Keep it simple and easy to remember

Domains – Most customers looking for a website want to remember something associated with the product or service you offer. Unless you have a lot of money to spend on advertising like eBay or Amazon, your best bet is to choose a domain name that represents your products and services. Use simple, easy-to-remember words that your customers say often. For example, your e-commerce business might be selling racing bikes, so consider domain names: racingbikes.com or roadracingbikes.com. Try to avoid names like joesracingbikes.com or smithsracingbikes.com even if your business is called that. We want to make sure your domain name is easy to remember and captures the widest range of customers.

don’t be fancy

Try to make sure you choose domain names with the correct spelling and use abbreviated words. I have seen some domain names like racingbiks.com or rcingbikes.com. These are words we might know when we send an SMS text message, but when it comes to marketing your eCommerce business, it’s not worth shortening your domain name so people try to remember it.

It’s very common to see onlinebusiness.com shortened to onlinebiz.com, which isn’t great for search engine optimization and other keyword linking strategies I’ll be talking about.

Choose dot com or another extension?

According to Verisign, more than 45% of all domain registrations have a .com extension. Keep in mind that shoppers will likely remember a .COM extension while shopping online and this will impact the success of your business. In any business I set up, the first extension I look for is a .com, which allows me to expand and market my business globally, even if I’m not a US-based business.

Search Engine Friendly Domain Name

You may have noticed my emphasis on choosing a domain name that is related to your products and services and also my encouragement to keep it simple. The reason I recommend you consider choosing a domain name related to your products and services is to allow search engines to easily find your website. Having the right keywords related to your ecommerce business in your domain name can play a vital role. For example, if my domain name was racingbikes.com and I went online to search for “racing bikes”, your website would most likely appear at the top because it is the most relevant to the searched keywords. This has already conquered half your battle. If you had chosen rcingbikes.com, you would be spending a great deal of time and resources trying to optimize your website.

One question I get asked a lot is what happens if the domain name I want for my e-commerce business is taken? Since there are billions of websites on the internet, it would be common for one and two word domain names to be already taken. Don’t worry though, you can still create a domain name from other niche keywords. Let’s take the keywords “racing bikes” as an example again. Since racingbikes.com is in use, let’s dig deeper and choose a bike brand you want to focus on. Shimano is a popular and reputable brand – let’s choose shimanoracingbikes.com. You could repeat this with many other brands and use it to create many domain names that would point to your website. Alternatively, being more generic, you can choose topracingbikes.com or leaderracingbikes.com. Regardless of the keywords that are dominating in your market, try to find out which ones would be profitable for your eCommerce business and see if the domain name is available.

Check if your domain name is available

There are many domain name registries on the market, but I don’t recommend buying domain names from them as they don’t provide good support.

How to register your domain name

The company I use to register my domains is Namecheap and I highly recommend it. They are very affordable and provide 1 year of private registration as of this writing. It also allows me to keep my business address and phone details private at no additional cost. Many of the major internet marketers use them because they provide good support and also forward any spam complaints to the web host.

The process of registering your domain is a very simple process. Once you’ve decided on a domain name, check to see if it’s available, and then register it through Namecheap. Once it is complete, you will receive a couple of notification emails with your registration certificate and you will be the owner of the domain. In the next few posts, I’ll walk you through how to set up your hosting services and link them to your domain name.