If you are starting a new e-commerce internet business, one question immediately pops into mind, what name should I choose? Have you heard of the saying in property, “location, location, location”? Most associate buying property with choosing the right location and it may mean that you make or lose money. Your e-commerce domain name is no different. Think of your domain name as your Internet property, which represents your business presence online. Choose a domain name that is customer friendly and easy to remember:

How To Choose A Profitable E-commerce Domain Name?

Keep It Simple And Easy To Remember
Most customers who look for a website want to remember something that is associate with the product or service you are offering. 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 and easy to remember words that are spoken often by your customers. For example, your e-commerce business might be selling racing bikes so consider the domain name: racingbikes.com or roadracingbikes.com. Try to avoid names like joesracingbikes.com or smithsracingbikes.com even if your company is called that. We want to make sure your domain name is easy to remember and captures the widest scope of customers.

Don’t Be Fancy
Try to make sure you choose domain names with the correct spelling and to use short hand words. I have seen some domain names like racingbiks.com or rcingbikes.com. These are words we may know when we are sending a text via SMS but when it comes to marketing your e-commerce business it is not worth shortening your domain name for people to try to remember.

It’s very common to see onlinebusiness.com get shortened to onlinebiz.com, which is not very good for search engine optimization and other keyword link strategies that I will discuss about.

Choosing Dot Com Or Another Extension?
According to Verisign, over 45% of total domain registrations have a .COM extension. Keep in mind that shoppers will more than likely remember a .COM extension while shopping online and this will have an impact on how successful your business will be. 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 am not a business located in the United States.

Domain Name Friendly For Search Engines
You may have realised 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 why I recommend you look at choosing a domain name related to your products and services is to allow for search engines to easily find your website. Having the right keywords that relate to your e-commerce 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”, more than likely your website will come up at the top because it is the most relevant to the key words searched. This has already conquered half of your battle. If you had chosen rcingbikes.com, then you would be spending a great amount of time and resources trying to optimize your website.

A question I get asked quite 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 single and double word domain names to be already taken. Though don’t sweat, because you can still create a domain name from other keywords in niche markets. Let’s take for example the keywords “racing bikes” again. Since racingbikes.com is taken, let us dig further and choose a brand of bikes you want to focus on. Shimano is a popular and reputable brand: so let us choose shimanoracingbikes.com. You could repeat this with many other brands and use that to create a lot of domain names that would be directed to your website. Alternatively being more generic you can choose topracingbikes.com or leadingracingbikes.com. Which ever keywords are dominate in your market, try to find out which ones would be profitable for your e-commerce business and search to see if the domain name is available. I recommend you read this article on how to choose profitable keywords as well.

Checking If Your Domain Name Is Available

There are many domain name registers in the market and one of the most popular ones I recommend using to check for the availability of your domain name is GoDaddy. Firstly I don’t recommend you buy domain names from them as they don’t provide good support. I only recommend this site because it allows you to see other available domain names if the one you are searching has been taken. Here is an example:

As you can see they have a good domain search engine to recommend other available domain names. It’s handy to see what is possible from an additional 10+ recommended domain names.

How To Register Your Domain Name

The company that I use to register my domains is Namecheap and I can highly recommend them. They are very affordable and provide 1 year of private registration as of writing this. It also allows me to keep my business address and phone details private at no additional cost. A lot of top Internet marketers use them because they provide good support and also they refer any SPAM complaints to the web host. Unlike GoDaddy as I have mentioned above, they will handle SPAM directly with you and only give you 24 hours to respond. If you do not respond within 24 hours they will ask you to pay a fee of about $179 to reinstate your domain from a total ban (this is in their Terms Of Service). This may not be a bad thing if you like your domain to be SPAM free, but what would happen if you can’t take action within 24 hours? Your domain gets locked and it will take you months to get it back. I only mention this so that you can avoid these problems for yourself.

The process in registering your domain is a very simple process. Once you have decided on a domain name, check to see if it is available and then register it through Namecheap. Once that is completed, 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 will explain to you how to setup your hosting services and link them to your domain name.

Tyrone Shum
Helping Businesses Get Online