MAN: OK. In this video, we're going to talk about something super important, and that is buying your own domain name, your own dotcom so you can strengthen your brand. When you log in to Shopify if you have a brand-new store, typically that's one of the first steps they're going to tell you to take. And if you're kind of wondering right now why should I buy my own domain because Shopify gives me one, it's really for branding purposes.
So right now, my Shopify domain is thebarkshop.myshopify.com, and that doesn't look very professional, right? It's nice and everything that Shopify does that. But if you're building a real big brand, you want to have your own domain name, and Shopify makes it very easy to do that for your store. So when you come in here on your homepage, you're going to see a button that says Add a Domain.
Additionally, if you go down to your online store right here where you click Online Store, you'll see the same option there as well. So we're going to go ahead and click Add a Domain Name. Now Shopify is going to say buy or connect a domain. So you have two options. If you already own a domain name in another place like GoDaddy.com, is a very popular domain registrar, then you can connect it.
If you don't already own a domain name that you'd like to use for your brand, you can buy it straight inside of your Shopify store, which I recommend. I think that that makes it simple, especially if you're a novice. So you go ahead and you click Buy a New Domain. Now right here, it's going to ask you to enter in the domain you want. Now here's where a lot of people shed a couple of tears because oftentimes, the domain that you want-- I was zooming in-- the domain that you want is already taken.
I mean, all the good stuff seems like it's taken. So if the domain that you really have your heart set on is taken, you might want to try a dotnet or a different extension than a dotcom, right? So we own thebarkshop as our example store. I pretty much can guarantee somebody else already owns that. Remember this is just an example store, so let's just try, thebarkshop.
All right. So as it looks for the domain, it tells me that that is unavailable, right? And when you're choosing the name of your business and you're buying domains and stuff like that, you want to make sure that you try your best to create something unique, right? You want to make sure that you build your own brand, right, not piggyback off somebody else's.
So thebarkshop is taken by somebody already. So what we want to do is we want to find an alternative domain name to thebarkshop, OK? Now we could come down here and buy thebarkshop,net for $16 per year, which is a great rate for domain, dotorg. This one's pretty nice, the barkshop,store, right, 19 USD. But if I'm being honest with you, you really want a dotcom.
So you can come in here and start playing around with it, so like thebarkshop, you could say like thebarkshop123, all right? And you just type it in, it'll automatically check to see if it's real. You don't really want to have 123 in your domain either, I'm just trying to be honest with you. I want you to know this is an example, so we're not going to spend 20 minutes trying to find the perfect domain.
But thebarkshop, we could do like a barkshopstore, we could do barkshopboutique. You got to come up with something that you're comfortable with. So shop store is kind of like saying the same thing twice, so we could say like thebarkboutique, right? So we just play around with everything, but we want to make sure that it aligns with our brand.
OK? So once you find the domain name that you want-- we'll just go back to thebarkshopstore. So once you find the domain that you want, all you have to do is go ahead and hit Buy, and you can buy that domain inside of Shopify. So let's go ahead and click Buy, and it's going to ask you to review your information for buying this domain.
It's going to say, hey, this is $14 per year. You can obviously cancel that at the end of the year if you like. You're wanting to have your information in. This is just some filler information for me. One very important thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to hit Auto-renew this domain every year. So Shopify will automatically renew the registration of the domain barkshopstore every year, and you don't have to worry about it expiring.
So you definitely want to go ahead and check that, and my personal recommendation is to do that. And then, of course, WHOIS privacy. WHOIS privacy basically blocks your personal information. So if somebody wants to search and find out who owns barkshopstore.com, you have privacy protection, which is very, very nice, and no one can see your information. So I love that Shopify does that.
Then you just come down here if you're OK with all of this, and you hit Buy domain. And voila! We have purchased the domain barkshopstore.com, and now it's just asking us to verify our email address. So this is the email address we want to verify. Very, very simple. And now down here, we can see that we are connected.
We can see that our domain setup is in progress. And very soon when you go to barkshopstore, you'll be able to see our website. Very, very simple. And if you really want to create a long term and strong brand, then this is something I would recommend doing. You can always come in and remove it and change your domain as well. You don't have to have a new Shopify account to change your domain.
So that's always fun as well. Hope you enjoyed this video. Hope you learned how to set up your own domain name for your Shopify store to build a stronger brand. That's it. I'll see you in the next video.
