Website Builder and Ecommerce Support Which Platforms Offer The Best Help?

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At WebsiteTooltester, we take support questions very seriously. I really enjoy helping users find the best solution (after all, that’s why I created the site), and it keeps me updated about how website builders and ecommerce platforms are performing.

So when our users started complaining about missing refunds from Wix or the support they received from sites like GoDaddy or One.com, I decided to check it myself.

I have to admit, it wasn’t easy. “Support quality” is a hard metric to measure scientifically.

But after testing refund policies and interacting 60+ times with 10 providers’ support teams, I think I got a pretty good idea of who is good at helping – and who isn’t.

Email Support – How Long Do Platforms Take To Reply?

The first step was to see how long it takes to get an answer to a simple email. I sent 6 rounds of questions at different times of the day and week to calculate an average response time.

Note that out of the 10 providers I tested, GoDaddy was the only one who doesn’t offer email support. I used their live chat instead.

What I learned:

• Weebly claims to offer support on weekends as well as weekdays. However, when I sent a question Saturday morning, the answer only came back on Monday.

• During my first week of tests, Squarespace’s team put up a banner in their help section to say support was slower than usual. Live chat was hardly ever available during that time. Answer times didn’t improve significantly, even after the supposed peak was over.

Seems like we picked the wrong time to review Squarespace’s support

• Even though Godaddy’s live chat was available pretty instantly most of the time, we also had two instances when it took almost an hour to reach a support agent (especially for billing related issues). In these cases, email support would have been much more convenient, which they, unfortunately, don’t offer.

GoDaddy’s Live Chat is not always instant

• Jimdo’s support team seems to be based out of Europe. If you are from the US and write them in the morning, you might even have an answer on the same day. However, write them in the afternoon/evening and you will most certainly receive your answer the following day.

Support Answers Quality – Are They Actually Helpful?

Your experience of how good an answer is will vary greatly. So I created a set of 6 questions, from the very basic to the fairly tricky. Each answer then got a score: excellent (+2 points), OK (1 point) and bad (-2 points).

The questions were:

1. How can I add a Wistia video to my website?
2. How can I create a bilingual website?
3. How do I add hreflang tags to my site?
4. What’s my cheapest option to set up my own domain and 5 email accounts?
5. How do I compress the images on my site to speed it up?
6. How do I add Meta Keywords to my website?

Question #4, for instance, was a sneaky one. It’s usually cheaper to buy domain name and accounts externally, but platforms tend to favour Google’s Google Workspace, which most of them partner up with. It’s a great service, but not the cheapest. (Only Shopify and BigCommerce had good alternative solutions).

Question #6 was also designed to confuse support: Meta Keywords are not really necessary anymore, so a good answer would recommend other good SEO techniques. (Squarespace, BigCommerce, and Webnode scored maximum points here.)

What I learned:

• BigCommerce is pretty far down the list. That’s because they’re very quick to recommend hiring a developer – even for simple things like adding a Wistia video, which really isn’t all that hard. Shame because their other answers were excellent.
• GoDaddy and One.com are at the bottom. It often felt like they were completely clueless.

Knowledge Pages – Who Had The Best Ones?

In an ideal world, you would find all your answers simply by searching the support pages. While some companies take great care to craft good answers, others don’t. Here’s how I rated them:

What I learned:

• GoDaddy and One.com: please sort out your knowledge base so it’s product-specific. It’s so frustrating to find answers about your email hosting feature when I’m clearly looking for website builder info.
• Wix is ahead of the game with their small bot chat wizards. They’re not only useful but also quite fun to use.

Your bot-assistant for Wix sites

Getting Refunds – I Want My Money Back!

Refund policies are one of the biggest complaints we hear about. It’s understandable – you really don’t want to feel like you are paying for something you don’t use anymore. But is it the fault of the provider, or the users who don’t read the terms and conditions?

To investigate, I actually bought packages and checked if I could get my money back – ensuring it was within their refund policies. This is how it went:

* After you can use Shopify for 3 months more paying $1 a month

What I learned:

• If you ask for your refund within the set time frame, you’ll get your money back. Sure in some case it might take a while, but you will get it.
• Wix had by far the most efficient system. You will use a chatbot type application that will immediately confirm whether the refund will be processed or not.
• Shopify and BigCommerce have no refund policy in place at all, so there is no way to trial an actual paid package. They do have a free trial though.
• Maybe all the complaints we get are from users who don’t actually read the T&Cs?

Conclusion – Which Provider Has the Best Support Overall?

Admittedly, this point system is a little bit flawed, but it still gives us a good overview of the support quality. To calculate it, I added up the points for quality and the knowledge base (KB). Each available support channel gave another point. Email answer speed was not included (except to separate those with the same score) – because some companies also offer live chat, which is usually instantaneous.

Final things I learned:

• You can’t go wrong with the top 3. Strikingly, Shopify and Jimdo do a splendid job. Anything after that and you might run into some frustrations.
• Surprisingly, contacting Wix is not as easy as it should be. You have to find a topic, then click NO when they ask if the answer was helpful. Only then will you be able to talk to someone.
• GoDaddy’s phone support is just as poor as their emails: they seem to mistake phone support with sales.
• Refund periods were always honored in our experience. If they say money-back guarantee, they mean it.

And there you have it! Hopefully this will give you more confidence about choosing the right website builder or ecommerce provider.

And if you have any questions, comments or feedback – please ask us below. I promise you our support is excellent 🙂

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Robert Brandl

Founder and CEO

Hi, my name is Robert Brandl! I used to work in a digital marketing agency where I managed website and email marketing projects. To optimize my client's campaigns, I always had to find the optimal web tools. Tooltester offers this knowledge to you, hopefully saving you endless hours of research.

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