The domain: choose it, buy it and point it at your store.

What a domain is, in plain words

A domain is the name your company exists under on the internet: yourcompany.com. It's the address a buyer types, the one printed on your invoice, the one in your email sender and the one Google indexes. It's yours as long as you renew it, like a shop's registration.

The domain is not the store. They're two separate things: the domain is the sign with the name, the store is the shop itself. Connecting them is what's called delegating DNS, and it's a two-field change in the panel where you bought the domain.

How to choose the name

Wholesale buyers look you up by your brand name, not by a keyword phrase. The most useful rule is this: it has to be sayable over the phone without spelling anything out.

• Your brand name, exactly as your customers say it. If your company is “Distribuidora Sur”, the domain is distribuidorasur, not dsur-wholesale-2026.
• No hyphens and no numbers: they get lost when dictated and typed wrong.
• Shorter wins. Every extra letter is one more place someone gets it wrong.
• No accents or ñ: technically they can be registered today, but they get typed wrong from any keyboard that isn't yours.
• Don't put “wholesale” or “b2b” in the domain unless that's your brand's actual name. That's solved by the store's content, not the URL.
• Check that it doesn't clash with a registered trademark in a nearby industry before printing it on catalogs and trucks.

I already have a domain: delegating DNS

Delegating DNS means telling the internet where your site lives. Right now your domain points at the servers of wherever you bought it; what we do is swap that reference for the store's. It's two text fields, and there's no risk of losing the domain: it stays yours, in your account.

1. Log in to the panel where you bought the domain. It may be your country's NIC, GoDaddy, Namecheap, Hostinger, Donweb or anyone else. If you don't know which, the answer is in the purchase email or last year's invoice.
2. Find the DNS section. Depending on the provider it's called “DNS”, “Name servers”, “Nameservers”, “Delegation” or “DNS zone”. It's always inside the domain's detail view.
3. Replace the servers with the ones your advisor gives you. Two or four lines of text. Delete what's there and paste the new ones, nothing else.
4. Save and let us know. The change can take anywhere from a few minutes to 48 hours to be visible worldwide: that's called propagation, and it's nobody's to speed up.
5. We verify and publish. Once the domain resolves to the store, the security certificate is issued and the store goes live under your name, padlock included.

I don't have a domain: we handle it

If you don't have a domain yet, the path is shorter: you pick the name, your advisor checks real availability at the registrar and handles the purchase, the payment and the configuration. No accounts to create, no card to enter on an English-only site.

• A .com managed by us costs USD $40 a year, renewable.
• National extensions have their own price and their own requirements: in several countries you need a company registered locally.
• The domain is registered to your company. If you ever leave, you take it with you.

The mistakes that delay this step the most

• The domain is registered to someone who no longer works at the company.The classic one. Recovering access can take weeks. Worth checking today, even if launch is two months away.
• The registrar's contact email is out of date.That's where renewal notices and verification codes land. If nobody reads that mailbox, the domain expires unnoticed.
• The domain is expired or about to expire.An expired domain resolves nowhere, no matter how perfect the store is. Renew it before connecting anything.
• DNS was changed without mentioning there was live email.It's the only real way to break something in this step, and one sentence prevents it: “we have mailboxes on this domain”.
• A name already used by another brand in the industry was chosen.It confuses buyers and can end in a claim. Worth the five-minute check before printing catalogs.