.shop Domain
Your Online Shop Domain
Register your .shop domain from just £32.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .shop domain?
The .shop domain is designed for e-commerce. It tells customers exactly what to expect: a place to browse and buy. Whether you're a small retailer or a large online store, .shop provides a clear commercial signal and strong brand potential.
Who should register .shop?
Online retailers, e-commerce stores, and businesses selling products online.
Why choose .shop?
- Purpose-built for e-commerce
- Immediate customer understanding
- Great availability
- Strong commercial branding
Who runs .shop, and since when
Registry data from the .shop delegation record held by IANA, which maintains the internet's root zone. Eligibility comes from the registry's own policy, and the prices are ours.
- Extension type
- Generic (gTLD)
- Registry operator
- GMO Registry, Inc.
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2016
- Delegated 5 May 2016
- Who can register
- Open to any person or organisation worldwide, with no retail or trading requirement
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £32.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
The auction that made .shop an e-commerce domain
On 27 January 2016 ICANN ran a last-resort auction to settle who would operate one string. Seven applicants had made it that far, from a field that had included Google and Amazon, and GMO Registry of Japan won it at 41,501,000 US dollars. .shop domains went on sale to the public that September.
That number matters to a buyer for one reason. A registry that paid it has to earn it back through renewals, so this was never going to be a bargain extension and the price is not going to drift downwards. Weigh it as a permanent annual line rather than a launch offer, the same way you would weigh a lease.
The eligibility position is unusually clear, because GMO put it in the registration policy rather than leaving it to a marketing page. Two other details from the same document are worth carrying away. Names can be held for one to ten years, which is useful if you would rather take the renewal date off your calendar for a while, and not something every registry allows: a .be, by contrast, is issued a year at a time and no longer. And the .shop policies are governed by the laws of Japan, with jurisdiction sitting in the courts of Tokyo. Neither is a problem. Both are the sort of thing nobody discovers until the day it matters.
The keyword trap
The tempting move is to buy the category: shoes.shop, candles.shop, bikes.shop. It reads well and it feels like an edge. It is not one. An exact-match domain has not been a ranking shortcut for many years, so the words in the address do no lifting, and a name assembled entirely from generic terms is hard to trademark and harder to defend when somebody opens up on a near-identical string. The extension does its best work behind a brand, not behind a product category.
Check the price before you fall for a name, too. GMO keeps a premium list, and short or obvious labels can carry a much higher fee. Ask what the renewal costs, not just the first year, because the two are often different numbers.
Our steer for a British retailer is not changed by any of this. If your customers search from the UK, a .co.uk still does more in Google UK and costs a fraction as much. A .shop earns its keep when the name is the brand rather than the category. It also makes sense if you sell beyond Britain, or if the .co.uk went years ago.
Any natural person or entity is eligible to register domain names in the .shop TLD.
What that means if you are buying one
Registry policies are written to be enforced rather than to reassure, so a flat sentence like that one is close to the strongest wording you will get: no trade check, no company number, no evidence of stock. It settles who may buy. It says nothing about what a name costs to renew, and nothing about the abuse rules that can still take it back.
Is .shop the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.shop works well if
- Your brand name is taken on .co.uk and .com, and brand.shop says what you do without padding the name out with "online" or "store".
- You sell across several countries, so a UK extension would be the wrong signal and you want one address that reads the same in every market.
- You are launching a retail-only site alongside a company site that already lives on a .co.uk, and you want the two to stay distinct in search results.
- Your domain often appears with no other context, in a paid advert or a marketplace listing, where saying "you can buy here" in the address itself is worth something.
Look elsewhere if
- Nearly all your customers are British and find you through Google. A .co.uk carries a UK signal .shop cannot, at roughly a third of the price.
- You have your heart set on a generic keyword name. Something like shoes.shop looks like a category page rather than a business, and the words in it will not rank it.
- The name you want sits on the registry premium list, where the higher fee usually applies at every renewal and not only at the point of sale.
- Your buyers are older or nervous online, and a domain that is neither .com nor .co.uk reads to them as a link they should not click.
Selling mainly to British shoppers? A .co.uk will do more in Google UK and costs about a third as much. See .co.uk pricing.
.shop vs .store: which should you register?
These two arrived within months of each other in 2016 and they are sold on the same promise, so the choice usually comes down to language and money. On money, .shop is the cheaper of the pair here, by a wide enough margin that a decade of renewals is a noticeable difference for a small retailer.
On language, British English does most of the deciding. A shop is a shop: the word is used the same way by a village greengrocer and by a national chain, and it doubles as a verb, so "shop at" reads naturally in an advert. Store leans American, and where it does not it tends to mean either a department store or the place things are kept. If your market is the UK, .shop is the more natural word. If you sell into the United States, .store loses that awkwardness.
Neither restricts who may register, and neither will rank you. Pick on price and on how the name sounds when you say it out loud to somebody who has not seen it written down.
| .shop | .store | |
|---|---|---|
| Registry operator | GMO Registry, Japan | Radix, back end run by Tucows |
| In the root zone | Since May 2016 | Since February 2016 |
| Annual cost here | The cheaper of the two | Around half as much again |
| Reads in Britain as | A shop, in the everyday sense | A large retailer, or storage |
| Works as a verb | Yes, people shop | No |
| Eligibility | Anyone, stated in the registry policy | Anyone, first come first served |
.shop domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .shop domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyIt is neutral. Google treats .shop as a generic extension with no country meaning, so it neither helps nor harms rankings on its own, and the word "shop" in the address is not a keyword bonus. What it does affect is the click, because a shopper reading a search result or an advert can tell what the site is before they arrive. If your customers are UK-based, note that a .co.uk gets a geographic signal that .shop does not.
Anyone can. GMO Registry states in its own registration policy that any natural person or entity is eligible, so there is no requirement to be a retailer, hold a company number, be VAT registered or sell anything at all. The only limits are technical and administrative: 63 characters maximum, no leading or trailing hyphen, no hyphens in both the third and fourth positions, and the reserved and premium name lists that every registry maintains.
For a British audience, usually yes, on two counts. Shop is the word British people use, and it works as a verb as well as a noun. And .shop costs meaningfully less here every year, which compounds over the life of a business. .store makes more sense if you sell mainly into the United States, where store is the everyday term, or if the exact name you want is available on one and not the other. Neither restricts who may register.
Because the registry charges more, and it has an auction to pay for. GMO Registry won the string at auction in January 2016 for just over 41.5 million US dollars, and registry fees are how that gets recovered. Technically you are getting exactly what a .co.uk gives you, so treat the difference as the cost of the word rather than the cost of the service. It repeats every year, so multiply before you decide.
It depends who your customers are, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Younger and more online buyers barely register the extension. Older and less confident buyers have been trained by years of phishing to be wary of anything that is not .com or .co.uk, and some will hesitate. If that describes your market, the fix is not a different domain but the usual trust signals: a real address and phone number on the site, visible returns terms, and reviews people can check.
Included with Your .shop Domain
DNS Management
Full DNS zone editor to manage A, CNAME, MX, TXT, and all record types.
Email Forwarding
Set up professional email addresses and forward to any inbox.
Auto-Renewal
Never lose your domain with automatic renewal protection.
Free 10GB Mailbox
One 10GB mailbox (POP3/IMAP) included with every domain, on any TLD.
Other E-Commerce Domains Extensions
Register your .shop domain today
Secure your .shop domain from just £32.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
