GoodBusiness, a new hosted application package from GoodBarry is aiming to make ecommerce easier for small business owners.
There’s a lot of options in this space, everything from CMS packages through to commercial high end hosted options. GoodBusiness is aimed at small businesses who either cant afford the high end packages, or don’t have the skills available to do it themselves. The package includes website creation, lead management, email marketing, online shopping, blogging, and business analytics in the one system. GoodBusiness offers a “customer centric vision” of a website, with every feature integrated into a central customer database allowing businesses to automatically build customer profiles and track behavior across their online business.
GoodBusiness competes directly with Shopify, a product we reviewed in April 2006. GoodBarry argues that GoodBusiness offers a more customer-centric ecommerce package that provides a complete picture of customer behavior, allowing for better informed decisions; however both packages do provide a similar outcome: a simplified software-as-a-service ecommerce package.
GoodBusiness pricing starts at $39/month for the most basic plan and includes all features. Higher plans are available with more bandwidth, disk space and admin user accounts.
GoodBarry argues that GoodBusiness offers a more customer-centric ecommerce package that provides a complete picture of customer behavior, allowing for better informed decisions
I argue that GoodRichard offer a more customer-centric prom picture package that provides a more complete picture of underaged drinking and sexual behavior allowing for better informed decision.
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We have found that small businesses do not have the ability to fully comprehend and utilize all of those analytics.
Also, they are short staffed and can not hire an expert to fully take advantage of all of those features. Most of them are jack of all trades Administrators with a few traditional sales people.
What we have done is to offer optional managed services with our model to accommodate those who need expertise to fully exploit the potential of their analytics and online marketing initiatives
Hi Web D,
Thanks for your comments, but I’d have to disagree that small businesses do not have the ability to comprehend and utilize those analytics.
That’s a pretty broad generalization! =)
In our experience, we’ve seen business owners are getting more and more web-savvy – they need to – and there’s plenty of resources out there that small business owners can tap into to expand their knowledge.
Our current customers love having a range of analytics available to them that they can use to evaluate their business performance – they understand their website is an integral part of their business that they need to have their heads around.
And in any case – there’s nothing stopping web designers and developers building their client’s site on GoodBusiness and managing it for them anyway =)
Cheers
I think it will be more beneficial to specific customers if they provide location based service and extend their reach around the world.
Their graphic “Meet the GoodBarry Family” on the frontpage is somewhat misleading.
How can Free + Free + Free + Free = $39 !?
For an open source alternative, check out Magento
http://www.mage...tocommerce.com/
Tim
I think it might help the small business to develop the web system with low cost.
Hey tim, how scalable is your open source alternative. Pardon me for thinking in this way, but I always suspect open source solution when it comes to business needs
Shopify kicks ass.
although, at the end of the day, I think that GoodBarry has somewhat of a different target market. I wouldn’t call it a “direct shopify competitor” necessarily…
Agree, GoodBarry is not really a competitor to Shopify. Although there are some cross overs, we are clearly aiming in a different place. Our goal is to make it easy for small businesses to have an integrated suite of products that they need to be successful online. One of our key competitve advantages is that we built everything from the ground up, so the level of integration and benefits flowing from one area of the system to another is sigificant.
Hi Bardia,
Your service looks like it could be outstanding and completely unique blend of a lot of formerly dispersed services.
We’d love to review GoodBarry for auditoriumA.com’s “A” List – it’s TechCrunch meets the WebbyAwards. Send beta login credentials to support@auditoriumA.com.
http://www.audi...riumA.com/alist
@Mayank – Magento can be scaled signficantly (read over the featureset).
I believe Open Source has proved itself for business/enterprise needs (just ask IBM, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, etc.)
Need an invite!!!
Microsoft will do e-biz right! These guys are all srew-ups!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Don’t forget StoreSuite NX, coming in early 2008:
http://www.inte....com/storesuite
We’re competing in the same space but not as SaaS.
http://faugenab...stmas-trees.php
I’ve been using the GoodBarry system for clients for some time now and I don’t think its a direct competitor of Shopify or Magento… both of those products are for Ecommerce with CMS features almost as an afterthought. Sure, Magento or Shopify might have more intricate features for coupons or shipping options, etc. But the whole point of GoodBarry is that you can have your shop, cms, blog, email campaign and reporting tools for all these services under on roof. You can drill down to your customer’s interactions on all of your feature sets, and for me, the Web Apps feature and SiteWalk (easy site editing) features sell themselves.
What other sites or SaaS are there that offer the whole host of ecommerce, CMS, analytics and keyword marketing? Keep the plugs coming, please, still trying to make up my mind. AdWords integration into product catalogue would be a huge plus – does anyone so this? Cheers.
I’ve been looking long and hard for something like Goodbarry and have passed up Magento and Shopify.
Magento because of the huge learning curve and overwhelming complexity. Call me stupid but Magento is too big for most of us to manage and it actually doesn’t hide behind the fact that it is built as an enterprise solution, not a simple ecommerce solution.
Shopify lost me at it’s price, I don’t feel I need to pay them any percentage of my sales. You may say only 1 or 2 percent of your sale is insignificant. However, there are enough fee’s being taken out by credit card processors and banks that I certainly don’t need another one from my site host.
I haven’t tried GoodBarry yet but after all my research, they’re the one I’m going to be trying next.
We’ve been trying to use Goodbarry to setup our site for a while now and it’s been a struggle. As a user and a small business owner I feel that Goodbarry needs their development team to catch up with their marketing team.
They’re really selling it, but their not really doing a 100% job for their customers. For instance, the latest problem we’ve been having is there is no sort by alpha/price module available for online catalogs, and when you look at the Goodbarry support forums (which are lacking to say the least) their response is to simply to say their system can’t perform that function, which is no real response to the problem.
For us, there have been many integral issues with Goodbarry like this that have caused problems. These issues, need to be fixed before Goodbarry can really be considered because they cost their users and their respective small businesses time and money.
Hi Marco,
To display your catalogs in alphabetical order, simply go to your online shop’s main layout (More Customization Options->Online Shop layouts) and change:
{tag_cataloguelist,4}
to
{tag_cataloguelist,4,,,alphabetical}
Hope that helps.
15 days is really really good for any support request from goodbarry.
Sometimes we don’t get ANY response (all but a courteous autoresponder!).
They are worth leaving alone. Probably going to interspire or shopify.
I agree that magento is waay too overwhelming when it comes to features and changes to its core features in the filesystem.
I have been using the Good Barry/Business Catalyst platform for about 6 months now and although there are certain features that are lacking it is still a very solid product. It took a little getting used to but i am starting to get my flow on the more i use it, i guess thats like any thing.
They need to improve the blog system (apparently some major changes are coming soon). Also faster activation on support requests would be great, i think now that they are moving to just partner/reseller mode with adobe this will improve as they wont be inundated with complete novice requests.
My clients seem very happy that they can keep all their customers interactions in the one place.
Yes you pay for the service but for me not having to worry about issues when upgrading software & servers is a large benefit. If they keep upgrading the system i will be happy and i presume Adobe’s input will be of great benefit.