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.

Ottawa-based Shopify launched a lot later than originally promised (last fall), but it was worth the wait. They’ve launched a private beta and plan to open their doors permanently in May.

Shopify is a hosted ecommerce solution with integrated payments. People who sell stuff online, or want to, are going to like it. You can set up a store in moments, add items to sell, upload images, add tags and group items, and integrate paypal or a credit card processor for payments. Reporting is excellent, and they’ve even thought to include a RSS feed of recent orders to keep track of sales.

See here for more details on features. In general, sellers will be able to create a very professional multi-page website with little or no programming skills in just a few minutes.

There are a number of pre-made themes for the shop, and themes can be modified by directly manipulating the CSS. Shopify has also released a product called Vision, which is a downloadable client application for designers to build and modify their own shopify shop themes.

Creating a store is free. Shopify takes a 3.75% commission on all sales.

So Shopify will help you set up a very nice store at a reasonable price. But they should quickly build tools to help people promote these stores as well (Vendio, for example, has some basic promotional tools, and they also assist with ebay listings). If shopify can help store owners with marketing, too, it’ll become a more useful service.

For more on shopify, see their blog and this interview with development lead Tobi Lutke. If anyone knows about good sample shops, please let me know about them.

Scott Lake’s Shopify, based in Ottawa, Canada, has been threatening to launch for some time now (the site still says it will launch in the Fall of 2005). It promises to solve many of the woes associated with selling online today, with solutions for hosting, design and integrated payment options:

In fall 2005, Jaded Pixel will be releasing Shopify 1.0! Shopify is a hosted e-commerce solution that removes the traditional barriers that have kept many individuals and small business from selling online. It is a Web 2.0 product that focuses on providing buyers and sellers with the features essential to completing e-commerce transactions. It is simple, elegant and desperately needed.

Whenever it launches, I’ll be looking forward to checking it out. The Shopify blog is here. Sign up for launch notification here