Shopify Domains: What You Pay, and What You Actually Own

Buying a domain is usually the second or third hour of setting up a store, and it feels like the smallest decision on the list. It is not. The domain is the one asset that outlives the store — the platform, the theme and the apps can all be replaced, but the address on your packaging, your invoices and your customers' browser history cannot.

This guide answers the three questions that decision actually contains: what a domain costs through Shopify in year one and in year two, whether to buy inside Shopify or keep the registration at an outside registrar, and what happens to the domain on the day you leave. Everything here is read off Shopify's own pages and ICANN's transfer policy, in US dollars, as of August 2026.

The Quick Verdict

Two phrases run through this whole page, so here they are once: pointing the DNS leaves the registration wherever you bought it and just aims it at Shopify, while transferring moves the registration itself into Shopify. Find your own situation in column one.

What a Domain Through Shopify Costs in Year One

The headline number is straightforward. Shopify states that domains typically start at $9 USD/year, billed annually for the cheapest extensions, and its own blog puts a typical .com between $11 and $14 per year. That two-part formula is the honest version of the answer, and the rest of this section is about why you will see other numbers.

Two conditions travel with the purchase and are easy to miss. Domain purchases through Shopify are non-refundable, and once you have bought a name you cannot change the URL you chose during the purchase. Both facts argue for spending five extra minutes on the name before you spend nine dollars on it.

Why there is no Shopify price list you can look up

Merchants keep searching for a table of Shopify domain prices by extension, and no Shopify page we have found publishes one. There is a per-extension table on Shopify's blog, and it is the source of most of the confusion, because it is not about Shopify at all. Shopify says so directly, immediately under the table.

That sentence also dates the table: one of the three registrars it names, Google Domains, no longer exists — its customers were migrated to Squarespace. Read the table as an old snapshot of the market, not as what Shopify will charge you.

Why three Shopify pages quote four different figures

Shopify is not hiding a price — it is publishing several, written at different times for different purposes, and never reconciled. The pages are the constant here, not the numbers: three live Shopify pages carry four figures, and each figure has a different scope, which is what the middle column below is for.

All three pages read on August 1, 2026. Each is linked at the point where this article quotes it.

None of these is an error to be corrected into the others, and averaging them would produce a number no Shopify page states. The figure on the third page — around $16 per year for a .com — is Shopify's own, on Shopify's own blog, exactly like the $11–$14 range. We keep a running register of figures where Shopify disagrees with itself in our verified Shopify statistics, and this is one of the entries.

One more trap sits on the same pages, and it runs in both directions. The domain-price post opens with a market figure not tied to Shopify at all — “most domain names cost between $10 and $20 per year” — while the second post gives a Shopify-scoped range in the same breath as its higher .com figure: “On Shopify, domain pricing for relatively unique store names typically run from $10 to $30 per year.” The first describes the domain market; the second is Shopify's own wider frame, for names it calls relatively unique.

What the price already includes

The $9 to $14 is not a bare registration. Five things come with a domain bought through Shopify, and the last one is the argument that decides this article's main question for a lot of merchants.

None of this is tied to your pricing plan — it travels with the domain purchase itself. The domain is also one line in a much longer monthly bill, and if you are still assembling that bill, our breakdown of Shopify's true costs puts the domain next to the plan, the card rates and the apps.

What You Actually Pay in Year Two

This is the question that separates a first-year price from a multi-year cost, because the classic registrar pattern is a cheap first year followed by a much larger renewal. Here is the honest state of the evidence: Shopify publishes one renewal figure and no renewal price list — its blog's comparison table gives Shopify a “.com renewal (average)” of $16 a year. The domains page says only that “renewal pricing may differ from initial purchase and can change over time.” What you can act on instead is the date and the switch: the renewal is charged automatically on the date listed for your domain, automatic renewal is on unless you turn it off, and both of those live in your own admin rather than on a public page.

The one thing Shopify does say about year two is qualitative, and it comes from the same blog post that quotes the $16 figure: “Shopify's renewal costs generally stay in line with what you paid upfront,” and a .com costing $16 in year one “will cost roughly the same when it renews.” That is reassurance, not a price, and the two Shopify surfaces do not fully agree with each other.

Compare that with an outside registrar, where the renewal is published in advance. Namecheap lists a .com at $14.98, discounts the first year to $11.28, and publishes $18.48 as the renewal price for a personal registration in US dollars. You may not like the number, but you can budget three years against it, and that is the real difference in this comparison.

Whatever you pay, the schedule around the payment is documented in detail, and it is worth knowing before a renewal surprises you.

Those four stages come from Shopify's domain renewal page. Two details matter in practice: the 40-day grace period applies to most domains rather than to every extension, and domain renewals are billed separately from your plan subscription — which is exactly why they keep running when the subscription stops.

Shopify-Managed or Third-Party: What Actually Differs

One merchant question — “which mode should I be in?” — is answered across six separate Shopify documentation pages, which is why nobody feels they have the whole picture. The table below puts all six in one place, stage by stage, with both modes side by side.

Six different official Shopify pages answer one question about the same domain. All read on August 1, 2026.

Read down the two middle columns and the trade-off stops being abstract. Shopify-managed buys convenience during the store's life and costs work at the end of it; an outside registrar costs a second dashboard during the store's life and nothing at the end. Neither is a trap, but only one of them is reversible without a process.

The one thing only a Shopify-managed domain gives you

Email forwarding is the most concrete advantage of buying inside Shopify, and it is not a general feature of connecting a domain — Shopify's own glossary attaches it to a condition.

If your domain stays at an outside registrar, that need does not disappear — it moves. You set forwarding up at your registrar, or you buy a mailbox from an email provider, because Shopify does not host mailboxes in either mode and forwarding only ever sends mail on to an account you hold somewhere else. Our FAQ on whether Shopify gives you a business email covers which of those routes fits which store.

The one thing only an outside registrar gives you

Independence, and it is worth more than it sounds. The registration never enters Shopify, so the day you leave the platform there is nothing to transfer, unlock or rescue — you change a DNS record and the domain points somewhere else. You also get a renewal price published in advance and a DNS panel that survives any platform decision you make later.

The price of that independence is real: no built-in forwarding, two dashboards instead of one, and DNS records you edit in a place that has never heard of your store. For a merchant who has never touched a registrar control panel, that is a genuine cost, not a rounding error.

Bringing a Domain You Already Own

Most merchants arriving here already own a name. The choice is not “keep it or lose it” — it is whether the registration itself moves. Both options end with your store live on your domain; they differ entirely in who holds the registration afterwards.

Connecting without transferring

The lighter option is to leave the registration exactly where it is and update the DNS records at your registrar so they point at Shopify. Your registrar keeps billing you, on its own schedule and at its own renewal price, and Shopify simply receives the traffic. If this switch is part of a wider replatform, the domain step sits inside a bigger cutover plan — our Squarespace migration playbook shows where it lands in that sequence.

How a transfer into Shopify actually works

Transferring is the heavier option, and it has a fixed shape. Five steps, in this order, with one waiting period that catches people out.

The fear this section usually has to answer is downtime, and Shopify answers it directly: transfer times vary by extension, and “your domain continues working during the transfer process.” The store does not go dark while the registration changes hands.

On the clock itself, Shopify's per-extension table puts most extensions at five days, a .com included, and about two dozen country-code and specialty extensions — .ac, .nz, .pl, .tw and their neighbours — at 15 days. The page also states an overall maximum of up to 20 days for the process, though no individual extension in that table carries that figure. Plan around your own extension rather than the headline.

Why the 60-day wait exists

This is not a Shopify rule with a Shopify workaround. It comes from ICANN's transfer policy, which sets out the limited circumstances in which a registrar may refuse to move a domain.

Note the verb. Those two circumstances are cases where a registrar may deny the request. There is a stricter one alongside them: ICANN states a registrar must deny a transfer while the domain is subject to a 60-day change-of-registrant lock — the lock that follows an edit to your contact information. Shopify applies the same 60-day wait after you buy or transfer a domain inside Shopify, so the clock is not something you escape by starting on its side.

What a transfer costs, and who charges it

A transfer is not free, but the charge is not a Shopify fee. Every transfer extends the registration by one year, which is written into the registry agreement itself. Shopify states this plainly as an ICANN requirement rather than a separate fee it charges, and refunds the one-year renewal charge if the transfer does not succeed. On the duration side, ICANN's transfer policy as we read it sets no end-to-end maximum — the day counts come from Shopify and from your registrars.

Extra Domains and the Free myshopify.com Address

Buying the misspellings and the .net alongside your .com is a reasonable defensive move, but price it as what it is: each domain is a separate registration with its own renewal, on its own date, at its own price. Your primary domain is the one customers see in the address bar while they browse; the others sit behind redirects and quietly renew.

Your free myshopify.com address is a different thing entirely. Shopify states it can be neither removed nor transferred, which is the clearest possible statement that it is Shopify's address rather than yours — a permanent handle for the store, not a name you own. If you are working out what else arrives with the store out of the box, our guide to what a Shopify ecommerce website includes covers the rest of that list.

Two boundaries worth naming here. Local domains for selling into different countries are a Shopify Markets decision rather than a domain-shopping one, and our guide to selling internationally owns that topic. And premium or aftermarket domains — buying a name someone already holds — are a different market with entirely different prices, which this article does not cover.

What Happens to Your Domain When You Leave Shopify

This is the question almost nobody asks at purchase time and everybody asks eventually, and it is the reason the managed-versus-third-party choice matters at all. The short answer: the domain is yours in both modes — though Shopify states that if you are planning to deactivate your store and want to keep using a Shopify-managed domain, you need to transfer that domain before you deactivate. The long answer is about how much work “yours” requires, and about a charge that outlives the store.

A third-party domain: nothing happens to it

If the registration lives at an outside registrar, closing your Shopify store changes nothing about the domain. It stays registered to you, on the same renewal schedule, at the same price. The only real task is turning off auto-renewal on your registrar's own website if you no longer want the domain — a switch that is not in the Shopify admin and never was.

A Shopify-managed domain: still yours, but you have to move it

A domain you bought through Shopify is also still yours, and Shopify's own billing documentation tells you what to do about it: if you want to maintain ownership of a domain you purchased through Shopify, transfer it to a third-party domain provider. That instruction exists precisely because a managed domain cannot be removed — it can only be moved, parked so its DNS no longer points at the store, or pointed at a redirect. Nobody will take the name from you, but nobody will move it for you either.

There is a second move that is easy to confuse with that one. Transferring a Shopify-managed domain to another Shopify store is a different operation with a different clock: it completes in up to 24 hours after the request is accepted, it carries your email forwarding addresses, DNS records and subdomains along with it, and only the store owner or a staff member with the transfer permission can start it. That is not the same as leaving the platform, and the two should never be planned as one task.

The renewal that does not stop when the store does

Here is the part that costs merchants real money. Cancelling the store does not cancel the domain, because the two were never on the same bill.

Combine that with the 14-day rule from the renewal clock above and the trap becomes concrete: the charge lands two weeks before the term ends, which is often before the close date a merchant had in mind. What ends it is one switch — the domain keeps renewing until automatic renewal is turned off, in Shopify for a Shopify-managed domain and on your registrar's own site for a third-party one. One documented exception: on a .de or .at domain that setting can't be manually deactivated from your Shopify admin, and turning it off goes through a compliance form submitted to Shopify Support at least 5 days before the scheduled renewal date. This is one instance of a wider billing pattern — subscriptions, apps and domains all stop on their own terms — and our guide to what Shopify charges and when covers the full exit sequence.

Deactivation, reconnection, and the 90-day HSTS tail

This only bites in one case: a next home that does not serve HTTPS. Shopify states that if you transfer the domain to another platform that uses HTTPS, no additional steps are needed — and since practically every modern host serves HTTPS by default, this is a checkbox rather than a crisis. It is still a checkbox worth ticking before you point the domain somewhere new.

The mechanics behind it: Shopify's HTTP Strict Transport Security policy stays in effect on your domain for 90 days after you deactivate the store, so browsers keep insisting on a secure connection to it throughout that window. Alongside it, deactivating or freezing a store leaves your custom domains disconnected, and you have to reconnect them if you reopen later.

Your domain exit checklist

Six steps cover both modes. Steps 1, 4 and 5 apply to everyone; steps 2 and 3 only apply if Shopify manages the registration, and step 6 only matters if the domain's next home does not serve HTTPS. Work them in order while the store is still open — every one of them is harder after the account is closed.

The Bottom Line

Domains are cheap enough that the price is rarely the real decision. What actually differs between the two modes is how much of your future self's time you are spending — and Shopify's documentation is far clearer about the buying than about the leaving, which is why the leaving is where merchants get caught.

Frequently Asked Questions