Setting up a business email address for your Shopify store

A hello@yourstore.com address instead of a Gmail one is a small, cheap credibility win. Shopify sells domains, and it can forward email — but it does not host mailboxes, and knowing the difference saves an afternoon.

Forwarding vs a real mailbox

Email forwarding takes mail sent to hello@yourstore.com and delivers it to an inbox you already have. Free with a Shopify-managed domain, and set up in minutes.

The catch: you can't reply from that address. Replies come from your personal Gmail, which undoes most of the benefit. Forwarding also complicates deliverability if you try to work around it, and it doesn't scale past one person.

A real mailbox — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, or your registrar's mail service — gives you a proper account you send and receive from, with calendars, shared inboxes and aliases. It costs a few pounds a month per user.

For anything beyond a side project, get a real mailbox. Forwarding is fine for the first month.

The DNS part

Mail routing is controlled by MX records on your domain, plus TXT records for SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Two rules:

1. Set up email before or alongside pointing the domain at Shopify. The website records (A and CNAME) and the mail records (MX) are separate, and replacing a DNS zone wholesale is how businesses lose their email — covered in domain and DNS setup.
2. Copy the existing MX and TXT records before changing anything. Write them down.

Your mail provider gives you the exact records to add. Add them at whoever manages your DNS — Shopify if the domain is Shopify-managed, your registrar otherwise.

Deliverability: SPF, DKIM, DMARC

Three records that decide whether your email reaches inboxes or spam folders. Your provider documents each:

• SPF — which servers may send as your domain.
• DKIM — a signature proving the mail wasn't tampered with.
• DMARC — what receiving servers should do when the first two fail.

Set all three. Missing them is the most common reason a store's order confirmations land in spam.

Which addresses to create

Fewer than you think. For most stores:

• hello@ or info@ — the public address, on the contact page.
• orders@ — where Shopify's notifications go, if you want them separated.
• returns@ — if returns volume justifies it.

Use aliases rather than paid mailboxes where you can — most providers let several addresses land in one inbox at no extra cost.

Whatever you create, make sure someone reads it. A contact address nobody monitors is worse than not having one.

Shopify's notification emails

Separate from your mailbox, and worth understanding. Shopify sends order confirmations and shipping notifications on your behalf, from your store's sender address.

Two things to check:

• The sender address under Settings → Notifications. It should be your domain, not a default.
• Authentication. Shopify will tell you if the domain isn't properly authenticated for sending. Fix it — an unauthenticated order confirmation is a spam-folder candidate, and that's the email every customer expects.

And edit the templates. There are around twenty, every customer reads two of them, and most stores never open the editor — it's on the launch checklist.

Marketing email is a different system

Your mailbox is for conversations. Campaigns, automations and newsletters belong in an email marketing platform with proper list management, consent tracking and unsubscribe handling — email marketing setup.

Sending a campaign from Google Workspace to five hundred addresses is a fast route to a damaged sending reputation, which then affects your order confirmations too.

Get a real mailbox, set SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and copy the MX records before touching DNS. That's the whole job, and the third item is the one that takes businesses offline.