I’m Olivia Anderson, and I’ve been coming up with company names as a part of creative agency for almost five years. In this article I’m sharing field-proven rules that help make the best name for your business.

1. Don’t tie a name to a region

I wouldn’t recommend using the city and region title in your store name. The reason is competing with older and reputable sites in search results.

For instance, naming a clothes store in Colorado as Clothes-colorado.com means vying with all sites that have the word Colorado in their name — Wikipedia, the University of Colorado, Google Maps, and a few news sites. A sad spoiler — winning the competition with these sites will be very challenging.

2. Choose the name for a company that can reflect its main feature

If you haven’t decided on a business name yet, consider future customers. Think about the qualities they value in the product: price, fast delivery, or materials. If you sell low-cost clothes, highlight low prices in the name — Pricecut.com.

3. Match the name and domain

Users primarily remember the store name, so it has to match the domain. Finding the site becomes more complicated if the name and domain differ. Someone when searching for the site on Google may not recognize it among the search results and may not reach the store. When you’ve created a name, check on any domain name registration site if the domain is available.

Сhecking on domain name registration site if the domain is available

4. Avoid commonplace prefixes in a company name

The trend of using prefixes like super, premium, mega, and vip has passed. These words evoke negative associations. The name Vip-glasses.com suggests poor taste rather than the premium quality of the products.

5. Avoid using numbers and hyphens

Customers should easily remember online store names. Quickly enter them in a search engine, and don’t worry about where the hyphen is placed. Avoid special punctuation marks: hyphens, dashes, brackets, quotes etc.

For this reason, it’s not advisable to include numbers in the name. Dress-2024.com is challenging to remember and inconvenient to type. Numbers are appropriate if they are part of the company positioning. A store that accepts orders 24/7 can be named Shop24.com.

6. Try using abbreviations

The key to developing a good name for a company is simplicity. But if you can’t convey the idea with a short word, use abbreviations. An example is the brand Intel, which stands for Integral Electronics. Or IKEA — Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. It’s the owner’s name and surname and the farm name Elmtaryud in the Agunnaryd region, where he was born.

7. Use Chat GPT for inspiration

You can also ask artificial intelligence to create a name for your business. ChatGPT won’t probably give the perfect naming of a shop, but it can inspire you for the right variant. A prompt could be like this:

I’m going to start selling clothes (write your niche) online, and I need a unique (write your requirements to the name: easy to remember, not long, or something else) name for my future shop. Create 20 variants.

How to pick a great name for business using ChatGPT

Good luck!