Today, GoDaddy is announcing an upgrade and expansion of its small business ecommerce service, GoDaddy Online Store. Launched last year, GoDaddy Online Store provides a simple way for a small business to add e-commerce capabilities to their company website—or, in some instances, to set up a free-standing online store that can serve as both store and simple website. Among the enhancements is the integration on the  administrator’s dashboard of GoDaddy’s email marketing service, GoDaddy Email Marketing. The commerce platform will also provide SECURE certification from McAfee and the ability to use Shippo, a customized shipping solution, along with services in previous updates.

Background: As we’ve tracked during the past two years, GoDaddy has acquired or developed a series of cloud-based services as part of its strategy to use its position as the world’s largest domain name registrar into becoming a platform for a broad suite of simple-to-use online marketing and cloud-based operational tools for small businesses.  Today’s announcement regards an enhancement to its e-commerce service, GoDaddy Online Store. (Note: GoDaddy Online Store is a self-service product from GoDaddy. GoDaddy also provides an additional service that includes professional web design.)

In an interview with SmallBusiness.com, Antonio Silveira, vice president of engineering at GoDaddy, said a top priority in the development of GoDaddy’s small business suite of services is making them “super simple” for people who run small businesses to use. “Our goal is to help small businesses run their online business smoothly and grow.” The competitive landscape of small business e-commerce service providers is daunting (companies ranging from Shopify and BigCommerce to Amazon). GoDaddy must be capable of matching not only the quality commerce platforms of competitors, but also incorporate the type of highly-touted real-time customer service it has developed for its domain name services. Silveira said the company has spent more than two years developing the GoDaddy Online Store and will continue to enhance it in coming months.

Example of a store template that is available via GoDaddy Online Store.

Services now included in GoDaddy Online Store (partial list)

• GoDaddy Email Marketing
• Accepts all major credit cards, as well as PayPal
• Money automatically transferred to bank account of small business
• Shippo, a customized shipping solution
• SECURE certification from McAfee
• Store front templates
• Integration with Facebook stores (via Shopial)
• Built-in social media features (share, likes)
• Customer reviews (via Yotpo)
• Built-in SEO tools
• Smartphone-ready store
• Sell unlimited products
• Hosting and unlimited bandwidth
• Ship anywhere with flexible rates
• Cut deals with your own coupon codes
• Display up to 10 images per product
• Secure checkout
• Shopping Cart

Managing GoDaddy Email Marketing can now be done inside the administrative panel of GoDaddy Online Store.

Countries Covered by the GoDaddy Online Store Update

• Email Marketing and McAfee SECURE certification is available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Philippines, Singapore and India.
• Shippo is available to U.S. businesses only.

Example of a catalog page using GoDaddy Online Store.

Photos: GoDaddy