5 Reasons GoDaddy Shopping Cart Beats Yahoo! Merchant Solutions

GoDaddy and Yahoo! are two of the most popular choices for hosted shopping cart solutions. They each provide fully-featured shopping cart software that makes managing an online store easy and cost-effective.

For the most part, GoDaddy and Yahoo! web stores share the same set of features. However, there are large differences between these two products. Here are 5 reasons GoDaddy's Quick Shopping Cart is a better choice for ecommerce solutions than Yahoo! Merchant Solutions.

1. Cost – Yahoo! Merchant Solutions is Expensive!

With GoDaddy, you pay a monthly fee based on the Quick Shopping Cart package that you have chosen. With Yahoo, it is different. Yahoo charges both a higher monthly fee as well as .75% to 1.5% of your gross monthly sales. Yahoo also charges a setup fee.

	GoDaddy's Shopping Cart	Yahoo! Merchant Solutions
Setup Fee	$0	$50
Monthly Fee	$9.99 for Economy Plan Lower monthly fee if you signup for 1 year, 2 year, or 3 year terms	$39.95 and up for Starter Plan Monthly fee depends on gross monthly sales

2. GoDaddy's Web Hosting Far Superior!

One good thing about both of these solutions is that customers receive a free web hosting package. But Yahoo's web hosting leaves much to be desired. It lacks basic web hosting features such as .htaccess and php.ini support, making many routine tasks impossible.

3. GoDaddy Has a Simple, Easy-To-Use Control Panel

GoDaddy's Quick Shipping Cart has a slick, well-organized control panel. Yahoo's Merchant Solutions control panel is quite different. It is disorganized, hard-to-navigate, and not intuitive. You will find yourself regularly consulting the documentation to find your way around.

4. Yahoo's Shopping Cart Is a Nightmare To Customize!

With Yahoo!, any type of advanced customization is hard to do. Yahoo's templates are written in their own special language and customization requires purchasing a book for technical details OR hiring a specialized developer. On the other hand, GoDaddy's shopping cart product is easily customized using standard web markup and languages that most developers are familiar with.¹

5. GoDaddy Customer Service is The Tops!

If you have a question and need quick resolution, GoDaddy wins. They are industry leaders in customer service and they will make sure that their customers are satisfied. Even better, customer support telephone numbers are easily accessible.

In the end, both GoDaddy's and Yahoo's shopping carts have a similar set of features. However, GoDaddy's Quick Shopping Cart is a better solution than Yahoo! Merchant Solutions. With GoDaddy's Quick Shopping Cart, you'll be able to save money, enjoy easy customization, and take advantage of their other easy-to-use tools to further add features to your store and/or market your products.

1. It is true that using Yahoo's RTML language to build shopping cart pages can achieve a higher level of customization than can be achieved with GoDaddy's Quick Shopping Cart. But such customization will only be realized after a significant time investment or expense from hiring their developer partners. [↩]