• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 2, 2021

Commerce has become critical to GoDaddy customers, so the company spent most of 2020 and into this year heavily investing in ways to build out intuitive experiences that enable small businesses to sell everywhere.

This month GoDaddy dug deeper into ecommerce and launched an extension for its Managed WordPress Ecommerce hosting plan.

Website designers and developers can now get their clients’ online stores up and running in fewer steps.

The plan includes a new built-in support dashboard, daily backups with one-click restore and daily malware scans and repair, including security activity auditing, remote malware scanning, and security notifications with guaranteed cleanup of any malware found on a client’s site.

The new extensions are made possible through GoDaddy’s acquisition of SkyVerge in September 2020. It enables GoDaddy customers to create custom WooCommerce stores for their clients with a library of WordPress plugins and themes and more than 75 extensions. 

WooCommerce is a third party, open-source ecommerce platform that enables businesses to sell products online. It is used by more than one-quarter of all online stores. GoDaddy offers fully managed web hosting for the WooCommerce platform, which provides exceptional value to end users by.

It includes a library of premium plugins that extend the platform and allows developers to build exactly the stores their clients need.

Through the integration of the new extensions, GoDaddy now offers nearly double the amount of WooCommerce extensions available for its Managed WordPress Ecommerce customers -- increasing the value of the plugins from $3,000 to nearly $6,000 worth of software -- at no additional cost to the customer. 

The new extensions include advanced options for an online store’s cart and checkout, merchandising, payments and shipping to name a few. GoDaddy customers can enable more features on their client’s website. 

Last month, GoDaddy reported ending its fiscal 2020 year with nearly 1.4 million new customers, just about double the number the company added in 2019. Total revenue for the quarter came in at $873.9 million, up 12% year-over-year. 

International revenue rose 12.2% to $293.2 million, compared with the prior year.

GoDaddy didn’t sit still last year. In December, to support ecommerce, GoDaddy acquired payments processor Poynt in a $365 million deal that included $320 million in cash at closing and $45 million in deferred cash payments subject to certain performance and employment conditions over three years.

Poynt CEO Osama Bedier, the man who created Google Wallet, joined the GoDaddy team as the lead of the new commerce division.