Test Driving GoDaddy Marketplace

GoDaddy Marketplace is simple, but what effect will it have on the market?

As Reglike noted earlier this month, GoDaddy is launching an online marketplace to buy and sell goods. It is now live, and over the weekend I had a chance to test drive GoDaddy’s fresh “marketplace”, which operates similar to eBay stores or Amazon. The process to buy something was relatively simple, and you’ll be happy to hear that there are no upsell/cross-sell pages during the checkout process.

OK, so GoDaddy Marketplace works. But what is GoDaddy’s motive for launching it, and what effect will it have on competitors such as eBay?

Why did GoDaddy launched Marketplace?
We don’t know for sure, but I suspect it has less to do with incremental revenue and more to do with building its brand. GoDaddy can push its Quick Shopping Cart, a product it has offered to web site clients for a while. Users can import their products from Quick Shopping Cart to Marketplace.

When you think regarding it, web sites like eBay and Yahoo Stores use their paying clients to deliver traffic to their web sites. These clients (sellers) tell people regarding their products on these sites. It’s nice to have your clients e-mail a link that includes your web site to friends or buy pay-per-click ads to promote their products listed on your web site.

GoDaddy is using shops.godaddy.com as its marketplace URL; it is not using a unique domain name. While they’re on the site, users are just a click away from buying a GoDaddy product.

Will it Work?
That’s the million dollar question. There are a couple things working against GoDaddy here.

First, people visit GoDaddy to buy web services such as domain names and web hosting. They don’t go there to by tangible goods. Making the leap to tangible goods is hard.

Second, GoDaddy has to get a lot more listings for Marketplace to work. When I need to buy something I can’t find on typical sites, I usually go to eBay. I typed in some of these items on GoDaddy Marketplace and got zero results: Norelco, Sega, etc.

It would take a great consumer mindshift to add shops.godaddy.com to the list of places they go to find bargains and hard-to-find items.

Following all, what does “the best yogo pants ever” have to do with web services?

eBay need not worry regarding a competitive threat yet. But judging from sellers’ disdain for the heavyweight, people are pulling for GoDaddy — or anyone else — to succeed.