Ecommerce Ingredient List: 4 – URL & Email

So far in our list of Ingredients for  Ecommerce Success we have looked at Value Proposition, Budget and Brand – fundamentals for every business – online or offline. This article is for companies that are at the very beginning of their digital journey and explores the need for your own domain name and online identity. 

Why You Should Own Your Digital Presence.

Social commerce has enabled many new, small businesses to enable products and services to be discovered and promoted to a wide audience. This is great to get your idea off the ground, but in order to build a long-term, sustainable brand, you need to own your digital assets.

• Branding: having control over the customer experience, from colours and fonts to emails.
• Trust: Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Do you trust an email from a Google or Hotmail address?
• Ownership of the Customer (Data): Is the person you are selling to your customer or Amazon’s or Facebook’s? Are you benefiting from the data points?
• SEO: Is your content helping LinkedIn get bigger or helping customers find your company?
• Risk: 3rd Party sites and Apps come and go. Remember MySpace?

Have Your Own Domain Name (URL)

Once you have done the work to create your brand, you should obtain the domain-name for it. You should do this even if you are going to use a Software as a Service ecommerce platform.

In 2019, consumers discovered brands through search engines more than any other technology. Also high on the list of ways that customers find brands was ‘their own branded website’.

There are a lot of good arguments for having your own domain name, your own address on the internet. However, perhaps the one that is most convincing is that almost everything changes… except domain names.

As a writer and freelancer, I have had business profiles on a lot of sites: Bolt.com, SixDegrees, Ecademy, MySpace and more. I’ve had email addresses at Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, and more. I’ve worked for a bunch of companies and had work-related email addresses. I’ve had messenger accounts at Hotmail, Yahoo, IRC, Skype and more… Most of these are gone. But the domain dmfreedom.com, that I registered in 1999 is still there.

At around $12 per year. A domain name is the best digital investment you will every make.

Setup Email Addresses at Your Brand URL

Once you have secured your domain, you should create email addresses that use that URL. You can still use 3rd party email providers like Gmail, but if you ever move from that service you can take the email address (and your emails) with you.

Email is still a huge part of the ecommerce experience. It is used to confirm accounts, send order confirmation, receipts and promotions. Customers are much more likely to trust an email from support@yourdomain.com than support1234@yahoo.co.uk.

Some services that are required for ecommerce, like payment gateways, also test to see if email and domain addresses match. This is also true of plugins and apps – many of which haves licenses that are linked to a particular domain.

Up next… Products.