That is sound reasoning; one which I tend to subscribe to. But in business, there are seldom situations where one size fits all. There will be situations where it makes more sense for the ecommerce business to adopt a domain name other than its brand name. Here are some of them:
- A Generic Keyword Based Name Seems More Appropriate
Let's say that your business is called "Wichita Creations," and you are a manufacturer of wrist bands. You have sold through physical channels all along, and now want to set up an ecommerce website. It will make sense for you to choose the domain name: WichitaCreations.com. But if your online market is going to be different from your physical market, you might consider using a generic name that describes your business, e.g., CoolWristbands.com.
Of course, you could want to have Wristbands.com as your domain name, but such generic domains are usually not available anymore; they were reserved a long time ago.
- Your Brand Name Has Lost Its Significance Over Time
Your name is Amy, and along with your friends Lira and Beth, you started a business of drawing children's caricatures based on photographs that parents mailed in to you. At the time of starting this business, you thought it made sense to call yourself "ALB Artists." After all you were artists, and ALB was an abbreviation for Amy-Lira-Beth. Over time you diversified into spheres other than art. Also, Beth left the business.
Since your business relationships were in place, you did not feel the need to change your name from ALB Artists. But when you decide to have an ecommerce presence, you have the opportunity to start afresh. If one of the reasons you chose to go into the ecommerce business was to spread your wings geographically, then the new markets may not ever have heard of ALB Artists in any case.
- You Want to Have a Network of Multiple Specialist Websites
In the physical world, a retailer could either be like Walmart, i.e., a seller of everything, or a specialist with emphasis on a single product segment. Ecommerce is likewise. Some of the biggest names are generalists: Amazon.com, eBay.com, and the like. But there are successful specialists too, e.g., Staples.com and 1800Flowers.com.
If you choose specialization to be your chosen ecommerce strategy, it makes more sense to set up an ecommerce network of multiple sites. In the case of a network, each domain name should be relevant to the product category sold on its website.
- Your Primary Source of Traffic Is Organic Search Engine Traffic
If your marketing depends upon ranking high in search engine results, your SEO strategy will be heavily dependant on getting backlinks to your ecommerce website. Since many people tend to link to a website using the domain name of the website as anchor text, you will gain highly relevant links if your domain name contains relevant keywords.
For example, if your website sells high speed USB devices, and your domain name is HighSpeedUSBDevices.com, you could gain an SEO benefit when other sites link to you with the anchor text High Speed USB Devices. The expectation is that your ranking for the search term: High Speed USB Devices, will improve.
The example of HighSpeedUSBDevices.com could mislead you into believing that ecommerce domain names that contain exact keywords are intrinsically superior from the SEO point of view. Getting backlinks with relevant anchor text is beneficial, but merely having product terms in your domain name will not impress search engines.
There was a time when exact-match domain names were all the rage, and Google seemed to love them. But the Mayday update to the Google Algorithm put paid to ecommerce SEO strategies involving a large number of sites set up on domain names that contained product terms.
Regardless of the domain name you choose, make sure that you are not found lacking in domain name protection. Postscript: Two domain names -- WichitaCreations.com and HighSpeedUSBDevices.com -- are mentioned in the article for illustrative purposes only. At the time of writing this article, neither of those were registered.
