E-commerce is becoming a big online industry, making many people wanting to start their own online store to sell their goods. Even physical stores are taking it to the Web for brand exposure, extending a digital arm into the world of online commerce. Not a fan of codes? It’s fine because you can fall back on tools like Goodsie, to do all the coding for you to have your very own online store.
Getting Started
Goodsie makes it really easy to start up your online store. All that is needed is a store name, an email, your name and a password. After entering all your details for your store you are presented with a flat UI dashboard to manage your newly created store.
One of the main parts of managing an online store is of course, adding and managing the products you want to sell. Apart from having fields for description, titles and price, Goodsie also has some rare features in their product manager such as SKU, an option used to keep track of all your profit margins, and not to mention the ability to add extras like wrapping, color, etc.
Styling Your Store
Nowadays the style of your store is pretty important. The Goodsie store designer is as simple as can be. You can customize the page layouts, backgrounds, colors, fonts and effect, or add your custom logo for the site. There are also design features for products and details, but with all these ‘customization’, there is a problem.
One of the few, or perhaps its greatest weakness is that Goodsie does not allow those that are able to dig into designing full layouts to even touch the default design. In the long run, Goodsie will lose an overwhelming number of tech-savvy store owners.
The Little Extras
But when it comes to the extras, Goodsie makes up for it, going a bit further than other e-commerce services with awesome and useful extra features.
The extra features of Goodsie starts with its statistic dashboard that gives you all of the information that you need from your store including the amount of visitors, actions from the visitors, average time spent on the store, common actions, searches, links to your store, countries and sources of the traffic.
Last but not least we have two other extra features which is the ability to use coupons for your online store and products being sold and the ability to accept credit cards using Stripe Payments.
Up to 55% of shoppers want multiple payment options and will abandon their cart if the option is not there to pay by the channels they are most comfortable with. Thus having Stripe integrated into your store is a big plus compared to other services
Pricing
Goodsie has two plans, Standard, which is $15/month and Premium which is $40/Month. The premium account can give you a few more features. Let’s take a look at what the premium account can give you:
- Inventory email notifications
- Insightful sales analytics
- Targeted email marketing system
- Multiple user accounts and permissions
- Shipping label solutions by ShipStation
Personally, I believe that the premium account is overpriced.
Should You Try It?
Here’s a summary of the good and the bad of Goodsie.
Advantages
- Simple and easy-to-use dashboard.
- Ability to accept multiple payment options using Stripe.
- Coupon Codes feature.
- The extra details within the product information. (e.g. gift wrapping, colors)
Disadvantages
- The site styles may be a bit too simple for some people.
- The account plans are on the pricier side.
- There is no ‘free’ account type.
Conclusion
Goodsie has some useful and unique features but if you are looking for really awesome design, you may find it lacking in that aspect. I’m hoping that there will be improvements in this area, hoping that Goodsie will eventually allow designers to play and experiment with the design side of things.
For the most part, I recommend Goodsie for storekeepers that are looking for a simple easy to use e-commerce service especially, for those that are just starting out in online business and ecommerce.
