Domain Names

Michael — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 07:09:10 +0000

Are there any plans on to allow account to use thier own Domain addresses?
Instead of myshop.myshopify.com I’d like to be able to have myshop.com. Is there a way for me create a C-Name or point my domain to your server and have you route it to the apporpiate shop?

tobi commented

tobi — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 21:41:15 +0000

There are, its already implemented and will be rolled out next week. Its going to blow your mind as well :)

wayne sutton commented

wayne sutton — Mon, 01 May 2006 03:24:47 +0000

Hey shopify is great! Can I test out the domain name feature?

http://waynesutton.myshopify.com

Hugh commented

Hugh — Wed, 10 May 2006 20:06:39 +0000

I’m looking this feature as well.

wayne sutton commented

wayne sutton — Thu, 11 May 2006 16:19:51 +0000

hey how you looking on the dns feature? will there be beta testers for that also? If so can I get on the list?

thanks

wayne

beley commented

beley — Fri, 12 May 2006 21:25:12 +0000

I’m interested in using this too… I have about 5 shops I’d like to create as soon as Shopify goes live, and I’d love to use the domains I already own.

Any news on when we might be able to see it in the admin section?

tobi commented

tobi — Fri, 12 May 2006 23:31:04 +0000

Here is an update:

We decited to extract the features from shopify and move them into an own service which i’m working on right now.

Thats pretty much as much information I can share right now.

We are trying everything to make this feature accessible for non technical people but its really really hard. DNS is an inherently difficoult topic.

wayne sutton commented

wayne sutton — Sun, 14 May 2006 03:43:51 +0000

ok, thanks for the update, keep up the good work

Wayne

joey marchy commented

joey marchy — Tue, 30 May 2006 20:25:25 +0000

If you use the domain name option for your store, ex mystore.com instead of mystore.myshopify.com, will the domain name persist throught the check out process?

Or will the domain revert to checkout.myshopify.com when you reach the checkout process? Does anyone know? If this was already discussed in the forum somewhere can someone please post the link?

Thanks!

Lon Baker commented

Lon Baker — Wed, 31 May 2006 21:33:11 +0000

Based on how SSL certificates work. It will most likely remain checkout.myshopify.com

Otherwise, they would need to get an SSL certificate for every domain/subdomain. Which would be expensive overhead.

tobi commented

tobi — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 01:22:22 +0000

Infact we just made the investment into a new wildcard SSL certificate so that we can protect the entire myshopify.com area. So checkouts will soon happen on say.. turtles.myshopify.com .

Note that it will even be turtles.myshopify.com if your main store uses www.turtles.com.

The main reason we do this is so that we can protect the more sensible parts of the admin interface behind SSL. for example the payment options should be protected better.

Jacob commented

Jacob — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 05:24:53 +0000

I realize that the idea and strength of Shopify is creating dead-easy ecommerce for people without development skills—but since there are so few quality options for people not looking to spend ages hacking spaghetti code, I have a feeling you’re going to be dealing with more and more people (like myself) wanting slightly more advanced features.

I can handle (although it’s definitely not prefered) mydomain.com redirecting to mydomain.shopify.com just for the checkout process, as long as I get to design the checkout process the same as I do my store.

Ideally, I’d like it to stay all on my domain. I can handle installing an SSL certificate on my own domain if that’s the hang-up.

Similar to how other hosted apps (Basecamp, Campaign Monitor, etc) allow designers/developers to offer solutions to their clients without giving away what runs the backend, you should (or have?) consider a plan that fulfills that need.

Cliff commented

Cliff — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 05:51:46 +0000

Ideally, I’d like it to stay all on my domain. I can handle installing an SSL certificate on my own domain if that’s the hang-up.

I believe you would need server access to install an SSL cert, which is something a hosted application like this won’t allow. Which is fine, the point of a product like Shopify is to let the merchant deal with the merchant stuff and leave the geek stuff up to jaded Pixel. I believe it’s in their ecommerce mantra somewhere.

If your needs require you to have more control of the server, there are plenty of ecommerce applications out there. BV Software is coming out with a great one soon, but it will set you back a lot more than Shopify will up front. :)

Similar to how other hosted apps (Basecamp, Campaign Monitor, etc) allow designers/developers to offer solutions to their clients without giving away what runs the backend, you should (or have?) consider a plan that fulfills that need.

Basecamp and Campaign Monitor don’t really work this way (unfortunately). They are slightly customizable as far as some colors go, yes, and you can hide the branding, but that’s about it. They don’t give you the ability to map your domain.

Shopify gives you massive presentation control on the store side. I do agree that the visual disconnect between the store and the checkout presentation will be scary to most online shoppers, and I speak from experience when I say that I expect that disconnect will cause many an abandoned cart. Hopefully, there will be a way for Shopify to offer at least some visual control at that level.

tobi commented

tobi — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 12:36:36 +0000

Like i said we will move the checkout process to happen in your myshopify.com domain to get rid of the URL visual conflict. I’ll also move the checkout process—in parts—to liquid in the future (read: the layout).

SSL certificates for www.example.com : This is next to impossible with the current state of technology. All web servers I know require you to restart the web server to install the certificate and that is not an option.

I’m constantly thinking about this. The software to make it happen just has to be invented yet. As other things settle down with Shopify we at jP might be the right people to solve this issue as we certainly have the right itch.

joey marchy commented

joey marchy — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 15:29:38 +0000

Like i said we will move the checkout process to happen in your myshopify.com domain to get rid of the URL visual conflict. I’ll also move the checkout process—in parts—to liquid in the future (read: the layout).

Not to be thick-headed, I just want to make sure I understand what you are saying. Basically even if you are running your shopify store on www.mydomain.com, the check out process will always go through mydomain.myshopify.com, at least until you are able to find a way to work around this. And you will be adding the ability to customize the checkout process to match the branding of the rest of your store.

Jacob commented

Jacob — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 15:32:08 +0000

Cliff: My thinking was that since they’re developing a way for us to utilize mydomain.com instead of mydomain.shopify.com for the shopping, perhaps there was a way to keep it there for the checkout.

As far as the BC/CM comparison, I’m not talking about mapping the domain. To offer Shopify to my clients, I don’t particularly care about the backend styling – what Shopify currently has is fine. (Changing colors and branding would be great, turning off access to panels, same as BC.) As long as they can utilize their own domain name for the entire process (not using PayPal of course) then it would be a much easier sell. I could focus on the front end (i.e. Vision themes, copywriting, photography) and not have to deal with the payment processor junk. (I’m badly scarred from an OSCommerce experience.)

Tobi: Understandable, and please don’t feel slighted/attacked. You and all of jP have done an outstanding job so far with Shopify and I’m only pushy because it’s such a superior solution. I totally understand about the SSL situation and to me that’s not a deal breaker.

If I could “fix” one thing, it would be not being able to style the checkout – as Cliff said, all I see is way too high a percentage of abandoned carts because of the visual disconnect. The URL switch doesn’t concern me nearly as much – most people don’t even notice in my experience.

Cliff commented

Cliff — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 16:53:07 +0000

Yeah, unfortunately (well, fortunately for security’s sake) the browser compares the URL in the browser to the URL in the SSL cert. The ability to install a special SSL certificate through a web interface for a specific account would be cool, if the option existed, but I think it would really defeat the purpose of SSL, especially certificates which verify the site’s ID.

I’m badly scarred from an OSCommerce experience.

Ouch. I’ve heard enough horror stories to stay far, far away from that shiz. :)

Jacob commented

Jacob — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:03:41 +0000

How does simplebusinessworkshop.com do it then? Just masking the URL changes throughout the entire process with some type of mod_rewrite or what not? Their URL doesn’t change, even throughout the entire checkout process.

(Although, examining it closer – it doesn’t appear to actually be utilizing SSL, even though it’s taking credit card numbers and has the standard “You are browsing our secure server” at the top of the page…?)

Gwyn commented

Gwyn — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 18:43:03 +0000

That’s a trick. They’ve used a frame at simplebusinessworkshop.com, taking up the whole screen. Then they’ve loaded their myshopify.com site into the frame. Nice trick, but in the end a bad idea – The checkout process lacks the padlock and gold address bar that signifies a secure page. I don’t know if doing this actually negates the security, or if it simply hides the visual cues. Either way, it’s a bad idea.

Cliff commented

Cliff — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 18:44:05 +0000

It looks like they’re using masked domain forwarding, which basically means the real page is in a frame. You’ll notice that as you click through the site, the URL never changes.

That doesn’t seem so secure to me. Most shoppers in the know will be put off by the absence of the https, and the little padlock icon.

pabcas commented

pabcas — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 01:31:58 +0000

Tobi,

regarding secure certs, would the following not make sense:

Control panel for uploading certificate, which is installed automatically

1) Charge a premium $5 per month or whatever…

2) Order additional ips from your provider…

3) Create virtual hosts under those ips for the domains…

???

how many ips can one machine have – is there bottlenecks involved after a few?

tobi commented

tobi — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 02:51:35 +0000

So i did actually look into the technical feasibility of doing this today.

There is a show stopper:

You cannot technically install more then one SSL certificate on a IP address.

The problem is that the browser will connect to the server and the server will send a certificate. This happens before the bowser ever told the server which domain it actually wants. So the server will probably reply with the SSL cert of shopify.com. Before anything else happens the client will compare this address to the one it actually requested. It will be different because the real address it wanted was www.example.com and it will show all sorts of nasty warnings.

Ah well. there is still the possibility of creating such a service by getting more IP addresses and allocating those to premium customers but thats an entire different magnitude of effort.

Can anyone think of a way to solve this dilemma?

pabcas commented

pabcas — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 12:55:35 +0000

Tobi,

you should have a CSR generator in the control panel that creates CSRs WITHOUT an access key.

Then, you should be able to create lighttpd vhosts something like:

$SERVER[“socket”] == “YOURIPADDRESS:443” { server.document-root = ”/path/to/shopify” server.name = “whitelabel.com” server.errorlog = ”/shopify/error.log” accesslog.filename = ”/shopify/access.log” # ADD YOUR RAILS or PHP or WHATEVER DETAILS HERE #### SSL engine ssl.engine = “enable” ssl.ca-file = ”/etc/lighttpd/whitelabel.crt” ssl.pemfile = ”/etc/lighttpd/whitelabel.com.pem” }

which I took from http://neubia.com/archives/000425.html

I guess there may be an issue when it starts getting into a good many of these, but then again, maybe not.

You’ll also need to configure your server ( farm ) to accept requests from each of the additional ips … but that isn’t a huge hassle either.

I don’t think there is much of an alternative.

Peace,

Paulo

tobi commented

tobi — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:02:00 +0000

Well considering we already have 2.5k shops in the database and probably a lot more once we go public i don’t think we have a good chance of getting so many IP addresses assigned.

Now. What about ports. Do you think people would have beef with https://www.example.com:10020/... ?

pabcas commented

pabcas — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 16:57:39 +0000

I’d say you’d need a show of hands there …

1) I’d expect a vast majority of shops would happily redirect to https://theirshop.shopify.com IF the checkout page was more customisable … I’m sure that’s in your plans.

2) Non standard ports mean losing business from customers behind typical firewalls.

3) I know that a lot of providers give out IP addresses if you provide them with an SSL cert… I’d also expect you could charge a premium.

4) Perhaps the port solution for the masses and then the premium for true whitelabel …

Payment gateway politics sucks!

Peace,

Paulo

krew commented

krew — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 19:21:36 +0000

What about subdomains like shop.mydomain.com or, even better, using mydomain.com/shop for my Shopify store? Will this be possible?

krew commented

krew — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 21:17:07 +0000

Please disregard my last question, I found the answer here:

http://forums.shopify.com/community/general/post/470

beley commented

beley — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 15:53:20 +0000

I’m not really concerned with the domain name at checkout. I’m not concerned that my clients and customers see that we’re using Shopify and it’s no different from a web host’s shared SSL certificate. Sure, using our own SSL would be ideal, but it’s definitely not a deal breaker for me.

I’d much rather have the ability to use my domain for the majority of the shopping experience, and customizing the look of the shopping cart is also a big neccessity.

I too think that customers would be more put off by the total change in appearance than the small change in URL.

beley commented

beley — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 19:01:59 +0000

Also, are you guys already using this feature with some shops? I just saw the Reorganize.ca site and notice they’re using their domain for their Shopfiy store. How could we set this up?

tobi commented

tobi — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 22:19:37 +0000

they have preview access to the screen which allows this. coming very soon.

tobi commented

tobi — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 22:12:37 +0000

Its up now. Please let me know what you think

Hugh commented

Hugh — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 22:44:59 +0000

Works great.

Rene Vico commented

Rene Vico — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 22:55:18 +0000

I already had a domain name and a web hosting company. What kind of implications will it cause if I point my domain name to myshopify servers? Will it be hard to change it later in the future?

Kyle commented

Kyle — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 01:11:13 +0000

People pay a few hundred bucks for an SSL certificate. They’ll pay another hundred or more to have it installed (5 minute manual process, tops). Rackspace offers me as many IP addresses as I want for $2/ip/month. Just let it be a profitable manual process, given that its hard to automate.

Rene Vico commented

Rene Vico — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 23:00:31 +0000

I have set-up a test account :

audism.myshopify.com

and asked my web hosting provider to make CNAME changes:

I have made the changes you requested as seen here.

$ host www.audism.com

www.audism.com is an alias for audism.myshopify.com.

audism.myshopify.com is an alias for argon.jadedpixel.com.

argon.jadedpixel.com has address 72.232.46.90

$ host www.audism.tv

www.audism.tv is an alias for audism.myshopify.com.

audism.myshopify.com is an alias for argon.jadedpixel.com.

argon.jadedpixel.com has address 72.232.46.90

What am I missing? I already updated the DNS preferences and made audism.tv a primary domain.

Rene V.

Rene Vico commented

Rene Vico — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 23:04:57 +0000

disregard my previous comment! it worked now!

Jamie commented

Jamie — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 22:01:35 +0000

Where are the instructions for domain aliasing? I can’t seem to find a step by step “officially” recomended way to do this.

Thanks!

tobi commented

tobi — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 22:45:19 +0000

Have you checked out the documentation in /preferences/network ?

Jamie commented

Jamie — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:27:57 +0000

DOH! I thought I looked there, but I must not have been looking for this function when I was.

Thanks

tobi commented

tobi — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 03:09:33 +0000

We also have the nasty habit of moving things around ;)

Christina commented

Christina — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 23:11:21 +0000

Hi Tobi,

On the SSL issue: I’m hosted at textdrive on a shared server; but everyone using that server can get their “own private dedicated IP addresses with signed geotrust SSL certificates for 10$ a month” extra. (that was direct quote from specs.) i.e. 120$ a year for the certificate including installation. the domain names are all different of course (i.e. not just wildcarded to *.textdrive.com). I have no idea how they do it, but maybe something like that would be feasible for shopify?

I don’t believe they restart the servers every time someone requests a certificate, so maybe the software HAS already been invented?

tobi commented

tobi — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 03:22:46 +0000

Interesting. I know the testdrive guys very well. I’ll send them an email and figure out how on earth they managed to get an actual allocation of a IP block in this day and age.

I thought the only good way to get a IP block in 2006 is to buy a company which got one in 1996 ;)

Richard Quick commented

Richard Quick — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 02:00:28 +0000

Hi Tobi,

A suggestion:

With the checkout URL, one option might be to have an alternative domain name which was more ‘neutral’.

Rather than myshop.shopify.com it chould be myshop.checkout-process.com (or something, but that’s avail.)

That way you’re not giving away the backend to your clients.

Richard Quick

thePasty.com

Keenpixel commented

Keenpixel — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 04:58:29 +0000

Am I correct in understanding that one only needs a domain name to take advantage of the domain alias? Or do you need a domain and hosting?

I.e. can I basically set up my whole shop at username.myshopify.com and just have mydomain.com point to it?

Thanks in advance

tobi commented

tobi — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 15:28:44 +0000

You don’t need hosting. Just a domain name with a domain name provider which supports configuration of CNAMEs.

We should compile a list of good registrars with this feature …

Cliff commented

Cliff — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 16:40:15 +0000

I use godaddy.com. They have some nice DNS tools and very inexpensive domain registrations.

I found that setting the CNAME for www to the Shopify store, then using Godaddy’s domain forwarding feature to forward the domain to the www address works perfectly with Shopify. If anyone types in mydomain.com the URL automatically switches to www.mydomain.com.

Ryan commented

Ryan — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 17:06:23 +0000

Hi Cliff, I’m trying to do exactly that with Godaddy but I’m a bit confused, would you mind stepping through what you did? My Shopify store is http://sixfourthree.myshopify.com and the domain is http://www.643nation.com/.

Thanks!

Cliff commented

Cliff — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 18:21:22 +0000

No problem, I’ll write it out for you in a few…

Keenpixel commented

Keenpixel — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 19:19:31 +0000

OK, thank you…that’s what I thought.

I was looking into godaddy.com as well. It’s the cheapest place to register a domain that I know of. You also get email with your domain so I could have info@mydomain.com?

I would normally just go ahead and register a new domain with hosting, but it appears that Shopify will let me do everything I need to do without going to that expense right now.

I too would be interested in the steps to change the DNS settings through godaddy to point my domain to my Shopify store.

Thanks

Cliff commented

Cliff — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 23:02:42 +0000

OK, tutorial is ready: Using Your Own Domains

If you have any additions or changes, feel free to make them in the wiki.

Keenpixel commented

Keenpixel — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 15:13:36 +0000

Cliff,

I haven’t gotten a chance to try my hand at using my own Domain for my Shopify store, but I appreciate you posting the tutorial. I look forward to giving it a shot when I get a chance!

Cliff commented

Cliff — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 01:18:37 +0000

No problem. It’s a wiki, so feel free to add to it if you come across any good info.

John commented

John — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 12:37:32 +0000

Cliff, I tried following your tutorial, and even moved my domain to godaddy, but I don’t seem to have the ‘total DNS control’ panel that is mentioned in your article.

I had something called ‘Domain Host Summary’ from which you can enter a prefix to your domain name, and an IP address to direct to. Would that work as well?

I have a domain name, tajimaphotography.com, which points to my photography gallery. I want to point store.tajimaphotography.com to photography.myshopify.com. So in godaddy’s Domain Host Summary, I entered in:

“store” prefix → IP address of photography.myshopify.com (which is argon.jadedpixel.com)

It still isn’t working as of yet, but I wonder if it takes a few days…

Thanks, John.

Bryan commented

Bryan — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 00:14:14 +0000

Hi Cliff,

Thanks for writing the tutorial. I have a newbie question regarding the email portion. Did you use the Godaddy name servers for email? Is it possible to point the domain requests to site.myshopify.com and still use another email provider?

Thanks,

Bryan

Cliff commented

Cliff — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 01:34:10 +0000

I point my MX records to where I have my POP email set up, or you can use GoDaddy’s built-in email support.

collin commented

collin — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:59:10 +0000

My client is using Dreamhost and I cannot seem to edit the www DNS record in order to point it to my clients shopify store. In fact it shows in a section “Non-Editable DNS records” – is there a way to add name servers to the registar that just point to shopify? will the above issue be an issue with the planned new way of handling domains in shopify?

thanks!

collin commented

collin — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:34:52 +0000

never mind.. i think i figured it out :)

collin commented

collin — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 19:38:50 +0000

I feel like I am going in circles on this. I have a domain registered with one company and hosting with another. On top of that I have a shopify store. What I want to do is this:

have www.mydomain.com → mydomain.myshopify.com

have media.mydomain.com → host (where i am keeping media files to link to from shopify)

have any email for name@mydomain.com → host (also handles email)

so i logged in to my registrar to change the CNAME record for www to point to mydomain.shopify.com but they will not allow it because my DNS servers belong to my host. d’oh. BUT, provided i can create a CNAME record with my host, does my above scenario sound feasable?

my apologies for the stupid question but i am new to DNS and it is really confusing. can someone explain how NameTag will simplify this? will my efforts in manually getting this to work need to be reversed? thanks!

arcadia commented

arcadia — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:50:46 +0000

I have a similar problem setting up email with 1and1:

The name@mydomain.com scenario does not work because as soon as I setup a CNAME record with 1and1 – email stops working. How do I get my name@mydomain.com email to work?!

Thanks in advance!

Rachel commented

Rachel — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:34:48 +0000

It is not possible to use your domain email if you redirect using a CNAME - with any UK registrars (unless things have changed recently).

You will need to either:

1. Point your site directly at the Shopify servers, or
2. Change to an international registrar.