Why your shop should own its address

Every Vylvet store starts life at yourshop.vylvet.co. It works immediately, the certificate is already provisioned, and you can be selling within the hour. For a lot of shops that is where it stays, and that is fine.

But if you are spending anything at all on getting people to your store, the address should be yours.

What a domain actually buys you

Search results accrue to the domain, not to you. When someone links to your shop, that link is a vote for whatever hostname is in the URL. On a subdomain of ours, a share of those votes strengthens vylvet.co. On your own domain, all of it strengthens you.

You can leave. This is the part worth being blunt about. If your customers know you as yourshop.vylvet.co, then moving platforms means losing them. If they know you as yourshop.com, you can point that name anywhere you like and every customer follows. A storefront that makes leaving expensive is not earning your business, it is trapping it.

It reads as a real business. Fair or not, people read the URL.

What we do about it

Connecting a domain is four fields and a DNS record. We provision the certificate, tell you exactly which records to add, and show you the live verification status rather than asking you to guess.

Two things stay true afterwards:

• Your vylvet.co address keeps working. Old links, printed cards and anything you posted last year all continue to resolve.
• Search engines are told your domain is the canonical one, so the two addresses are consolidated rather than competing with each other.

If verification ever lapses, we fall back to the vylvet.co address automatically instead of serving a broken page on a domain that has stopped resolving.

The honest trade

Making it easy to leave is not the obvious commercial choice. We think it is the correct one. A platform that has to hold your customers hostage to keep you is telling you something about how confident it is in the rest of the product.