# Anyone familiar with Godaddy.com Ecommerce?



## tuan (Nov 11, 2006)

I bought my domain name with them and just found out that they also offer merchant accounts for ecommerce. Does anyone have anything positive to say about their product/service?


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## kindred (Jun 13, 2007)

I use yahoo and works pretty well.

Also check out google analytics when you set up your site....


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## tuan (Nov 11, 2006)

kindred said:


> I use yahoo and works pretty well.
> 
> Also check out google analytics when you set up your site....


Thanks for the reply Lumberjack. I did think about Yahoo, does it let you customize your website design to a certain degree? When you ship your products to your customer, what software do you use to print out the order receipt to your customer?


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## binki (Jul 16, 2006)

We used godaddy and it was ok but there were some limitations. We did, however, have very good experience with their suport and they were able to resolve several problems that we ran into.


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## tuan (Nov 11, 2006)

binki said:


> We used godaddy and it was ok but there were some limitations. We did, however, have very good experience with their suport and they were able to resolve several problems that we ran into.


Hey Fred, what were the limitations and did those limitations force you to switch to someone else or it was just a matter of getting more tech support or upgrading your account to go around those limitations? Thanks.


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## tuan (Nov 11, 2006)

If 've got my website up and running, does Godaddy do the work in integrating my website with the whole credit card payment interface or do I pay for the service and do the work myself? Anyone knows?


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## kindred (Jun 13, 2007)

you can either use their templates if you don't know html/php/asp or you can ftp webpages up. the site has built in check out pages for you. it's apretty good admin interface. There is also OSCommerce which is free if you can find someone to host it for you. but that is for advanced users (not me)


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## binki (Jul 16, 2006)

we found the interface kind of sluggish but for quickly building a catalog and selling items it worked well. we did not want to be in the business of building ecommerce web sites so something like godaddy was ok.

2 things i did not like. 
1) users had to create an account to order
2) the user password had too many rules to make it friendly

my take on UI design is to let the user do what he wants. if he wants his user name to be 'a' and his password to be 'b' then who am i to force him to do something he doesn't want to do. otherwise it wasn't bad at all.


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## mark78 (Jun 18, 2007)

Hey Tuan,

I'm in the process of setting up OSCommerce in a linux economy hosting account. I have to say their support is pretty good although I've been having problems with getting connected to their mysql db that's been going on for about a week now and has left me stumped. 

I'm hoping to forego the whole merchant account/payment gateway in place of Paypals website payments pro. Apparently they allow users that dont' have paypal accounts to make credit card payments through them. 

I did a little bit of research into the whole merhcant account/payment gateway thing there myself before deciding on this plan as there's no setup/monthly fees that ye seem to get with most other places, in fact there's no need for me to head to a bank to get the merchant account which by all accounts isn't a straight forward process. I'm in Dublin, Ireland so I'm not sure what it's like where you are but when I rang the lads in Bank of Ireland they told me it wasn't a straight forward fill-out-a-few-sheets process. 

In another post on this forum ( search for godaddy website pro SSL and ye should find it) it says that ye don't even need a SSL certificate which also cuts the price down by a load. I had the amazing foresight ;-((( to buy a turbo SSL cert from GoDaddy when I purchased my sight and it cost me a couple of hundred bucks for five years. They do promise that it works in all browsers and I've heard of nightmare situations where the certs are being rejected by IE7 cossa naming problem in the cert. Havin' said that if it turns out that paypal are in some way supplying the cert then I'd bet the house on it being kosher and working in all browsers. 

Incidentally there's two website payment options with paypal.Standard and Pro. 

Standard is free but the customer leaves yer website. Ye can customise the paypal page ye go to but still navigating away from yer site is another step in the process. 

Pro costs I think it's 20 bucks a month but they supply ye with an api for making the payments directly. THis is what I hope to incorporate into OSCommerce as well. If I make any headway with it, I'll post up the steps involved. Let me know how yer getting on. I'm intrigued to see how folks are progressing with the GoDaddy/PayPal Pro/No merchant account /No payment gateway optiont.

Thanks,
Mark.


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## tuan (Nov 11, 2006)

mark78 said:


> Hey Tuan,
> 
> I'm in the process of setting up OSCommerce in a linux economy hosting account. I have to say their support is pretty good although I've been having problems with getting connected to their mysql db that's been going on for about a week now and has left me stumped.
> 
> ...



Thanks so much for sharing your experiences Mark! I just spoke to a software engineering friend of mine and she recommended that I go with Costco for merchant account which is cheap compared to others and Paypall for my payment gateway. For Ecommerce software that ties in with payment gateway, she's going to select one for me that allows me to completely customize the whole interface to retain my own look and feel. I don't think you guys have Costco in Europe. This whole credit card payment thing is such a pain and complicated thing for beginners like me because there's like 4-5-6 steps to achieving it. There's the merchant account, there's the gateway thing, there's the software that connects the 2 and you have to select all of these that will interact with each other with no problems.


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## treadhead (Jul 26, 2006)

I've got a website with Zencart and Paypal but am not happy with the person who has built it and is hosting it. For some reason, I can no longer get him to do anything regarding updates and I'm not skilled at all in this area.

I was thinking about the possibility of moving my entire site over to somebody like GoDaddy but not sure if that would be possible or how it would work.

Any ideas or thoughts??


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## lhhgbh (Jul 6, 2007)

For ecommerce sites I would recommend against GoDaddy.. Especially when it comes to having your own shopping cart. Zen Cart is good and its what I am currently using. We do it ourselves so I could see how you would get tired of someone else running your site. It took me a good 6 months to get it down with very minimal understanding of web design. GoDaddy blocks many outside merchant accounts and really is dog when it comes to speed of your site as well which will run customers off in seconds if its slow to load. I know from experience because I went the cheap way and tried out GoDaddy first. I now use a host that is Zen Cart specific who I found on their forums. (Merlin) His hosting is fast, and almost as cheap as GoDaddys. Very personable and he even moved my site for me one weekend (even on Sunday) and their support is great.. I would advise against GoDaddy unless you are simply trying to put together a simple non-commerce site.


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## treadhead (Jul 26, 2006)

lhhgbh said:


> For ecommerce sites I would recommend against GoDaddy.. Especially when it comes to having your own shopping cart. Zen Cart is good and its what I am currently using. We do it ourselves so I could see how you would get tired of someone else running your site. It took me a good 6 months to get it down with very minimal understanding of web design. GoDaddy blocks many outside merchant accounts and really is dog when it comes to speed of your site as well which will run customers off in seconds if its slow to load. I know from experience because I went the cheap way and tried out GoDaddy first. I now use a host that is Zen Cart specific who I found on their forums. (Merlin) His hosting is fast, and almost as cheap as GoDaddys. Very personable and he even moved my site for me one weekend (even on Sunday) and their support is great.. I would advise against GoDaddy unless you are simply trying to put together a simple non-commerce site.


Thanks for the detail Flag....I'll check out the Zencart site. Think Merlin would be willing to help me out??


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