Wix vs GoDaddy: Which Ideal eCommerce Platform May You Choose?
By LitExtension
Introduction
The current situation of the market is prioritizing online shopping channels due to social distancing. As a result, many store owners can grasp the opportunity to kick off an online business. However, sorting out one from hundreds of eCommerce platforms has never been a piece of cake for amateurs. There are two giant names we’re going to look at today: Wix vs GoDaddy.
In the past few years, Wix has grown in popularity thanks to many celebrity supporters such as Karlie Kloss. In the meantime, GoDaddy gains high social acceptance as one of the world’s most popular domain registrars and hosting providers with approximately 18.5 million customers and over 7,000 employees worldwide.
Despite being fantastic platforms, they are in fact vastly different. LitExtension has compiled this handy guide that takes you through seven key areas. This article may help better your understanding of Wix vs GoDaddy — and find out which one works best for you.
Overview of Wix vs GoDaddy
About Wix
To begin with, Wix is a drag and drop website creator, with online sales capability equipped. As a cloud-based platform founded in 2006, this platform is claiming itself as the leader in website creation with professional teams in various countries in the world. To website owners, Wix is a simple website builder with a drag-and-drop interface and a development wonderland for complete beginners.
It has been empowering 4,565,423 live websites all over the globe in diverse aspects such as online selling, photography, music, design, food, fitness, event, blog, etc. Wix is perfect for small businesses. Its user-friendly store builder and across-the-board eCommerce content management system (CMS) will allow you to create and design your website using intuitive, customizable templates and tools.
About GoDaddy
GoDaddy is an Internet web hosting and registration company headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona and incorporated in Delaware. As of March 2019, GoDaddy has approximately 18.5 million customers and more than 9,000 employees worldwide. Godaddy is known as the world’s leading domain registrar and hosting providers today.
The GoDaddy website has already claimed 717 reviews of their platform which is rated at a very respectable 4.1/ 5 on Capterra. Godaddy offers a number of services such as domain name registration and international domain transfer, hosting and VPS, email service and SSL Security. The platform offers basic eCommerce tools, a marketing suite, and a handful of other features that streamline your eCommerce workflows.
Pricing plans
Wix designs a wide range of seven paid plans costing from $4 to $35 per month. GoDaddy has four plans with prices ranging from $8 to $20 per month for annual payments.
However, you can experience it completely free-of-charge on both platforms. With Wix, you can build and publish your website GoDaddy as long as you allow the display of relevant Wix ads on your website and even in your subdomain. GoDaddy doesn’t have a free plan but does offer a 1-month free trial. This will provide you with a considerable amount of time to decide if it’s the appropriate website builder.
Now, let’s crack on and see how much the premium plans cost.
Wix
Wix pricing varies slightly between its 2 options: Website and Business & eCommerce.
When it comes to creating a website, there are 4 pricing plans. The cheapest one comes at $4/month for connecting your own domain with your Wix site. Your site will still show Wix ads (note that this plan is not available in all countries). From $8/month with the Combo plan, customers can have an ad-free website which also includes hosting and a domain name for 1 year. If you need more professional and advanced features like your own domain name or eCommerce, you must choose one of their premium plans, either Unlimited or Business VIP.
When it comes to launching an online store with the Business & eCommerce option, the price ranges from $17 to $35 per month.
You can save up to $66 and $168 respectively if payments for Website pricing plans are made one year and two years in advance. Moreover, you can save up to $60 and $240 for the Business VIP package if subscription periods are one year and two years correspondingly.
All of these packages benefit store owners by providing unlimited bandwidth, domain connection, statistics and reports on sales,etc, which helps you enjoy a feature-rich online store.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy comes with 4 plans depending on features you need
- Basic — For personal use: 15$/month
- Standard — For new businesses: 20$/month
- Premium — For growing businesses: 25$/month
- Ecommerce — For selling online: 30$/month
However, if you are an online store owner, the one and only package suitable is GoDaddy eCommerce pricing. It includes several features including:
- Add and edit products listings
- Set up flexible shipping options
- Sell products directly through your online store
- Sell on marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy
- Sync orders and inventory across channels
- Manage discounts and promotions
You could save money by registering for the annual plan if you have a long-term plan for your business. You can also save 47% by signing up for an annual subscription for the first year before renewal.
All of GoDaddy’s plans include a marketing tool called GoDaddy Insight, which uses data to provide you with constant advice on how you can keep improving your online presence. This comes built-in to your GoDaddy plan, alongside essential features such as SSL security.
Ease of use: Which Has a Gentler Learning Curve
Talking about the design, GoDaddy definitely gets points for ease of use. Since it’s designed for a quick and efficient start, the interface is intuitive and beginner-friendly. In saying that, Wix certainly offers far better design flexibility and more powerful features.
At the same time, Wix also provides a much wider range of design templates to base your website on. GoDaddy’s themes are quite basic, which might be a reflection of its inadequacy as a website builder.
However, GoDaddy left Wix for dead in terms of performance. The website built with Wix loaded very slowly, which was kind of irritating. On the other hand, GoDaddy site showed both great load speeds and great server response times under high visitor numbers.
Finally, both Wix and GoDaddy offer decent business features, including an eCommerce store builder and social media integration. Wix comes out ahead here because of its more powerful online store and marketing tools, but GoDaddy doesn’t do too badly, especially when considered its superior customer service.
Design & Customizations
Design is all about your website’s preface and usability. Simple and easy-to-adjust styles are often preferred. If you just take a look at the website designs of Wix and GoDaddy, it will be difficult to tell which platform is superior. Both platforms are professionally designed and optimized with a wide variety of themes. However, each cart has its own characteristics:
Wix
Wix provides users with over 500 templates for you to choose from. These are decided into certain categories, such as ‘Music‘ or ‘Travel & Tourism‘, and can be previewed before you commit to one. The backend of Wix also gives you the drag-and-drop functionality. This function acts like PowerPoint allows you to move something around, simply click and hold then drag any button at anywhere.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy, on the other hand, uses Artificial Design Intelligence to create your website. This is a cutting edge technology that GoDaddy will design a website based on answers about your business to set up your store. For example, GoDaddy will ask you: What’s the purpose of your website? Do you have an existing website? Are there any social media accounts you’d like to display? From there, GoDaddy will put together a website for you.
GoDaddy’s editor is also relatively simple. It doesn’t work with drag-and-drop like Wix, but you can customize elements of your site from the side panel. You can change the ‘theme’ of your site (which is the same as a template) and alter basic things like text, images and buttons.
It’s important to note that Wix also has an ADI product — Wix ADI. This works in a similar way to GoDaddy, but you don’t get the same level of editing control you do with Wix’s main editor.
In summary, Wix’s designs are far superior to GoDaddy’s. Wix has a more comprehensive editor, and a better choice of templates that are categorized by industry. In contrast, GoDaddy is more stripped back; editing isn’t difficult, but it is limited. In short, Wix is for control, while GoDaddy is for efficiency.
Common Features of Wix vs GoDaddy
Features are what really separate the elite platforms from the average . What you can and can’t do on each platform is crucial to your final decision. So, looking at a few different areas, let’s really drill into what kind of features both Wix and GoDaddy have.
1. Product Types
You can sell physical, digital products and services on Wix vs GoDaddy. However, you need an app with Wix to sell your service products. The ability to sell the other two product types is built into each platform.
2. Product Presentation
Wix makes your products shine bright. It provides an integrated product video feature to improve the experience of your customers and you can easily add a product zoom function.
GoDaddy allows store owners to list up to 5000 of products and enable them to attach multiple variants to products.
3. Payment Options
Wix supports all the traditional payment solutions, including PayPal, Stripe and Square, but digital payment gateways including Apple Pay and Amazon Pay are unavailable. GoDaddy accepts credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and a few more.
4. Shipping Options
With Wix, it’s a bit inconvenient that you may need apps to assist you with global payments for shipping. In addition, Wix does not offer printable shipping labels when you track orders and set tax rules for each product.
On the other side, GoDaddy is able to ship to anywhere in the world and calculate the suitable and economical tax and fee.
5. Inventory Management
In terms of inventory management, Wix is made for small online stores since apps are required for the sales report completion and visitor’s review collection.
Besides the Mobile-ready storefront, there’s even a mobile editor, so you can build your site and manage your inventory from your tablet or smartphone with GoDaddy.
6. Abandoned Cart Recovery
Analysis reports will increase your income by 25 percent by recovering lost sales! However, at present, the abandoned cart recovery function can only be accessed via a third-party app with Wix.
This is one of the key features of GoDaddy that Wix lacks. It allows you to send automatic emails to customers who have gone as far as placing items in your site’s cart, but left before checking out.
7. Tax Settings
Wix helps you to enable and disable taxes, including commodity rates, taxes and more. It would be great if you use Avalara — an integrated software program that can help measure tax rates in real-time.
When you put Godaddy’s eCommerce plans in comparison with other platforms like Wix, their feature set has been pared down or way behind their competitors, so you’re left with only the essentials.
Apps & Add-ons
Wix possesses an App Market with over 300 apps both made by Wix and third parties. The apps are distributed into content-based and eCommerce-based categories. Most apps are free or they have a lite version. Others require monthly payments and vary in prices. Despite a limited collection of apps, they cover most commonly inquired features.
Notably, Wix has checked all apps for compatibility, so you can be confident they will be well integrated. Nonetheless, Wix doesn’t provide a good solution for everything. While Wix offers a feature for a multilingual webpage, it’s not SEO-friendly and bulky to use.
GoDaddy establishes the GoCentral (GoDaddy eCommerce package), which is a combination of GoDaddy’s website builder and hosting services, now called Websites + Marketing. GoDaddy InSight™ is a smart learning system that provides data and guidance based on your business industry and goals. It’s a guide to spending time on the tasks that will have the most impact on your business. Next, for tracking the performance data they also provide Insight Score — benchmarking your business to others in your industry and region, with a similar merchant.
You can see the data across your website, social media, online reviews, online store and Bookkeeping all in one dashboard. You can easily monitor new reviews from Google, Yelp and Facebook and get reminders to respond. Moreover, with the launch of market selling, GoDaddy eCommerce allows you to sell products across top marketplaces — Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, Jet and more.
SEO & Marketing
1. SEO
The strength of your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will determine how high you rank on search engines like Google. It makes your eCommerce store visible among the millions of sites that are competing for attention on the market. After all, the ultimate goal of SEO is to boost sales and revenue.
Wix
It would be meaningless if a beautiful website ranks low on SERPs. So, when building content, you go to the settings and set up the SEO optimization feature. SEP WIZ tool will optimize support for the site.
In addition, you need to build a system of keywords and track them on search engines. All of these operations are possible using the Wiz SEO dashboard and various apps, such as Site Booster, where you can track your website’s SEO performance.
Not stopping there, if you use WIX’s paid plan, you can also connect your site to Google Analytics. Thus, you will be able to track the detailed information about the website’s traffic.
Users can also modify meta tags, URLs, keywords, anchor links, heading tags, alt text and more. Moreover, they also come with multiple built-in SEO features such as instant Google indexing, Google analytics, structured data, XML sitemap, Robots.txt file, and Canonical URLs.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy’s Search Engine Optimization is a do-it-yourself tool that improves your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). It guides you through optimizing your website for search engine inclusion. Search Engine Optimization analyzes your site by applying various rules based on what search engines see when they visit your site. Then it reports the results of the analysis and suggests measures you can take to improve the optimization of your site to improve your website’s visibility on the world’s top search engines like Google®, Bing® and Yahoo®.
GoDaddy just beats Wix for SEO. The later has a few SEO specific apps, whereas the former has more built-in SEO tools. From editing meta descriptions and URL slugs to getting keyword suggestions and submitting a sitemap, everything you need to rank high is readily available to you.
2. Marketing
After building your website, you’ll probably want to bring people to it. This is why both Wix and GoDaddy give you tools to make your marketing work a bit easier. These include deals for buying ads on Google, Bing, Yelp and others.
- Blogging
Wix has a bit more going for it when it comes to creating a blog. Wix’s blogging platform offers many of the features you’d expect such as using categories, tags, scheduling your posts, and you can also add video and images.
GoDaddy offers a custom dashboard, the opportunity to add a blog to your website, you can quickly post new content to engage visitors with eye-catching photos, tasty recipes or industry insights. So while GoDaddy doesn’t have the most feature-rich blogging platform out there, it will definitely work for basic blogging, like a simple mommy blog.
- Email Marketing
With Wix, you can create your own email account specific to your domain using G Suite. It also has integratable marketing tools like Wix ShoutOut which help you to send beautiful marketing emails and newsletters, as well as share updates on social media (more on that later). You can also capture email addresses to help widen your audience.
GoDaddy’s email features are totally built-in. It also has its own email marketing service, but that does come at an additional cost on top of the monthly fee you pay.
- Social Media Integration
With Wix, you can easily add social media buttons and feeds to your site. Again, it’s just a matter of dragging and dropping.In terms of social integration, the one place where Wix falls very short is when it comes to selling.You can’t use Wix to sell across multiple social channels, such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.
GoDaddy, on the other hand, is limited to just adding social buttons that link to your pages. There is currently no way to embed live social feeds.
- Analytics
Tracking your site’s visitors is a great way to monitor how it’s performing. You can check on things like page views, visitor counts and bounce rate. With Wix, you have the choice of either using Google Analytics, or adding the Visitor Analytics app to your site. With GoDaddy, your only option is to add Google Analytics.
Wix has much better features than GoDaddy,though GoDaddy has a couple of useful features such as abandoned cart recovery and built-in email marketing — but by and large, Wix offers more quality features and a much bigger range to choose from in its app market.
Security & Support
Wix
At every step of your website-building journey, you’ll see a help button linking to a specific guide for that particular tool. There are video tutorials galore, as well as a community forum where you can get help and advice from other users. Just hover your mouse over the editor’s question marks and wait for the small bubbles to appear. They can rapidly give answers to your common questions.
Wix offers email and phone support Monday-Thursday from 5am-5pm. Its Help Center is an online resource where you can search for guides and tutorials. Think of it a bit like a only search engine — you type in a query, and a list of search results will pop up that will be able to help you.
GoDaddy
You’ll find various support channels like phone support and live chat, along with their existing knowledge base and community forum. GoDaddy offers 24/7 phone support, or you can live chat with a GoDaddy expert all day on weekdays. GoDaddy also has a How-To section, unlike any other website builder I’ve seen. On this page, you can watch video tutorials grouped into comprehensive, stand-alone courses. Are they actually helpful? Let’s check it out!
Wix vs GoDaddy draw for help and support. GoDaddy has personal help available 24/7, which puts a big tick next to its name. On the other hand, Wix support is its in-editor help, which is hugely convenient if you want to tackle an issue straight away.
Final Words
In conclusion, both these platforms are powerful enough to provide you with website builders along with eCommerce features. However, nothing is perfect and each of these platforms has several limitations. Therefore, we hope that you will find a suitable home after reading this article.
GoDaddy is optimal to create your eCommerce store as it’s a website up fast with a small-scale store. Especially, if you are a newbie or don’t have a technical support team. However, compare to GoDaddy, Wix is more well-rounded. It gives you more creative control, more features, and more ways to get help.
If you are planning on migrating to Wix, or if you’ve already had a website and want to move to a new dream store on the GoDaddy platform, we bring you the best solution for migration. You can try a Free Demo with a few simple steps to envision how your store looks like and how the migrations are performed with LitExtension! As the world-leading shopping cart migration provider with impressive ranks on Trustpilot, Financeonline, and Youtube, LitExtension can transfer all your store entities automatically, securely and quickly with no technical knowledge required!
Should you have any questions about your store migration, don’t hesitate to contact our support team. We are here to solve all of your problems right away!
