WEBVTT 00:00.080 --> 00:00.560 Okay. 00:00.560 --> 00:01.580 Fantastic. 00:01.610 --> 00:06.950 You've bought your Shopify plan, and now we're ready to take your business to a whole new level. 00:06.950 --> 00:12.500 And the first thing we need to do is to get you a proper domain, a domain that is professional looking 00:12.500 --> 00:14.720 and properly represents your store. 00:14.720 --> 00:19.700 Now, I have no doubt you know what a domain is, but just to be absolutely clear, it's where your 00:19.700 --> 00:20.630 site can be found. 00:20.630 --> 00:23.150 So google.com is a domain. 00:23.150 --> 00:28.250 In your example it might be something like my amazing store.com. 00:28.250 --> 00:32.510 And in fact your store does actually have a domain name right now. 00:32.510 --> 00:33.830 And I'll show you what mine looks like. 00:33.830 --> 00:36.500 So if I go over to my store, you can see it here. 00:36.500 --> 00:39.770 It's A30449 hyphen. 00:39.770 --> 00:43.700 37 dot my Shopify.com pretty catchy, right? 00:44.390 --> 00:47.300 Now this domain has two huge problems. 00:47.300 --> 00:50.090 First of all, it's not, in fact, a real domain. 00:50.090 --> 00:51.530 It's what we call a subdomain. 00:51.530 --> 00:53.900 It's part of my shopify.com. 00:53.900 --> 00:59.750 And secondly, most importantly, and I think you can see this very, very clearly, it says absolutely 00:59.750 --> 01:01.370 nothing about my store. 01:01.370 --> 01:04.670 What I want in my case would be something like best Bark bargains. 01:04.700 --> 01:09.950 Com A domain that is easy to remember and says what my store is all about. 01:09.950 --> 01:12.800 So let's have a look and see how to set that up. 01:12.800 --> 01:15.470 Now there are in fact two ways of doing this. 01:15.470 --> 01:17.180 And I'm going to show you both ways. 01:17.180 --> 01:20.900 And then you can make up your own mind as to which way you want to use. 01:20.900 --> 01:27.410 The first way is to go back to admin, to go down to the settings in the bottom left hand corner, and 01:27.410 --> 01:32.900 then go to domains and you see two options buy new domain Connect existing domain. 01:32.900 --> 01:35.390 And it's these two options that I want to show you. 01:35.390 --> 01:38.390 So let's start by clicking on Buy New Domain. 01:38.390 --> 01:43.190 Now before I can actually go ahead and buy this, the first thing I'll need to do is to check the domain 01:43.190 --> 01:48.140 itself is in fact available, which is why for this first step it says search domains. 01:48.140 --> 01:52.430 So in my case, of course I want to buy Best Bark bargains.com. 01:52.430 --> 01:59.540 So I will enter into this field best bark bargains where you can see that the.com is available for $15 01:59.540 --> 02:00.050 a year. 02:00.050 --> 02:04.310 Now for you having done the same search if the.com isn't available. 02:04.310 --> 02:08.810 First of all, don't panic because at this point I'd like to give you two tips. 02:08.810 --> 02:14.750 The first one being that you can very easily add a generic word to the front of the domain name itself. 02:14.750 --> 02:19.310 You could add words, for example, like amazing or daily, or maybe even your own name. 02:19.310 --> 02:25.610 So in my example, if best Bark bargains.com wasn't available, I could try daily best bark bargains. 02:25.610 --> 02:29.330 And when you use that tip, the domain will almost certainly be available. 02:29.330 --> 02:34.520 But if you didn't want to use that, then for the second tip you could choose a different domain extension. 02:34.520 --> 02:41.390 So you can see here in my example, as well as the.com being available, there's also net.org dot store, 02:41.420 --> 02:43.040 dot shop and.info. 02:43.040 --> 02:47.900 And in fact there will be many more than this now because you're likely to have a large choice here. 02:47.900 --> 02:53.720 In order to help you with your decision making process, I suggest you either choose the dot store or 02:53.720 --> 02:54.770 the dot shop. 02:54.770 --> 02:59.600 So at this point, I could simply click on the buy domain button, purchase the domain, and within 02:59.600 --> 03:03.560 a few minutes my store would be found at Best bargains.com. 03:03.560 --> 03:05.870 And you could absolutely do that. 03:05.870 --> 03:11.090 But just to make you aware, when you do buy a domain from Shopify, which is what we're doing here, 03:11.090 --> 03:13.520 we're buying it directly from Shopify themselves. 03:13.520 --> 03:16.070 When we do that, there is a limitation. 03:16.070 --> 03:18.710 And that limitation relates to email. 03:18.710 --> 03:22.970 So Shopify doesn't have a full blown email service. 03:22.970 --> 03:26.780 It has what's called an email forwarding service. 03:26.780 --> 03:28.130 So what does that mean? 03:28.130 --> 03:32.420 Well, what it means is if somebody contacts me on my store domain. 03:32.420 --> 03:37.040 So let's say they send an email to info at best Bark bargains.com. 03:37.040 --> 03:41.930 The email is forwarded to the email that I used when I signed up for Shopify. 03:41.930 --> 03:47.240 So it's then forwarded in my case to Tim dropshipping expert at gmail.com. 03:47.240 --> 03:55.010 Then when I reply to that person, that person sees it coming from Tim, dropshipping expert at gmail.com. 03:55.010 --> 03:59.030 It comes from my personal email, not from my business email. 03:59.030 --> 04:04.970 And for me at least, that's a problem because it lacks professionalism and I'm missing out on an opportunity 04:04.970 --> 04:08.570 to build trust, which is so important with any e-commerce business. 04:08.570 --> 04:12.590 And so it's for that reason that I prefer the second method, which I'm going to show you in a minute. 04:12.590 --> 04:17.990 But before I show you, I want to emphasize you can absolutely do it this way. 04:17.990 --> 04:22.760 I simply want to show you both methods so that, as I said before, you can make your own decision. 04:22.760 --> 04:27.680 Everything I'm doing on this course is trying to give you the best information for you to build your 04:27.680 --> 04:29.840 business, and this is no exception. 04:30.140 --> 04:30.500 Okay. 04:30.500 --> 04:32.960 So that's method number one for buying your domain. 04:32.960 --> 04:36.290 In the next lecture let's have a look at method number two.