Domains
Using your own web address, how the certificate is handled, and what to expect when you switch.
Settings, Domains. Every shop starts on an address under the platform, and can use its own instead.
Adding Your Own Domain
Add the domain here, then point it at the platform from wherever your domain is registered. The screen tells you exactly what record to create.
Changes to domain records take time to spread, usually minutes but occasionally hours. Until they have, some visitors reach the new address and some do not, which is normal rather than a fault.
The Certificate
A certificate is obtained for your domain automatically once it points here, so the padlock appears without you doing anything. It renews itself.
The certificate cannot be issued before the domain points here
That is how the issuing process proves the domain is yours. If you add a domain and see a certificate warning, it almost always means the records are not pointing here yet, or not fully spread. Wait rather than changing anything.
www or Not
Decide which you want to be the real address and make the other redirect to it. Both working independently splits your search ranking and makes your analytics count one visitor as two.
Switching an Existing Shop
If you are moving a live shop to this platform, the order matters.
Build the shop and check it thoroughly on its platform address first. Set up redirects for your old addresses. Then switch the domain.
Switch when you can watch it
Not on a Friday afternoon. The hour after a domain switch is when you find the things that were only ever right on the old address: a hardcoded link, an email template pointing at the old shop, a payment processor with the old address registered against it.
After Switching
Check the shop on both www and bare forms, place a test order, confirm the confirmation email contains the new address, and check anything registered with a third party: payment processor callback addresses, carrier accounts, anything that sends to you.
Subdomains
A subdomain can point here too, which is how a shop runs at shop.example.com while the main site stays elsewhere.
A domain pointed at the shop does not change your email. Mail for your domain continues to be handled by whoever handles it now, and the shop sends its notifications through its own configured sender.
If you want the shop's emails to come from your domain, that is set under Settings, Email, and needs records adding at your domain registrar so receiving servers accept them.
Running it through Cloudflare
You can, and the shop works normally behind it, but the order you do it in matters: add and verify the domain here with Cloudflare's proxy turned off, then turn it on. See Using Cloudflare for the steps and the one encryption setting that breaks a shop if it is wrong.