Do I need a custom domain for my store?

Yes — once you are selling to people who do not already know you, running ads, or sending email. A free subdomain is fine while you test demand with friends. The domain costs an illustrative $10 to $20 a year; changing it later costs you every link and every ranking the old address earned.

That is the answer. The rest is why, what it costs, and the one case where waiting is genuinely the right call.

When a free subdomain is actually fine

A platform subdomain — the yourstore.someplatform.com kind — is a real, working store address. It is enough for three situations:

• You are testing whether anyone wants this. Twenty orders from your own network tells you what you need to know, and none of those buyers care about the URL.
• You have not settled the name. Buying a domain for a name you abandon in three weeks is how people end up with nine renewals and one store.
• You are selling in one place only, for example to an existing group, a class or a client list, where you send the link directly every time.

The moment you spend money on traffic, print the address on anything, or try to send email from it, the subdomain starts costing you more than the domain would have.

What the domain buys that the subdomain cannot

Email on your own name. This is the big practical one. You cannot send from [email protected], which means your order questions come from a personal Gmail address, and anyone who has been scammed before notices. It also means you cannot set up proper sending authentication for your own domain, so your marketing email is more likely to land in spam.

Trust at the exact moment of payment. A stranger about to type card details reads the address bar. A platform subdomain looks like a trial, because usually it is one.

Ownership of the address. If you change platforms — and plenty of stores do within two years — a custom domain comes with you and your URLs survive via redirects. A platform subdomain does not. That is the difference between a migration you can do and starting your search presence from zero.

Ad platforms and marketplaces. Several require a verified domain you control before they will run shopping ads, verify a business, or let you claim a merchant account. A subdomain you cannot prove you own will stop you at that gate.

On mAutomate, the custom domain starts at $79

Being plain about this, because it is the kind of thing you should find out before you sign up rather than after: connecting a custom domain is part of the Grow plan at $79 a month. The Launch plan at $29 a month does not include it — Launch gives you one store, 100 products, 5 GB of media and the AI Storefront Studio, on a platform subdomain.

So if a custom domain is a requirement for you on day one, your entry price here is $79, not $29. Current prices are on pricing, and every plan has a 14-day trial with no card required, so you can build the store and decide which tier you actually need before paying anything.

Registering the domain is separate on any platform. You buy it from a registrar for an illustrative $10 to $20 a year for a .com and point it at the store. Nobody includes the registration itself in a monthly plan without it reappearing somewhere else.

What it costs, honestly

Choosing one you will not have to change

• Pick the brand, not the keywords. bestcheapyogamats-online.com ages badly and reads as spam.
• Say it out loud to someone. If they have to ask how it is spelled, it will cost you traffic forever.
• Avoid hyphens and numbers, which survive nothing — not a phone call, not a podcast mention, not a business card.
• Take the .com if you can. Country domains are excellent when you sell in that country. The newer extensions work, but you will spend some of your life explaining them.
• Check the name is free as a business and a handle too, not just as a domain. Discovering the trademark conflict after you print packaging is expensive. The store name generator is a reasonable place to start a shortlist.

If you already own one

Then you are done deciding, and this is a configuration task: point the domain's records at the store and wait for propagation. Two things to get right. Lower the TTL on your DNS records before you change them so a mistake is reversible in minutes. And if that domain already handles your email, set up the mailboxes and sending records on the new side before you change anything, because the alternative is a day of silently lost mail.

The honest summary

Buy the domain when the store is real enough to send to strangers. Do not buy nine of them while you are still deciding on a name. And if you are on the $29 plan here with a domain already registered, that domain sits parked until you move to $79 — which is a fair reason to start on the trial, see what the store looks like, and pick the tier once you know you are launching.