Connect your own domain
Buy it anywhere, point two DNS records, and SSL is issued automatically. What to do during propagation, and why your mydukaan.io link should keep working forever.
A custom domain is the cheapest credibility upgrade a store can buy. It costs a few hundred rupees a year and it changes how a first-time buyer reads your link when it arrives on WhatsApp from a friend.
The technical part takes ten minutes. The waiting takes anywhere from an hour to two days, and that is the part worth planning around.
Buy it anywhere
Any registrar is fine. You do not need to buy through us and there is no advantage to doing so.
Two pieces of advice on the name itself. Prefer .in or .com — Indian buyers are used to both and trust them; novelty extensions still read as slightly suspect to an older customer. And say it out loud before buying: you will be reading this domain over the phone to customers for years, and anything requiring "no, with a hyphen" will cost you more than it saves.
Point two records
In Dukaan: Settings → Domain → add your domain. You will be shown the exact records to create.
In your registrar's DNS panel, create them exactly as shown. Two things to watch:
The apex and the www version are different records. Set up both, so yourstore.in and www.yourstore.in both work. Customers will type either, and a visitor who hits a dead www subdomain does not try again.
Delete conflicting records first. Registrars often pre-create a parking page A record on the apex. If you leave it there alongside the new one, DNS will resolve to whichever it feels like and your store will appear to work intermittently — which is far more confusing to debug than it simply not working.
SSL happens on its own
Once DNS resolves, a certificate is issued automatically. There is nothing to buy, upload, configure or renew, and no way to accidentally leave checkout running unencrypted.
If you see a certificate warning in the first hour, it almost always means DNS has not fully resolved yet rather than that something is broken. Wait before changing anything — the most common way to break a domain setup is to keep adjusting records while propagation is still in flight.
What to do while you wait
Propagation is usually under an hour and occasionally up to 48. During that window the domain may work for you and not for a customer in another city, which is normal and not worth panicking about.
So: do not announce the new domain until it resolves from a device on mobile data, not just your office wifi. Your own network caches DNS aggressively and will tell you everything is fine long before it is fine for everyone.
Meanwhile your mydukaan.io link keeps working. Nothing goes down during the switch.
Keep the old link alive
Your mydukaan.io URL continues to work after the custom domain is live, and you should leave it that way permanently.
It is written on printed material. It is in old WhatsApp messages. It is in a bio somewhere you have forgotten about. It is in the order confirmation of every customer you have served so far. A dead link in an old order confirmation is a customer who cannot find you again — which is an expensive way to save nothing.
After it's live, three things
Update your links. Instagram bio, WhatsApp business profile, Google Business listing, printed packaging inserts. The domain only helps where people actually see it.
Check it on a phone. Not a desktop browser. Load the storefront on mobile data, add something to the cart, and go as far as the payment screen. Domain changes very occasionally surface a mixed-content or redirect issue that only shows on mobile.
Set a calendar reminder for the renewal. Eleven months out. An expired domain takes a store offline completely, and it is by a wide margin the most preventable outage a small business ever has.
