Fifteen percent of e-shops have at least two web addresses. Why?

A record number of new online domains were launched by the Shoper platform in 2018. Although most of them were created with new e-shops in mind, for more than 2,000 sellers it was another address where buyers can find them online. Why do stores invest in buying additional domains?

In theory, it is possible to sell online without your own Internet domain, just as a hair salon can operate in the underpass of a train station. However, most customers will not be convinced that a quality haircut awaits them there. Moving to an establishment on a prestigious shopping street proves necessary. The same is true of a web address.

Every store starting on the Shoper platform gets its own address at the start, e.g. www.nazwasklepu.shoparena.pl. Shoper advisors encourage sellers to operate under the more professional domain www.nazwasklepu.pl from the start.

Your own domain not only means an address that is easier to remember, but also that you can use a unique contact email, such as kontakt@nazwasklepu.pl. It looks much better than an inbox that anyone can set up on one of the web portals.

In Shopper's new "Multi Challenges" report, retailers are most likely to cite "soft" factors - reviews from other customers (80 percent of responses) and professional photos and product descriptions (54 percent) - as building store credibility. These indications were more frequent than solutions that actually guarantee the security of shopping like installing an SSL certificate (41 percent).

For the expansive and prudent

Most sellers decide to operate under their own domain from the beginning and most often choose an address with the .pl extension. This is the most popular extension used by Polish websites - according to NASK data, more than 2.5 million sites have it. The cost of its launch in the first year is very small.

- Very often the second address of a store and subsequent ones have the same main name and extension .com .net. or .eu. This may indicate that the seller plans to expand overseas and wants the site name to be displayed with an "international" suffix for users outside of Poland and suggest a global scale of operations," explains Sergiusz Olszowy, Senior e-commerce Specialist at Shopera. - However, it happens that someone tries to impersonate successful stores. He sets up his own site with an almost identical address, differing, for example, only in the .com extension. There, he can launch a competing business or a site for positioning a completely different service. Such actions are not allowed, but they can easily tarnish a store's reputation, so some sellers prudently buy domains with popular endings to block others from using them, the expert adds.

For the smart and helpful

However, the second and subsequent e-commerce domain is not always an identical name with an additional extension. Often its launch is to correct the mistakes of a novice retailer and the result of learning online commerce. After all, the website address should be easy to remember and devoid of numbers, hyphens and foreign words that usually make a problem when typing. It would be good if it evokes associations with the industry in which the store operates. However, not everyone entering e-business is aware of this.

- It's a good idea to use tools that show from which places on the web shoppers come to our store. If we see that they are directed to us by a search engine, correcting typos regularly made by Internet users in the site address, we should think about an additional domain that will immediately redirect customers to the right store, so that they do not get lost on our way. Similarly, if at the beginning we chose, for example, the name of the store "Zosia" and the website address www.zosia.pl, but they are in no way associated with the shoes sold there. It is then a good idea to launch an additional domain, e.g. www.butyzosia.pl or even www.wygodnebuty.pl, to make it easier for buyers," suggests Sergiusz Olszowy.

Increasingly, merchants are deciding to launch a store site with more than one address right away. Last year, already 11 percent of stores starting to sell on the Shoper platform launched with at least two domains.