Selecting the best name for an e-commerce business is an art that not everyone dominates. To tell the truth, there are many factors that influence the development of commercial naming: meaning, brevity, musicality, SEO Friendly qualities or the correct adaptation to the web domain.
Before starting their commercial adventure, some companies invest real fortunes in naming and branding services. Why? Because the image of a brand has a capital importance in the perception of consumers towards their products.
Almost 8 out of 10 consumers (77%) make their purchases based on the brand of a product, not the product itself, according to data published in Crowdspring. To tell the truth, hardly anyone talks about eating a hamburger but about eating a Big Mac, and the same thing happens with handkerchiefs: most ask for a Kleenex, sometimes ignoring that this is the name of the brand.
How to choose the best name for ecommerce company? 5 useful tips
Are you looking for the best name for an e-commerce store? This is not an insurmountable challenge, because although it seems that the best names are registered, imagination knows no limits. The following tips and best practices will help you in the naming process:
Make it short and pronounceable
The best marketplaces in the market have one thing in common: their domain names are very, very short. Zappos, Amazon, eBay or Walmart follow this rule. In addition, all are formed by a single word (although Best Buy and Mercado Libre, for their part, do not follow this pattern).
The brevity is not a whim of these e-commerce. In fact, the sooner, the more difficult it is to register a web domain. However, a short trade name has unique qualities, which can be summarized as follows: they are easy to write, easy to remember, easy to pronounce and easy to recommend.
For example, if you had to recommend a shoe store, you could mention Zappos without thinking about it, but if you listened to ShopClues, you couldn’t help but ask: how do you write that e-commerce?
Think about the customer and you’ll get it right
In order to choose the best name for an e-commerce company, it is inevitable to put oneself in the place of the consumer. We did just that in the previous example. If you are able to think as your target customer thinks, you will have 50% of the work done. But this task is not easy.
To do so, you will need to elaborate a very defined person buyer: how old are your customers, do they identify with the millennials or are they baby boomers, are they married or are they single, are they salaried employees of a company, or do they work for others? Although it may surprise you, segmenting your client helps you define your business name. The Gymshark store doesn’t need a letter of introduction, does it? Its products and its clientele become evident.
Make sure it has an appropriate and positive meaning
There are countless brands with invented names, but which remind us of words associated with feelings and positive things. This, however, is not usual in e-commerce. Amazon, Zalando, Alibaba, etc.
But not all online sales platforms use meaningless names. For Spanish speakers, it is evident that Zappos sells footwear, as its origin is in the Spanish word ‘zapatos’ (shoes). For its part, the Japanese e-commerce Rakuten means ‘optimism’ of this oriental language.
This is one of the many examples of meaningful trade names. Underestimating the importance of this advice can bring problems. Amazon creator Jeff Bezos himself can vouch for that. His popular e-commerce started out as Cadabra, but some people confused it with a funeral home (because of its similarity to the word ‘cadaver’).
Don’t forget that naming and the web domain must be ‘friends’.
Is it possible you ignored this detail? The naming of e-commerce is linked to its domain name (www.example.com), which means that both must complement each other. But why wouldn’t a good naming look good during domain registration? In most cases, in fact, good naming gives rise to an excellent domain name. But this is not always the case. Let’s look at some examples of bad practices:
- Speed of Art gives rise to the horrible domain Speedofart.com, easily confused with the phrase ‘speedo fart’.
- Worse still is Who Represents?, whose domain (Whorepresents.com) is interpreted at first glance as ‘whore presents’.
- Therapist must have noticed that Therapist.com gave rise to the ugly interpretation of ‘the rapist’.
Prioritize SEO Friendly Domains
Organic positioning is another aspect to consider in order to be successful with naming development. And is that the best name for e-commerce store must be SEO friendly, it must be optimized for Google and other search engines. In this sense, we can summarize the following recommendations to build a 100% SEO friendly domain:
- Avoid numbers and hyphens, as long as they are not part of the naming. For example, radio stations usually include numbers in their domain names (1039rxp.com, alt923.com, etc.), but they are the exception that confirms the rule.
- The shorter the name, the better: if the naming is too long, you can always register its initials. For example, The Wall Street Journal domain is wsj.com.
- Keywords are welcome if they are related to your market niche: maggiescatering.com, novoshoes.com, etc. However, sometimes it is advisable to prioritize brevity. For example, the brand Toms Shoes has as its domain toms.com, because it understands the importance of brevity.
In short, choosing the best name for an e-commerce company is not an impossible task. With the help of these good practices, you will be able to master the complex mechanisms involved in the commercial naming process. What are you waiting for to develop the perfect name for your e-commerce!