How to choose a name for your e-commerce website

Choosing a name for your website is as important as choosing a brand name because the name will be your identity on the internet and the gateway to all you have to offer. Deciding on a domain name is not limited to start-ups only, many businesses plan to go online after they have successfully established their ventures. They may be brick and mortar stores or even entire product ranges that are being sold through e-commerce market places that now plan to extend their footprint on the e-commerce arena.

When you have an already established brand name, it makes sense to go with it as your domain name. But the online world has a slightly different way of recognizing a brand. When a customer is searching for a product, his search is funneled through a search engine. So the volume of traffic to your store would be governed by how your name ranks on SEO.

To raise your rankings and drive more traffic to your site, you will have to tweak or change your name to make it more SEO friendly. For example, Harish wants to take his father’s traditional shoe store online. Harish is internet savvy, so he changes the shops name from Shoe Mart to Kanpur Shoe Mart. Kanpur being the main center of shoe manufacturing in India, the domain name is sure to rise in the rankings and drive traffic from all over.

Selecting your domain name is a strategic long term decision that can majorly affect your store’s online performance. You have to be very careful about it. Here are a few ways you can arrive at a strong e-commerce website name.

The name has to reflect your brand to your customers. It should be in sync with your overall brand design which includes your logo, name style, and overall website aesthetics. The name should be consistent with your offerings because when customers visit, led by your domain name and finds something very irrelevant to their requirement, customers start doubting your brand’s validity.

Give a thought to the future plans for your brand. Choosing the domain name to do business is a long term investment. Think of how you plan to take the domain forward and what it should be in 2 years or more down the line. Another important thing, if you have noticed, most popular and successful ecommerce domains have a short name. They are easy to remember and rate high on recall parameters. Your domain name can be up to 67 characters but try to keep it down below 20. Whittle down the character count by removing verbiage.

Your name should be spelt correctly, don’t use hyphens or numbers. Unnatural usage or spellings are not advised unless you are an already established brand. Try to capitalize on language connotations. Words have positive as well as negative connotations. And sometimes they mean something else altogether in another language. For instance the English word ‘chore’ and its pronunciation when read or heard by Indian sensibilities. But the irony is that sometimes words with negative connotations really work well, for instance Rebel in Australia and Nasty Gals in the states.

Most importantly, you will have to arrive at a domain name that is SEO friendly. You have to figure at the top of the charts. That’s the key to a successful e-commerce business. Ranking high on the list drives free organic traffic to your website. Being relevant is the key. How relevant your domain is to search queries will decide your ranking. Keywords are important; you should have what you are selling in your domain name, ideally.

Amazon is one of the most popular ecommerce domains in the world with great depth of experience in e-commerce. Amazon would be happy to help you in selling online. Please register as a seller on Amazon and drop us a line at Service Provider Network (SPN) on whatever assistance you may require to sell online.