How do I set up my shop?
August 16, 2022 6:13 PM   Subscribe

I'm getting ready to launch an online store for an existing web site, and I need help getting my head around where I need to configure everything.

Existing web site is hosted on Wix.com with a custom domain. E-commerce site is hosted on Shopify. I'd like, let's say, existingsite.com/store to load up Shopify. If it's possible to keep the custom domain in the address bar instead of showing Shopify, even better. I don't want to simply link to Shopify and would prefer the more seamless approach.

Existing site's custom domain was registered through Google, which I don't own but I can get access to or provide the teammate who owns it with instructions. For kicks, I set up a niche TLD custom domain through Namecheap that redirects to the existing site, so I'm familiar with redirects.

How do I make it work? Do I go through Google for the main site domain, or Wix.com or Shopify? Some combination? What about an iframe on the Wix.com site that loads the Shopify store? Is that a better way to do it? If you've had a similar setup with WIx and Shopify, how did you do it?
posted by emelenjr to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I think you're going to find it easier to use a subdomain (store.existingsite.com) rather than hosting it on the same domain as the Wix site (existingsite.com/store).

From the Shopify help site, you want to Connect a third-party subdomain to Shopify by changing the DNS settings for your domain. You'd do this on your nameservers. Depending on how you have your domain set up, your nameservers could be with Google, with Wix, or possibly (but unlikely) with a third party. There are plenty of ways to look up where your nameservers are, but in your case, probably your best bet is to ask the teammate who owns the domain.

Once you have the subdomain working, you can Change your primary domain at shopify, so that it will show your subdomain in the address bar.

Note that for domains, there's actually three parties involved in displaying a website: the registrar, the nameserver, and the host. One or more of these can be the same company, or all three could be different. When my computer wants to display your website, it looks up which registrar sold the domain, checks with that registrar to find out where to find the nameserver(s) for the (sub)domain, then checks with one of those nameserver to find out where to find the server that is hosting the (sub)domain it wants to display, then contacts the webserver and asks it to send the webpage over. This is different per (sub)domain, so you can set it up so that existingsite.com (and www.existingsite.com, etc.) are sent to Wix, and store.existingsite.com is sent to Shopify.

(Also, be aware that: (1) your nameservers are used for all functions of the domain, including email; and (2) to save on network traffic, the lookups I described above are heavily cached and may actually only be done once, then stored for several hours or days before my computer (or my router, the computers at my ISP, etc.) decide to check and see if anything is different than last time; so don't go doing things like changing your nameservers from one company to another without making sure that the new ones are set up properly before you switch over to them. Apologies to my aunt for the time I fixed her website and broke her email, then could do nothing but wait for the correct settings to propagate through the internet...)
posted by yuwtze at 7:36 PM on August 16, 2022 [4 favorites]


I think you're going to want to configure this through Shopify: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/domains
posted by snowymorninblues at 7:37 PM on August 16, 2022


sorry on preview much more thorough answer from yuwtze!
posted by snowymorninblues at 7:44 PM on August 16, 2022


Response by poster: Thanks for the thorough reply, yuwtze!

I'll save the self-links for a Projects post, maybe, if all goes well.
posted by emelenjr at 8:25 PM on August 16, 2022


Response by poster: UPDATE: Many thanks for the assistance in getting the store and the main site hooked up together. I shared the result on Projects: Change one letter, improve a band?
posted by emelenjr at 8:33 AM on September 3, 2022


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