer free, flat rate, weight-based, percentage rate, and calculated shipping. With this platform, you can also offer customers in-store pickup options.

You can choose USPS, UPS, and FedEx for your shipping needs. GoDaddy’s two e-commerce plans give you discounted USPS shipping rates, but this benefit is only for store owners in the United States.

USPS and UPS provide real-time shipping rates, which facilitates the calculation of accurate shipping costs, so customers are not over or undercharged.

Marketplaces

GoDaddy is great for making international sales. The platform integrates with the following:

• Amazon
• Ebay
• Google Shopping
• Etsy
• Facebook
• Instagram
  

The integrations with these marketplaces mean greater scope for making sales. However, this benefit is only extended to some regions. Also, GoDaddy restricts marketplace selling, allowing only 50 to 1,000 marketplace orders per month, depending on the plan. GoDaddy assists with orders by synchronizing them in one place, no matter where they originate.

Analytics

Our experience shows that GoDaddy's analytics capabilities are one of its best features. You can integrate your store with Google Analytics to measure traffic and other data, and to know more about your customers and their behavior.

But that's commonplace for e-commerce platforms. GoDaddy goes a step further. It provides you with a personalized analytics tool called GoDaddy Insight, an intelligent learning system that uses data from millions of websites to generate insights that help businesses to grow.

It can generate statistics on:

• Number of site visitors
• Customer engagement
• Number of sales through your site
• Social media engagement
• Comments on your company
  

But that's not all. This innovative tool can help your business grow. GoDaddy Insight will use the data you provide, including your goals for your business, to create a personalized action plan for your business. Also, it can glean anonymous data from your competitors and make suggestions for you based on that data.

On top of that, GoDaddy Insight compares your site's performance with that of your competitors so you can see how your business compares in your industry space, giving you a so-called 'insight' score out of 100

GoDaddy Review. Marketing and SEO Tools

The platform lets users on the cheapest plan send 100 free monthly emails. Premium and Commerce users can send 25,000 free emails monthly, and Commerce Plus users can send 100,000 free emails. Of course, the emails can contain newsletters, which are an excellent marketing tool. As it is, the newsletter editor is a user-friendly tool that makes it easy to customize your newsletters.

GoDaddy makes a special effort with search engine visibility. The platform has an SEO wizard, available on the three higher plans, that finds and suggests keywords and phrases. With the help of this wizard, even first-time store owners can optimize their online stores for SEO.

In addition, GoDaddy provides an automatically generated XML sitemap that search engines need to crawl and index website pages. All of the platform's templates are mobile-friendly, a factor that Google also uses to rank a website higher.

However, GoDaddy also has some drawbacks in terms of search engine optimization. Store owners need to do something about 301-page redirects. If a store changes a page URL, Google uses redirects to know what to index when a page gets renamed or deleted. GoDaddy also only allows a little editing of page URLs, which search engines use to categorize content.

GoDaddy Review. Customer Support and Resources

GoDaddy is a platform ideal for beginners that offers loads of support, so anyone can build a website quickly.

All plans offer 24/7 live chat in all regions and 24/7 phone support in most. On top of that, GoDaddy has a support account on Twitter, WhatsApp support in some regions, and 24/7 SMS support in the US.

Phone support is provided in 50 different languages.

GoDaddy users can also get help from the GoDaddy Help Center, the community forum, and a range of video tutorials on various topics.

GoDaddy Review. Performance and Security

Loading speed is essential for online stores, as people need more patience to load around for a webpage to load. GoDaddy is primarily a hosting provider, which may account for the superfast loading speeds of GoDaddy sites.

GoDaddy’s load time is, on average, 171.1 ms, thanks to the hosting provider's multiple data centers. GoDaddy has three data centers: one in Europe, the U.S., and Asia, with plans to open another in India.

SSL certification is included with all GoDaddy packages. SSL (secure sockets layer) enables an encrypted connection between a web page and a web browser. With an SSL certificate, a website moves from an HTTP to an HTTPS protocol, which is more secure for safeguarding customer and visitor data.

With GoDaddy, website owners have a guarantee that their online store will be up and running 99.9% of the time, which is excellent.

Compared to other website builders such as Shopify, GoDaddy users don't need to keep backing up their store as they work on it. In fact, if a store undergoes significant changes, GoDaddy will automatically create a full backup of the store.

In practice, though, if GoDaddy auto-saves a mistake you made, you'll have to correct it manually.

GoDaddy Review. Integration Options

Integrations are not GoDaddy's strong point. Unlike most other e-commerce platforms, GoDaddy doesn’t have an app store where users can buy add-ons to increase the functionality of their stores. In addition, GoDaddy doesn't allow integration with Zapier. Zapier lets you connect two or more apps to automate repetitive tasks like sending out emails. This means that store owners can't integrate their stores with third-party extensions to improve its functionality.

GoDaddy does provide ample built-in functionality for marketing, payments, bookings, shipping, and SEO. For instance, GoDaddy offers integration with markets, but only for users in the States. GoDaddy helps you to sell to international customers through integration with the following marketplaces:

• Amazon
• Ebay
• Etsy
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Google Shopping
• Walmart
  

You can sell on these marketplaces, but only a little. You can only take 50 orders per month on the Commerce plan, and 1,000 orders per month on the Commerce Plus plan.

The platform also integrates with Spree Commerce for email marketing, SurveyMonkey for newsletter surveys), and Salesforce.

GoDaddy only offers integration with three external payment gateways: Paypal, Stripe, and Square, which compares poorly with other popular e-commerce solutions like Shopify, which offers integration with more than 100 external gateways.

The need for integrations for GoDaddy users means they may be forced to consider migrating to another platform once the business grows beyond a certain point.

GoDaddy Review. Limitations and Drawbacks

GoDaddy has several drawbacks you must know when considering building your store with this website builder.

• GoDaddy works with 18 currencies, but you can only use one for your store.
  
• Many benefits, like international selling opportunities and discounted shipping rates, are limited to users in the United States.
  
• GoDaddy templates are not the most impressive or professional you can get.
  
• No app store and limited integrations.
  
• Integrates with only three payment gateways.
  
• Social media integration still needs to be fully developed.
  
• Because of the use of ADI, GoDaddy websites tend to need more distinctive designs.
  
• Limited blogging features.
  
• SEO optimization is sufficient for small stores. As soon as you want to scale your store, consider a platform with more robust SEO capabilities.
  
• No option to install SEO apps to improve the site's optimization.
  

GoDaddy Review. User Reviews and Feedback

According to online reviews, GoDaddy offers exceptional customer service. Many users comment on the polite and professional service and helpful assistance.

Other users comment on the ease of use of the website builder, saying that it is a quick and easy way to get your business online. One reviewer commented that it's an excellent way for a small business owner to go digital.

However, some Go Daddy reviews also mention that GoDaddy’s website builder lacks customizability and flexibility for more advanced users. Others feel that the platform has limited e-commerce features and add-ons.

GoDaddy no longer uses Workspace Email and has moved customers to Microsoft 365. Multiple GoDaddy users are complaining about problems with this move.

GoDaddy Review. Comparison with Competitors

Based on our observations, GoDaddy can be compared with website builders like Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace.

All four of these website builders are easy for beginners to use. Shopify stands out as our first choice for e-commerce. The platform has the most comprehensive range of sales features and can scale, accommodating very large stores.

Wix has built a reputation as a website builder that lets anyone build stunning websites with its professionally designed themes. Recently, the platform has added a wide range of e-commerce tools and enables dropshipping, which GoDaddy doesn't offer. Based on our observations, Wix has become a top e-commerce platform. It also doesn't hurt that Wix is good value for money for what it offers.

Another website builder that stands out for its ease of use is Squarespace. It also stands out for its creative sophistication. Where GoDaddy's templates are acceptable, Squarespace templates boast stunning designs with animation effects. Squarespace also offers more advanced customization options. However, Squarespace is only really suitable for small stores.

Compared to these website builders, GoDaddy is ideal for those who need a simple website fast. GoDaddy won't give you a fully customizable storefront, and the platform doesn’t have a range of e-commerce features comparable to Shopify's. If you are serious about selling online, GoDaddy might not be your best choice.

GoDaddy’s most vital point is its ease of use. With the help of its ADI tool, you can build a website in less than 10 minutes.

Compared to the other three platforms, GoDaddy stands out for its efforts to assist beginners. The GoDaddy SEO Wizard and GoDaddy Insight give beginners a substantial helping hand when they first venture into online commerce.

Factors to Consider when Choosing an E-Commerce Platform

When choosing an e-commerce platform, there are several factors to consider:

1. Whether you want a hosted solution or an open-source solution.
   
2. The platform's level of protection and encryption for the store’s data and transactions, and whether it adheres to relevant regulations and standards.
   
3. The cost of the platform, the transaction fees, and the payment methods are supported.
   
4. The availability of well-designed, and e-commerce-optimized, mobile-friendly themes.
   
5. The availability of third-party tools and extensions to enhance the functionality and performance of your online store.
   
6. The ability of the platform to optimize the store for search engines and mobile devices.
   
7. To have a large-scale business, you must look at scalability and growth potential. Will the platform be able to handle increased traffic and sales, and accommodate the store’s expansion and development?
   
8. The quality and availability of the platform’s customer service, technical support assistance, and resources for troubleshooting and resolving issues.
   

FAQs

Is GoDaddy good for e-commerce hosting?

GoDaddy is, first and foremost, the world’s most prominent domain name and website hosting company. The company has provided web hosting for more than 20 years. It has a reputation for a 99.95% uptime, so sites are rarely offline. The company offers 24/7 support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Is GoDaddy an excellent website to sell from?

GoDaddy is a good solution for small business owners who want to create a simple online store without advanced e-commerce features. GoDaddy offers a simple, easy-to-use website builder for smaller businesses.

GoDaddy may not be the best solution for store owners who want to scale their online business and customize their store comprehensively.

Is GoDaddy the same as Shopify?

GoDaddy is a website builder with e-commerce capabilities, while Shopify is a platform explicitly designed for e-commerce. GoDaddy emphasizes ease of use for building all kinds of websites. On the other hand, Shopify has a range of e-commerce features to help users build online stores for selling.

Is GoDaddy a good website?

GoDaddy is a well-known domain registrar and web hosting company. It is widely used by individuals and businesses for domain registration, website hosting, and other online services. Whether GoDaddy is considered a "good" website depends on the specific needs and preferences of the user. Here are some factors to consider:

• Domain Registration: GoDaddy is one of the largest domain registrars globally, offering a wide range of domain extensions. If you need a domain name, GoDaddy is a popular and reliable choice.
• Web Hosting: GoDaddy provides web hosting services with various plans and features. The suitability of their hosting depends on factors such as website size, traffic, and specific requirements.
• Ease of Use: GoDaddy is known for its user-friendly interface, making it accessible for individuals with varying levels of technical expertise.
• Customer Support: Customer experiences with support can vary, but GoDaddy generally offers customer support through various channels.
• Additional Services: GoDaddy offers additional services such as website builders, email hosting, and online marketing tools, providing an all-in-one solution for many users.

It's essential to consider individual needs and preferences when choosing a web hosting provider. Reading recent Go Daddy reviews and checking for the most up-to-date information can help you make an informed decision based on your specific requirements.

If you want to migrate your store to GoDaddy, you can use Cart2Cart, a SaaS service that allows you to transfer your database, data, and settings to a new platform with ease and security. You can also try a free demo migration to see how it works.