When Osama Bedier announced in December that his payments company, Poynt, had agreed to be acquired by GoDaddy, he declared: “In GoDaddy, we found a company that shares our passion and vision for the future of small business commerce.”
“We believe that small businesses have been losing share to very large businesses for decades now,” Bedier said of the union of Poynt and GoDaddy. “We both had a vision to enable the small guy.”
In fact, GoDaddy sees ecommerce as a major part of its growth going forward, a strategy reflected in moves like the acquisitions of Poynt and SellBrite, a firm that specialized in enabling merchants to sell across multiple platforms.
That is central to GoDaddy’s pitch for online sellers. Rather than setting up its own marketplace (something Bedier says is “not a priority”), GoDaddy aims to equip small sellers to meet potential customers virtually anywhere on the Web, and is looking to expand its payment offering physical stores, as well.
“Consumers really want to be able to buy anywhere,” Bedier said.
“More than ever [customers] expect to be able to find, buy and fulfill products and services across different media in a way we’ve never seen before,” he said. “The tools really haven’t matched those expectations.”
So GoDaddy offers sellers a hosted online store that syncs inventory and plugs into the major US marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc.), but is also enabling commerce across social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. GoDaddy envisions a rolling expansion of the channels where it facilitates commerce, including messaging apps and emerging platforms like TikTok.
“We want to allow them or help them to sell on all these channels, not just on the ones that have been around,” Bedier said. “Now you have Facebook and Google becoming formidable marketplaces. TikTok I believe is going to become that way.”
But that diffusion has created headaches for sellers. Too many processes, from inventory management to payments, have relied too much on manual effort, Bedier said, summarizing GoDaddy’s offering for small sellers as “a single set of tools that allow you to sell seamlessly everywhere.” That means that sales and inventory sync across every channel where the merchant is set up to sell.
GoDaddy might not yet be a household name in ecommerce, but in addition to its acquisitions in the space, it has forged partnerships with WordPress and WooCommerce to build out its platform for sellers.
True to its roots, GoDaddy offers an array of site designs that sellers can use to build their store. Setup is free, and once the store is ready to open for business, sellers can upgrade to GoDaddy’s ecommerce plan for $24.99 a month.
Ecommerce customers have access to more than 75 plugins from WooCommerce to soup up their stores, and GoDaddy offers tools to help with marketing and SEO, setting up a business listing with Google, and syncing to a seller’s social channels.
The latest addition is GoDaddy Payments, launched in June and driven by the acquisition of Poynt.
GoDaddy plans to extend its payment-processing service to brick-and-mortar stores later this year, and expects soon to roll out a physical device to accept in-store payments.
As with the rest of GoDaddy’s ecommerce strategy, the company will be marketing those devices to smaller sellers, with plans to aggregate the customer and transaction information collected through its payments system and share that data with its sellers.
“You’d be shocked how many … platforms don’t do that,” Bedier said. “They look at the customer lists as their own.”
That’s very much in keeping with GoDaddy’s philosophical approach to working with sellers that Bedier described.
“At GoDaddy our commerce strategy is really an extension of GoDaddy’s vision to help small businesses be more successful and get a bigger share of the economy,” Bedier said.
“That’s how we measure our success,” he said, “how much we help the merchant build their own sales.”
BEWARE – GoDaddy is money hungry. I was with them for 5 years and every year they raised my fee 25%. They gave nothing else and furnished less then when I started. I wouldn’t trust them for anything. And to top it off I was telling my story about the price increases and GoDaddy blocked me from their page on Facebook. They didn’t want the truth told. GoDaddy is high priced and once they got you hooked they keep upping their prices. I was even quoted a less price once but charged the higher price and they would do NOTHING plus said the person who quoted me the price was wrong. Look elsewhere. I moved to SITE123 and got 3 years and added features for a little more then what one year was costing me at GoDaddy.
GoDaddy – Things from the past should be left in the past. I was a diehard GoDaddy customer for 14 years. They were the best, customer service was unmatched. Notice the words was and were. GoDaddy experienced some ownership changes in 2015 and this was the beginning of the end for them. It was fast too. Within a year they were behind the 8-ball because technologies had changed drastically and their architecture is still stuck in years past. I’ve hosted close to 100 sites on Godaddy over the years and started migrating everyone away beginning in 2018. It is easy to check. Just check core web vitals on any GoDaddy sites and the results suck. Slow server speed will be an issue for all of them. Their incredible customer service reps had to tell story after story to cover their faults. It was disgraceful. At one point the server housing my site had hardware issues which they supposedly fixed, it was July. My sites were down based on their own automatic notifications every single day after that for anything from seconds to minutes. Every time I brought it up they went on and on about it being my fault in one way or another yet it started the day the hardware failed. When I left Godaddy on Jan first, I couldn’t get a single page on my site to load in under 3.5 seconds. Less than 2 weeks later with no modifications, my entire site was loading in 2 seconds or less on-site ground. In this business, time is money and can make or break an eCommerce business. I loved Godaddy, but they should be dead and buried. They would be much better off changing names and starting from scratch. Just like Monster Commerce, Network Solutions, Buy.com, their heyday was long over. Just like the sites mentioned, they were incredible when they were in their prime and those days ended long ago.