Shopify vs GoDaddy: Which Is Better for an Online Store?

What GoDaddy Actually Sells an Online Store in 2026

When people compare Shopify with GoDaddy, they usually mean one GoDaddy product: Websites + Marketing, GoDaddy's website builder, sold in three plans called Basic, Premium and Commerce. The plan GoDaddy positions for selling is Commerce.

GoDaddy's help center describes Websites + Marketing as offering “a Commerce plan (available in certain regions only) so you can sell physical and digital products online.” That parenthesis is the first thing to check if your business is not in the US: the prices in this article are US prices.

GoDaddy also sells two other routes to an online store, and each is priced differently:

If you remember a separate “Managed WooCommerce Stores” product, check what GoDaddy sells today. As of September 2026, GoDaddy's launch page for that product carries the heading “Managed Hosting for WooCommerce”, the old ecommerce-hosting address redirects to WordPress hosting, and the WordPress hosting page lists no separate WooCommerce plan or price.

That route is a WordPress-and-WooCommerce decision more than a GoDaddy one, and it is the comparison our Shopify vs WooCommerce guide works through. The rest of this article compares Shopify with GoDaddy's Commerce plan.

What Each Platform Costs Before You Sell Anything

Both platforms charge a monthly subscription and take a fee on every card payment. This section covers the subscription, the next one covers card fees, and the worked example after that puts the two together for one store.

Which GoDaddy plan compares to Shopify Basic?

At Shopify's standard prices, GoDaddy is cheaper on the subscription line under both billing modes. Shopify Basic costs $29 a month billed yearly or $39 billed monthly; the gap is widest on the annual plan, because the GoDaddy figure there is a first-year price.

Shopify runs its own introductory offer: a 3-day free trial, then $1 a month for the first 3 months on most plans, after which standard pricing starts. For those 3 months Shopify's subscription is lower than GoDaddy's, and in the $5,000 example below Shopify costs less while the offer lasts. That example uses Shopify's standard prices, and its yearly GoDaddy figure is GoDaddy's first-year price on an annual plan.

Shopify's own GoDaddy comparison page says the two “cost roughly the same.” On the US prices GoDaddy publishes, that is closer to true for the month-to-month plans than for year one of an annual plan.

What does GoDaddy charge after the first year?

The $20.99 figure belongs to the annual plan, and the plan card ties it to paying for a year up front. What that plan costs in its second year is the number you would want next, and it is not on the page. On September 28, 2026 we searched GoDaddy's plan-selection page (latest capture September 22), the Websites + Marketing hub and its features page for a renewal price and found none, only GoDaddy's general notes that “Special introductory pricing is valid for the initial purchase term only” and that “Product renewal pricing is subject to change.”

Card Fees: GoDaddy Payments vs Shopify Payments

Each platform runs its own card processor: GoDaddy Payments on GoDaddy and Shopify Payments on Shopify. GoDaddy lists its rates “as low as”; Shopify lists its rates by plan.

This is a real GoDaddy advantage, and it grows with volume. Every online order costs the same 30¢ on both platforms, so the difference is the percentage: 0.2 of a point on each online sale at GoDaddy's as-low-as rate.

In person the gap is wider, because GoDaddy lists no fixed fee on a card-present sale. Shopify's rates fall on its more expensive plans, but on the entry plan compared here, GoDaddy's published rate is the lower one.

The fee Shopify adds if you skip Shopify Payments

Shopify's side of this comparison has one more line to read. If you take payments through a third-party payment provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of the provider's: 2% of those orders on Basic, falling on higher plans, with POS orders and manual payment methods such as cash on delivery excepted. That matters if you already use a processor you want to keep.

GoDaddy's Commerce plan card lists a “0% Online store transaction fee,” applied when selling online products, services, or donations. The per-plan figures on Shopify's side are in our breakdown of Shopify's third-party gateway fees.

What a $5,000 Month Costs on Each Platform

Here is one store, priced on both platforms: $5,000 of online card sales a month, across 100 orders of $50. The sales figures are illustrative; the prices and rates are the published ones from the two tables above, with GoDaddy's card fees counted at its “as low as” online rate.

Two things move the gap, and at Shopify's standard prices neither changes which platform is cheaper. The subscription difference is fixed, so it matters less as sales grow; the percentage difference grows with sales, so it matters more. Both work in GoDaddy's favor: once Shopify's $1 months are over, and against GoDaddy's published price on the same billing term, there is no sales level at which Shopify's entry plan becomes the cheaper one.

What the example cannot show is year two on GoDaddy's annual plan, because GoDaddy's plan pages we read on September 28, 2026 don't publish that price. If you would rather not guess, the month-to-month row is the comparison built entirely on published prices.

Selling in Person: GoDaddy POS vs Shopify POS

If the store also sells at markets or a counter, the in-person layer is a second set of costs: a card reader or terminal, an optional software tier with extra register features, and the card-present rate.

The premium tiers are not like for like. Each vendor decides what its paid tier adds, and this article doesn't map one feature list onto the other, so compare each tier against the register features you actually use. What Shopify POS Pro adds, and when it pays for itself, has its own guide.

GoDaddy also sells Smart Terminals, starting at $275 for the single-screen, handheld Smart Terminal Flex.

What the Store Itself Can Do

A cheaper store is only cheaper if it can do the job. Two questions decide most small-store choices here: how big the catalog can get, and how you add a feature the builder doesn't have.

How many products can a GoDaddy store hold?

Shopify's comparison page, read on September 28, 2026, says GoDaddy isn't ideal for stores that want to scale globally, citing “no app marketplace to add functionality” and “a 5,000 product limit.”

GoDaddy's own plan-selection page, in a capture from September 22, 2026, lists “Sell unlimited products and services” among its plan features. Neither page is a neutral source on the other company's product: the first is Shopify describing a competitor.

Apps and add-on features

Shopify's answer to a missing feature is its App Store, which held more than 21,000 apps as of December 31, 2025 according to Shopify's annual report. It is where Shopify stores add what the core platform doesn't include.

GoDaddy's side is described in the Shopify comparison quoted above as “no app marketplace,” and that is Shopify's description, not GoDaddy's. If a feature you need isn't in GoDaddy's builder, confirm it exists before you choose, because the fallback Shopify stores rely on may not be there.

The cost cuts the other way. Paid apps bill on top of Shopify's subscription, so a Shopify store that leans on apps can end up well above the plan price in the table earlier.

If You Start on GoDaddy, How Hard Is Moving Later?

Starting on GoDaddy and moving later is a legitimate plan. Shopify's Help Center guide to migrating from GoDaddy calls itself “a starting point and as a reference to make sure that you don't forget any key setup tasks,” and of the four methods it lists, it recommends CSV files when they're available: you export your products from GoDaddy and import them into Shopify.

Shopify's free Store Migration app is not one of the guide's routes for GoDaddy: none of the Shopify pages we read on September 28, 2026 (the app's listing, Shopify's migration hub and the GoDaddy guide itself) lists GoDaddy among the app's sources. The app moves product and customer data from Square, WooCommerce, Etsy, Wix, Amazon, eBay, Clover and Lightspeed R/X (Vend), by CSV upload or, on supported platforms, by connecting the account to import automatically.

The guide's four methods are manual copying, a CSV export and import, third-party migration apps from the Shopify App Store, and a hired Shopify Partner, and the effort grows with the catalog. Which method fits a store of your size is laid out in our migration guide's comparison of methods.

That is the practical reason to decide now rather than later: if you already expect to outgrow a simple store, starting on Shopify skips a migration you would otherwise have to schedule.

Does Shopify Work With a GoDaddy Domain?

Choosing Shopify doesn't mean giving up a domain you already own at GoDaddy. Shopify can point your existing name at your store while the registration stays exactly where it is.

In Shopify admin that route runs through Settings > Domains > Connect existing domain, and Shopify says it can take up to 48 hours for the domain to be fully live.

If the automatic route doesn't go through, Shopify's GoDaddy help page gives the manual version for a GoDaddy domain whose hosting stays at GoDaddy: two DNS records you set there.

Keeping the name at GoDaddy means GoDaddy keeps billing for it. According to GoDaddy's .com page, a .com there costs $22.99 for each year after the first as of September 2026, and its first-year .com promotion requires buying three years at once.

Whether to keep the name at GoDaddy for good or move the registration to Shopify is a separate decision, and our domain guide covers what connecting without transferring means for billing and control.

The walkthrough below, from the KnowledgeBase channel (2023), shows the manual route at GoDaddy step by step; the two records it uses match the ones on Shopify's GoDaddy help page as of September 2026.

When GoDaddy Is Enough — and When It Isn't

The numbers above point one way and the capabilities the other, so the decision comes down to which of the two your store will run into first.

Where GoDaddy's Commerce plan is the sensible pick

• A short product list that will stay far below the 5,000-product figure Shopify cites.
• Online card sales, where GoDaddy Payments lists the lower rate.
• A site whose features all sit inside GoDaddy's builder, with nothing you would need an app for.
• A business in a country where GoDaddy offers the Commerce plan, since it is available in certain regions only.

For that store, the $18 a month the worked example saves at $5,000 in monthly sales in year one of yearly billing, or $14 month to month, is real money.

Where Shopify earns its higher price

• A catalog that may reach the thousands, where Shopify's comparison page says GoDaddy stops at 5,000.
• Features you will add rather than find built in, which on Shopify come from the App Store.
• A plan to grow into a bigger store without switching platforms, since no Shopify page we read on September 28, 2026 lists GoDaddy as a Store Migration app source.

None of that is free. On Shopify you pay a higher subscription and a higher card rate on the entry plan, apps add their own bills, and orders paid through a third-party payment provider instead of Shopify Payments carry a 2% transaction fee on Basic, POS orders excepted. Those trade-offs are catalogued in our honest list of Shopify's disadvantages, and they are worth reading before you commit either way.

The Bottom Line

On the numbers GoDaddy publishes today, GoDaddy wins on price and Shopify wins on room to grow. The right pick is whichever limit your store will hit first.

Frequently Asked Questions