Roughly six months after acquiring the payments platform Poynt, GoDaddy has launched its native payments solution for its SMB customers. According to the company’s announcement of the new solution, it enables GoDaddy Websites + Marketing and Managed WordPress WooCommerce customers to handle all of their commerce transactions directly through GoDaddy.
So GoDaddy positions its payments solution as part of its progression towards a turnkey commerce solution for its website customers.
“GoDaddy is hyper-focused on empowering our customers to sell everywhere with a single solution in a seamlessly intuitive experience,” said GoDaddy President of Commerce Osama Bedier. “GoDaddy Payments represents a major step towards centralizing every tool and service a business needs to successfully sell online. Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and we look forward to accelerating our efforts.”
As noted, this announcement is the outcome of last December’s $365 million tech-plus-team acquisition of Poynt, a mobile payments soluti0n.
Playing Catch Up?
The move comes not a moment too soon. Rival site builders and eCommerce platforms like Wix and Shopify have been innovating and adding features at a breakneck pace. It feels more than overdue for GoDaddy to do something to get back on the industry radar. Wix, for example, launched its native payments solution last June. More recently, Wix rolled out a point of sale solution that connects the dots from online to brick-and-mortar sales for its merchants.
GoDaddy was founded in 1997 and went public in 2015 at a $4.5 million valuation. Today the company is worth about $14.3 billion. Wix, by contrast, launched in 2006, went public in 2013 (at $760 million), and is now worth $16.4 billion. Notably, GoDaddy has a smaller market cap yet has about 3X Wix’s revenue. GoDaddy is growing at less than half of Wix’s pace. Adding insult, last September Wix surpassed GoDaddy to secure the title of world’s largest web host.
It’s unfair, however, to say GoDaddy has done nothing to keep pace with the pandemic-driven small business eCommerce explosion.
For example, in September it acquired SkyVerge, a company that develops eCommerce products that orbit the WooCommerce ecosystem within the broader WordPress world. GoDaddy didn’t disclose what it paid for SkyVerge.
Be Like Shopify
As we’ve covered extensively on Localogy Insider, website companies were scrambling even before the pandemic to broaden their offering in order to drive lower churn and higher revenue per customer. Companies like GoDaddy, Wix, and Squarespace do not want to come in last in the race to be an end-to-end solution.
The pandemic, of course, raised the stakes on eCommerce. And it rewarded quick movers like Wix with rapid growth in 2020.
All of the major site builder rivals have their eyes to one degree or another on Shopify. The eCommerce giant, with its $183 billion market cap/ It’s no doubt better today for a stock to be positioned as a fintech and/or eCommerce play than just a website builder. This is why this email subject line in today’s The Hustle newsletter is so interesting. There are no fixed targets in this space.
Of course, some other site builders are taking a different tack. Duda, which just raised $50 million, is steadfast in its decision to focus on being the best site builder and is leaving all of the product to partners. “That’s what the app store is for,” Duda CEO Itai Sadan told us last week.
Granted, Duda is a designer’s platform. While Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and others are more oriented toward the DIY market. But the larger imperative to enable SMBs to do everything from creating a website to managing payments in a single dashboard is as acute as ever.
