Like so many companies trying to service online consumers and web-based businesses, GoDaddy has launched a new online and mobile payments processing service.
In fact, GoDaddy teamed up with three big players — PayPal, Dwolla, and Stripe — to introduce the service.
“Get Paid” will let users, most of whom have not been taking payments electronically, accept credit cards, debit cards, eChecks (ACH), and PayPal transfers. The service will be available first to GoDaddy’s 9 million users in the U.S.
GoDaddy will offer “Get Paid” in three service tiers starting at $4 per month and increasing up to $15 per month for users who want to add features such as expense tracking, connecting bank accounts, and other accounting interfaces.
According to SVP of applications Steven Aldrich, GoDaddy decided to add a payment service because the company was hearing regular complaints from customers about being paid in a timely and easy way for their products and services.
“They were using a hodge podge of different methods to collect payments,” says Aldrich. “Less than half of our users accept credit cards, some would invoice, some would take sales over the phones. Small businesses were losing track of who paid what and who owed money, rather than just getting paid then and there. When you are talking about businesses that may only be pulling in $40,000 per year, every dollar makes a difference.”
GoDaddy is preparing for a $100 million IPO, and the domain and web services company is bulking up on features that will help it boost revenues from its 12 million small-business customers.
Aldrich says that the company decided to partner with established payment companies because PayPal, Dwolla, and Stripe are already services that its customers are using; and each of the three offer strengths in different areas.
PayPal, for instance, is so big that many of GoDaddy’s customers already have PayPal accounts, making it a natural route to take for mobile and point-of-sale payments (via PayPal’s Here offering). Aldrich says that the mobile element was a “must have” in whatever payment service GoDaddy built. He noted that Stripe, on the other hand, offers a “really innovative credit card processing service, with great support for developers. You can basically start taking payments right away.”
Industry observers have noted the proliferation of payment services providers and question how many will survive to become dominant forces.
“We’ll continue to look at it,” Aldrich says. “There are a bunch of payments providers out there today and a lot of activity going on. We don’t know what the future will hold so I don’t know where our payments strategy could lead over time.”
And GoDaddy, already trying to swim upstream (it made $1.13 billion in 2013, with $199.88 million in net losses), may have other challenges. That could come when Google jumps into the domain registration business. Google is currently testing its own service, dubbed Google Domains.
