Your own domain

Your shop can be served from an address you own — shop.yourbrand.com, or yourbrand.com itself — instead of the yourshop.my-store.shop address it came with.

You buy the address. We serve it, secure it with https, and keep it renewed. Nothing is bought, billed or renewed through us.

Your original .my-store.shop address keeps working the whole time, and after. Nothing you have built is moved or copied.

What you need first

A domain, bought from a registrar — Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Hostinger, or whoever you like. Any of them work; we have no preference and no partnership with any.

You need to be able to sign in there and edit its DNS records. That is the only technical thing asked of you, and it is one row in a table.

If you have not bought a domain yet, do that first. A domain someone else owns cannot be connected — the check will fail, as it is meant to.

Which address to use

A subdomain — recommended. shop.yourbrand.com, or store., or whatever word you like in front. Slightly easier to set up, and it leaves yourbrand.com free for a company site, a landing page, or email.

Your bare domain. yourbrand.com with nothing in front. Fine, and common for a shop that is the brand. One caveat below.

You can only connect one address at a time. Changing it later is two clicks and costs nothing, so this is not a decision to agonise over.

Setting it up

1. Type the address into your admin

Settings → Domain. Enter the address exactly as you want people to see it:

shop.yourbrand.com

Leave off https:// and leave off www. — we handle both. www.shop.yourbrand.com will redirect to the address you enter, so visitors end up in one place whichever they type.

Press Use this address. Nothing changes for your shop yet. The screen now shows you the exact record to add, filled in with your address.

2. Add the record at your registrar

Sign in where you bought the domain and find the DNS settings. Registrars all name it differently: DNS, DNS Records, Manage DNS, Advanced DNS, Zone Editor. Add a new record.

For a subdomain like shop.yourbrand.com:

That Name field trips most people up. Your registrar already knows the domain, so it wants only the piece in front. If it insists on the full shop.yourbrand.com, that is fine too — some do.

For a bare domain like yourbrand.com, your admin screen shows an A record with a numeric address instead. Copy it exactly, with @ as the name (@ means "the domain itself"). Bare domains cannot use CNAME — that is a rule of DNS, not ours.

If your registrar offers ALIAS or ANAME records, use one of those pointing at stores.my-store.shop instead of the A record. It behaves the same for visitors but keeps working by itself if we ever move servers. Cloudflare, DNSimple and a few others have it; most do not. Either is fine.

Save the record.

3. Come back and press Check DNS

Back in Settings → Domain, press Check DNS.

If it says your address does not point here yet, that is normal and not a mistake — DNS changes take time to travel. Usually a few minutes. Sometimes a few hours. Very occasionally up to a day.

Make a cup of tea and press it again. You can close the page; nothing is lost.

4. Wait a few minutes for the padlock

Once the check passes, the screen says verified and your shop already answers on the new address. Within about five minutes it becomes live: the security certificate has been issued and visitors get the padlock in their browser.

You do not have to do anything in this step, and there is nothing to buy. The certificate renews itself for as long as the address is connected.

Moving an address that is already in use

If the domain currently points at another shop — Shopify, Wix, a website builder — there is one extra step worth taking a day before you switch.

In your registrar's DNS settings, find the existing record and change its TTL to 300 (five minutes). Leave the value alone for now. Wait a day, then come back and do the switch as above.

TTL is how long the rest of the internet is allowed to remember the old answer. Most registrars default to 14400 — four hours — so without this, you and your customers keep landing on the old shop for up to four hours after the change, with no way to hurry it. Dropping it to 300 first shortens that to about five minutes.

If you have already switched without doing this, there is nothing to fix and nothing to worry about: it corrects itself within a few hours. Your own browser is usually the last to notice, which makes it feel broken when it is not — check from a phone on mobile data to see what your customers see.

What the three words mean

When it does not work

"That address points at 203.0.113.9, which is not this server." There is already a record for this name, left over from a website builder or a parking page. Edit or delete the old record rather than adding a second — two records for one name fight, and the wrong one wins about half the time.

"That does not look like a web address." Enter the hostname alone: shop.yourbrand.com, not https://shop.yourbrand.com/ and not shop.yourbrand.com/products.

"Use the address without www." Enter yourbrand.com. We serve www.yourbrand.com as well and send it to the address you gave, so visitors are never split across two versions of your shop.

"That address is already used by another shop." It is connected to a different shop on this platform. Remove it there first.

Verified for hours, never live. Something on our side needs a look — contact support. Your shop is still being served on the address meanwhile; it is the padlock that is missing.

It loads for everyone else but not for me. Your own browser and router hold the old answer longest, precisely because you visited the old site most. Try a phone on mobile data — if it works there, nothing is wrong and yours will catch up within a few hours.

It worked, and now it does not. Check the domain has not expired at your registrar, and that nobody has tidied up the DNS record. An expired domain stops working everywhere at once, including email.

Changing or removing it

Remove on the Domain screen disconnects the address. Your shop goes back to its .my-store.shop address immediately. Nothing is deleted — not your products, pages, orders or customers.

Tidy up afterwards by deleting the DNS record at your registrar. Leaving it pointed at us does no harm, but a record pointing somewhere that no longer answers is a confusing thing to find in a year.

To move to a different address, remove the old one and add the new one.

Worth knowing before you switch

Tell people. Nothing announces the new address on its own. Update your social profiles, your printed material and anywhere you have posted a link.

Links you have shared still work. Old .my-store.shop links keep working, so nothing you posted in the past breaks.

Email is separate. Connecting a domain here has nothing to do with email at that domain, and does not affect any mail you already receive. If you want hello@yourbrand.com, arrange that with your registrar or an email provider as usual.

Shoppers signed in on the old address will be asked to sign in again on the new one. Browsers keep sign-ins per address; there is nothing we can do about that, and it affects only people mid-session at the moment you switch.

Search engines will find the new address on their own, in their own time — generally a few weeks to settle.