Using a separate domain for ecommerce "portion" of a business? I run a "IT" business in which we provide networking,IT etc etc services. We also have an ecommerce site, do you guys think it would be a good idea to run the business with say EEEE.com and have a separate domain eeeemall.com for the ecommerce portion? Or would sticking to one domain be better?
Hi, sorta need to take a look and see what you are doing and going to sell etc. Both subdomains and subfolders have their respective benefits. If you want to shoot me a link I can take a look and advise you accordingly. Nigel
hi, well nothing is setup yet so i dont have links, i dont mean subdomains, i meant a completely different domain.. for example itsol.com for main site then itsolmall.com for ecommerce
Well, note that google treats a subdomain as a new domain. So, store.yoursite.com is perfectly fine for using a different domain name. It depends on how tightly integrated you would like things. So ultimately using subdomain is good and perhaps more organized. This will benefit the site in the long run. Having it in on the main site may be logical as well and likely would help a few onsite SEO matters a bit faster. Still need a few details to sort this properly but that should help a bit. Unless you need to run a fairly substantive e-commerce site I would not likely launch a full new website on a new domain. I would go the subdomain route. Its depends really on how big the storefront is. Nigel
thank you for your replies. my original idea was a "main landing page" then from there you chose to go into the "main page(where company info, service etc) is written" or you decide you want to shop and you go into the ecommerce
If it's part of your company I'd use www.example.com/store of course what solution I'd go for would depends on a few factors such as the quanity of items that are being listed.
Yeah, I'd just make it a subdomain. You would get more benefit to the full site, with all the content, instead of splitting the value between two url's. Also, the users would have an easier transition within the site, including the storefront. Otherwise, you have to pass their login info to the other database, etc. Pain. Unless you want possibly better security by keeping registered users separate from the storefront. Also, another reason may be if you have a long-running site and it is managed by an inflexible CMS and you insist on staying on it instead of migrating to a more flexible CMS with a good ecommerce addon.
For SEO purposes only, I'd only reccommend going for www.example.com/store, because Google will treat any other variation as a new website, so you'll be starting from zero.
Unless you want to keep the both sites separate, it's probably best to just do EEEE.COM/store so your main site shows as having more content (and hopefully increased ranking). Plus it saves the cost of a domain, separate emails accounts, etc.