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How to Setup an Alternate Domain for Your ProductCart Store When Switching Platforms

You can keep your ProductCart store running on your own hosting for reference on a subdomain or different domain altogether when you transition your current domain to a platform like Shopify. The following article is not all inclusive, but good general guidance to how to proceed with this approach.

There are a few possible reasons where you’ll want or need to keep your ProductCart website online after moving your store to Shopify.

For example:

  • If you elect to have NetSource migrate customers and order history to Shopify. This work must be completed after your store has moved to Shopify. NetSource will still need to have access to your ProductCart store via the web to complete this work.
  • If you choose not to migrate customers and order history to Shopify, you may still need to sign into your ProductCart store for a period to wrap up pending orders and access financial reports.
  • If your original website has content which was not part of the ProductCart store, this will not be moved to Shopify, so you will need to consider whether to keep the original site up.

These cases can be addressed by having your current website updated so that it’s available at an alternate web address. For example, at https://pc.yourdomain.com. This is normally a simple change that can be made by the company that manages hosting for your ProductCart store.

If somebody else manages hosting for your website, we recommend that you reach out to them as soon as possible to see if they can help.

Here’s a sample question you can send to them:

"We are in the process of moving our ProductCart store to Shopify. We need to add a new hostname to our existing website at www.ourdomain.com. This is so we can continue to access the current website after traffic is directed to Shopify. We’d like to add the hostname pc.ourdomain.com. For now, pc.ourdomain.com needs to have a permanent redirect to www.ourdomain.com, but that redirect needs to be removed later. Can you do this for us?”

If you host your own website, accomplishing this would involve the following steps:   

  • Configure web server: The website needs to have a new hostname added to its bindings. This is a simple task in IIS, which is the most common web server for ProductCart.
  • Configure DNS: Add an A record for the new hostname to DNS, pointing to the IP address of your web server.
  • Configure TLS: If your website has a TLS (SSL) certificate, that certificate may need to be updated so the new hostname is included as part of the certificate. Note that Cloudflare and other front-end proxy services normally manage this certificate automatically, so depending on your unique situation, no further action may be needed.
  • Configure redirection: You should configure the website to redirect any visits to the alternate hostname (pc.yourdomain.com) to your main hostname (such as yourdomain.com). This redirect should be permanent (301) initially. Once your store is on Shopify, this redirect needs to be removed.

Note that the redirection is a very important step to prevent Google and other search engine crawlers from publishing links to what is really a temporary URL.

If your site is hosted by NetSource, we will contact you regarding this once we get started working on your project and can take care of this for you in most cases.

If you’re unsure about your hosting, please reach out to us for further assistance, we may be able to offer guidance.