The client had an existing domain name she wished to route to her new Shopify web site. One option would be to transfer the domain name to Shopify but that is a tricky process (a little more so with .com names rather than .co.uk).
Better is to use the internet DNS system to route web traffic from her current internet host while leaving everything else (primarily email) untouched. This is nominally “easy” just add an A record with the IP address of the Shopify website (and, equally easy, a CNAME record) but for those not confident with using the DNS, risky and confusing.
The first difficulty was finding the DNS management interface on the current host.
Each web host has it’s own user interface, the complete underlying interface (commonly cPanel or Plesk) is very powerful and fiddling by the uninitiated can lead to difficuties. In order to prevent users being confused by a legthy menu of choices they’ll not understand, some hosts choose to maintain a very simple first level of interface.
The more comprehensive cPanel was accessible but it was not readily evident how to find that.
Although Shopify do provide quite good instructions for routing an external domain name to a Shopify site, they may look a little technical and a non-technical user might not feel confident.
Having followed the instructions, as is to be expected the change does not take effect immediately but when the domain name was still responding with an error message after two days it was time to seek Shopify’s assistance. It turned out there was an additional change needed at their end, not mentioned in their otherwise quite helpful “how-to” notes.
After that another undocumented change to make the address bar show the client’s domain name rather than an obscure address at Shopify.
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