How to Pick a Brand Name for an eCommerce Business

Hold your horses on assembling keywords into a domain name and looking it up for availability. We will eventually get there anyway. For non-marketers, we have developed an actionable guide on how to invent a working and livelong brand name for an eCommerce business featuring tools and techniques. If you’re seeking out a working eCommerce brand name, follow the steps below.

· Collect all the building blocks for your brand name

· Differentiate from competitors

· Select and combine

· Run brandability audit

· Check for availability

· Rehash and recycle, or go back to the drawing board

· Validate

· Get a tagline

For a start, all you need is a clean slate — а free mind and a blank sheet.

Trust Your Gut: Brainstorm Unrestricted

Put down the first few words that spring to mind. Write down everything: words, non-words, phrases, character sequences, or syllables that just sound good to you. Meaningful or meaningless.

Differentiate From Your Competition

List competitors’ names and try to figure out what they convey. It’s a valuable exercise especially if you have missed out on your brand’s market positioning and got ahead of yourself by jumping straight to naming.

Look into their approach to branding to see how you can stand out. If most of them are keyword-heavy, take the other street and go with an unrelated name. If your main competitor goes by its founder’s name — differentiate by exploring evocative names.

Employ a Bit of Structure to Your Longlist

· Get practical. Brand names broadly fall into two main types:

· Descriptive. Describing what the company does or sell, or by whom — Booking.com, OurHarvest, Dell.

· Abstract. Evocative, out-of-context, made-up, completely random — GoPlinto.

These two intermix in at least 10 different categories for a good reason: most words with meaning happen to be non-trademarkable, copyrighted, or registered as domain names.
This is why you need to collect more distinctive building blocks for your brand name.

Select and Combine

· Single out those who can work on their own, both descriptive and abstract.

· Assemble blocks into powerful combinations.

Get them on a spreadsheet, we’d have to run them through a brandability checklist: are they brand-worthy?

Brand-Audit Your Longlist

You may ask why not run all suggestions through the availability check, what’s the point in a brandability audit if a name is unavailable?

Chances are you may stumble at the first hurdle: your top of the list name returns ‘taken’. When browsing close alternatives you still have to keep brandability criteria in mind. You don’t want to be swimming in circles, do you? From experience: having enough building blocks produce the best names even if you have to tweak, chop and change them later.