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BigCommerce Custom Domain

Learn why your store should have a custom domain, SSL, and how to do that

Paulius avatar
Written by Paulius
Updated over a year ago

To make sure you can benefit from all market-leading features at Omnisend, you need to meet some technical criteria. If you own a store on BigCommerce, you have to have a custom domain (yourowndomain.com) assigned to your store and be sure it allows safe browsing with SSL. 

Not meeting either of these criteria means you cannot use:

  • Sales tracking for your reports

  • Abandoned Cart

  • Live View

  • Product Picker

  • Forms 

Note: these features also require you to have our snippets on your store. Learn more about snippets for Stencil and Blueprint.

Getting your custom domain

To get your own custom domain, you can either purchase it from a 3rd party domain provider (like Godaddy, Namecheap, etc.) or straight from BigCommerce. For the sake of simplicity, we recommend the latter. 

Note: purchasing your own custom domain might add additional expenses to your BigCommerce invoice.

To purchase your own domain from BigCommerce, simply follow these steps on your Bigcommerce account dashboard:

1. Go to Server Settings › Domain Name and select Buy a new one

2. Enter your desired domain name and click Check Availability. If the domain is available, you will receive an option to purchase the domain. Click Next to register the domain.

3. Select the length of time you would like the domain registered for and verify your Bill to details.

4. Select the appropriate email address for each of the following domain contacts.

  • Administrative Contact — the individual to be contacted for administrative, non-technical matters. These include legal matters, change of ownership and more.

  • Registrant Contact — the individual or organization which has the rights to use or "owns" the domain

  • Technical Contact — the individual to be contacted for technical matters relating to the domain

5. Click Confirm purchase to complete the domain registration.


In case BigCommerce made any changes to these steps and you cannot find something based on these instructions, please refer to this BigCommerce article on Purchasing a Domain.

Adding custom domain to a store

Once you have a domain purchased (preferably directly from BigCommerce), you can apply and manage it at your account dashboard:

1. Click Domains in the top left.

2. Click Manage to the right of the domain you want to change.

Your domain should already be applied to your store and no additional actions are required.


To learn more about domain management, transfer and termination refer to Purchasing a domain article on Bigcommerce.

Enabling SSL

An SSL certificate is issued by a trusted third party (like GeoTrust) for a specific domain or subdomain and verifies that a secure web page (like the checkout page) is properly encrypted, ensuring that all information passed between a user and the site is private. All addresses of websites with an SSL certificate start with HTTPS instead of HTTP.

BigCommerce gives you three options for getting an SSL certificate for your custom domain.

Use BigCommerce free dedicated SSL certificate

  • All BigCommerce stores with a custom domain (e.g. mybcstore.com) installed after May 24, 2017, are automatically outfitted with a free, dedicated SSL certificate called Encryption Everywhere.

  • Stores with a custom domain installed before that date can also enable it at any time.

Purchase an SSL certificate from BigCommerce

  • BigCommerce also offers paid SSL certificates verified by GeoTrust which offer additional security features like site seals, increased purchase protection, and Extended Validation. Once you decide to purchase this SSL, refer to a guide on installing an SSL.

Use a third-party SSL certificate

Stores without a custom domain (e.g. mybcstore.mybigcommerce.com) have their secure pages protected using the free BigCommerce shared SSL certificate. However, having your custom domain is mandatory to have all Omnisend features on your BigCommerce store.


To learn more about SSL certificates for BigCommerce stores, see BigCommerce SSL certificate.
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Contacts

Your contacts will be sent to All contacts list and for all newly added and updated contacts via Bigcommerce, we will add a tag “source: bigcommerce”. That way you will be able to create a segment and filter the list of contacts that were added from Bigcommerce. Just create a segment on Profile data where tag is “source: bigcommerce”.

Learn more about segments here.

Have more questions? Reach out to our support team.

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