GoHighLevel has finally introduced tools for e-commerce and made it easier to use the platforms for selling higher volumes of products.
I was curious, so I took a deep dive into the features to see if they are up to scratch.
Key Takeaways:
- You can now add e-commerce pages to any GoHighLevel website
- Only suitable for physical products—not digital products.
- Payment providers are limited, and there’s no integration for drop-shipping
What Can You Sell with GoHighLevel E-Commerce?
You have always been able to sell physical products on GoHighLevel. There was (and still is) a feature to create product listings, but that was all you got in terms of e-commerce tools.
The platform has now expanded its range of e-commerce capabilities and made it easier for you to sell higher volumes of physical products, but there are still limitations.
It’s great that GoHighLevel is focusing on e-commerce, but it’s still unsuitable for large-scale selling. And if you want to sell digital products like ebooks and design files, there’s no capability for that, either.
Right now, if you have anything more than a handful of products, you’re going to quickly realize that a dedicated e-commerce platform is the better option.
What I Thought About the GoHighLevel E-Commerce Features
E-Commerce Pages and Templates
If you open the GoHighLevel website builder, you will notice seven new e-commerce templates to explore. These include a florist shop and a gym equipment store, although the product niches are irrelevant since you can customize them.
The design of these pages is pretty simple, but they get the job done. In total, you get:
- A product list page
- An individual product details page
- A cart page
- Checkout and thank you pages
If you’re thinking the template selection is on the thin side, don’t worry. The website builder now features the option to add the e-commerce pages to any of your GoHighLevel websites.
This means you can use e-commerce with any template design—a feature I think is really useful. It will save you a lot of time if you want to set up e-commerce on an existing site.
As I said, the pages are basic and the bare minimum you would expect from an e-commerce tool. Would I recommend them to a high-volume shop? Probably not. But they will do just fine if you have a modest number of products to sell.
Product Listings and Variants
You have always been able to create product listings in GoHighLevel, but now the feature is enhanced and you can use it with your e-commerce pages.
You get what you’d expect from a product listing creation tool. You can input details about the product, upload photos, and add product variants such as colors and sizes. You can also pick which currency to display the price in, and there is a very basic inventory tracker.
What I also find useful is that there is an option to automatically charge and collect taxes. Having to do this manually would make this feature next to useless, so I’m glad GoHighLevel has included it.
The platform has also introduced a product collections feature where you can create groups of related products to organize them better.
This would be great, but you can’t bulk-add products to a collection. Instead, you have to go into each of your listings and add them to a collection one by one, which quickly gets annoying.
Overall, I think the GoHighLevel has started out on the right foot with this feature. However, it needs some refining to compete with dedicated e-commerce platforms.
Automatic Abandoned Cart Emails
If a would-be customer abandons their cart, GoHighLevel will send out an email to remind them to complete their purchase.
You’ll find this option in the Payments tab under “Settings.” There’s not much you can customize here except when the email gets sent.
If you want to use a customized email, you can create one in the email builder.
To do this, add the shopping cart element to the email and anything else you want to include, such as a discount coupon. I like that you get free reign over what to include in the email—it means you can target your audience properly and stay on brand.
If you don’t use a customized email, a default email gets sent and you don’t get any visibility on what it looks like.
What’s Missing from GoHighLevel E-Commerce?
Inventory and Fulfillment Management Tools
Unfortunately, the lack of inventory management makes GoHighLevel unsuitable for a large-scale e-commerce store.
A basic inventory tracker tells you how many units you have of a particular product, but there is no centralized place to view the data and you can’t assign inventory locations.
Shops with hundreds or thousands of products will find it impossible to keep track of everything.
Additionally, product fulfillment cannot be completed in GoHighLevel. You have to use a third-party shipping site and then manually input the shipping numbers into GoHighLevel. If you’re dealing with high order volumes, this will get tedious very quickly.
What I also found odd was that you can create product listings in the currency of your choice, but when it comes to setting the shipping rates, you can only charge in your default currency.
That means customers may end up paying for the product in euros and the shipping in dollars. This doesn’t make sense, and I hope GoHighLevel changes it quickly.
Native Shipping, Drop-Shipping, and Print-on-Demand (POD) Integrations
Drop-shipping is huge—around 27% of online stores use the drop-shipping method for fulfilling orders. Print-on-demand is another big niche (over 11% of Shopify stores are print-on-demand).
By not including native integration for this type of e-commerce, GoHighLevel is excluding a huge chunk of the market.
I think GoHighLevel is missing out here. While you can set up product listings for physical products, there is no option if your product is digital.
On platforms like Shopify, you can select the digital product option and upload the files for purchase. When someone buys the files, they are automatically sent via email.
Sure, since GoHighLevel has the course builder, you can get around it by uploading your digital products as a course, but this won’t work for everyone. Someone with a thousand design files to sell isn’t going to do that!
Varied Payment Gateways
If GoHighLevel wants to compete in the e-commerce world, it will have to up its payment provider game. In fact, this is the only area where the platform does not live up to its “all-in-one” status.
The platform does not have a native payment gateway, so users have to connect with Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, or NMI.
Most e-commerce sites offer integration with a wide variety of payment providers and also have their own payment gateway. Doing this makes it easier to do business globally and gives the customer less friction at the point of sale.
Is the GoHighLevel E-Commerce Feature Worth It Right Now?
Overall, I think the GoHighLevel e-commerce tool has a long way to go before it’s fully suitable for selling physical products. I’d love to see this feature enhanced to include digital products, drop-shipping, and POD.
Additionally, there needs to be far more flexibility in choosing which products to add to a store because this creates a serious limitation on having different types of e-commerce.
I am sure GoHighLevel will continue to enhance the features, so it’s worth keeping an eye on them to see how they develop.
Who Should Use GoHighLevel E-Commerce?
Since many of the e-commerce tools and processes are manual and tedious, this isn’t the right choice if you’re selling at high volumes.
Similarly, if your entire focus is e-commerce and you’re looking for a platform to start your business, you will be far more satisfied with a dedicated platform like Shopify.
However, if you’re already using GoHighLevel for marketing or CRM and have a handful of physical products you want to sell, the tools are just about adequate.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Many GoHighLevel E-Commerce Stores Can I Have?
Since the feature is unlimited, you can create as many GoHighLevel e-commerce stores as you want. You can even add the e-commerce pages to an existing GoHighLevel website.
How Many Products Can I Sell With GoHighLevel E-Commerce?
You can create unlimited product listings inside GoHighLevel and sell unlimited units. However, the platform lacks tools for high-volume selling (like proper inventory management and fulfillment) and is unsuitable for this purpose.
Is Shopify or GoHighLevel Better for E-Commerce?
Shopify is better than GoHighLevel for e-commerce. Shopify is a dedicated e-commerce platform suitable for all types of product sales, including digital, drop-shipping, and print-on-demand. In contrast, GoHighLevel is only suitable for low-volume physical product sales.
