GoEmerchant Review

Full review

GoEmerchant is an internet merchant account specialist – a merchant account is a specialized bank account that lets you accept credit card payments online or over the phone. If you’re selling anything online and you want to do it direct (not through eBay or Amazon etc) you need a merchant account. GoEmerchant doesn’t only offer a merchant account set-up; you can also set up and manage online shopping carts and ecommerce stores.

Sign up

Unlike many of the ecommerce solutions available on the market, GoEmerchant doesn't offer unlimited bandwidth on all plans. The price of a monthly plan depends on how much traffic you expect, as well as how many products you want to sell, which means you could end up penalized if you end up having an exceptionally strong month.

Plans start at the Starter package for $19.99 - very low traffic, 2GB bandwidth, for around 4,000 visitors. The professional plan is $129.99 a month for 45GB, unlimited products and 90,000 visitors (aprox.) There’s a 15-day free trial available.

There are set-up fees and an annual fee, making this potentially one of the less economical packages around. Be sure to read the merchant account agreement before you sign up so you are sure about what you are getting.

Design

When you’re a beginner and setting up an online store the chances are you won’t want to wade through a HTML tutorial in order to create a decent-looking site. Most ecommerce store providers offer free ready-made templates you can use to showcase your products and GoEmerchant offers 50. The originality and style of the templates doesn’t match some top providers but they are easy to use and they do what you need them to do – display your products. The Easy Edit Bar allows you to make simple changes to the site and you can create a more personal design using HTML and CSS (although you don’t need any programming skills at all if you just want a basic design.)

Products

With GoEmerchant you can take advantage of a number of different product display tools that help you organize and sell. The zoom option, automatic enlargement feature, image gallery feature and automatic thumbnail generator all allow your products to stand out a little more. In addition, your customers can see which products that have previously viewed and can also use the Quick View button to purchase a product more easily if they have made an immediate decision.

Store

Inventory management – Keep up to speed with accurate records of how much of a particular item you have in stock, broken down into options such as size and color. The GoEmerchant package also offers shipping help, integration with QuickBooks and other programs, shipping tools, tax calculation tools and other inventory management features.

Payments – GoEmerchant is a merchant account provider so you sign up with their package for taking credit card payments online.

Marketing

No store will succeed without some online marketing help. Use the GoEmerchant tools to generate daily deals, offer discounts for group deals (aka Groupon), coupons, “make an offer” feature (aka eBay), gift certificates, and wedding lists. There is an additional feature to generate personalized customer email newsletters.

There are SEO tools built into the package too, including SEO-friendly HTML URLs, meta tags on your product pages, an index for your products and categories, and category breadcrumb navigation.

Reporting

The software includes some reporting features that are useful for tracking who visited your site, what they saw and what they ended up buying. GoEmerchant is integrated with Google Analytics and there is a dashboard within the program that you use to monitor statistical information about your sales. You can also track your customer correspondence with the CRM feature.

Features

The GoEmerchant software is not the most comprehensive when it comes to mCommerce, but there is an option to display your store so it is accessible for customers with iPhones or Android devices.

Set up a store on Facebook and automatically synchronize your product sales on Facebook and your online store. You can also update followers on Twitter from your online store.

Security

GoEmerchant is a trusted ecommerce provider and subsequently offers fraud protection features and tools that allow shoppers to buy securely. The software is fully PCI compliant and integrated with Visa CISP Compliance.

Ease of use

This ecommerce package is firmly targeted at beginners so it should be easy to handle. We found the GoEmerchant software to be just that – easy to handle, simple to customize and pretty simple to maintain. The web-based software package means you don’t need to download anything and you don’t need any programming skills.

Help & support

If it turns out to be a little more complicated than you hoped, you can call the GoEmerchant tech support team. Free telephone support is based in the United States and we think the service is pretty good. You can also browse technical articles and FAQs online for free.

Overall

Beginners will feel comfortable with this ecommerce package and you can get a decent store online within a short time. With additional features such as mobile sites, social networking integration and marketing tools it is a good option.