Creating consistent branding across each of your customer touch points helps build trust among your shoppers. When your in-store displays, online store, invoices and emails carry your branding and have a consistent look and feel, you can turn your one-time shoppers into repeat customers.

One of the ways that you can ensure consistency in your branding and promote trust is by using your (store's) domain name in your email address. This has the added benefit of preventing your store's emails being marked as spam by an email authentication measure called DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance). DMARC is an email-validation system that determines whether or not an email comes from an authentic source.

DMARC is one of the main reasons why Lightspeed enforces the use of a Lightspeed-branded email when you use the email services of certain inbox providers for your store. Here are the inbox providers we currently do this for:

• Yahoo
• AOL
• Google (only googlemail.com)
• ProtonMail
• Rocketmail

NOTE: It's important to note that only the sender address is changed for the aforementioned inbox providers. The sender name in all outgoing emails will always be your store name. For example:
From: Mike’s Surf Shop <shop-emails@lightspeedhq.com>

If you already have an email address that you've been using since you established your business, it's perfectly reasonable for you to not want to change your address—as your customers are familiar with it. However, by connecting your store's domain name to your existing inbox, you'll:

1. improve and promote your brand
2. prevent your store's emails being marked as spam by DMARC

This article explains how to connect your store's domain name to your existing inbox.

To connect your domain to your store's email

Before proceeding, it's important to note that connecting your domain to your store's email requires an inbox provider and/or account type that allows for this type of connection. For example, although Gmail allows you to connect your domain to your inbox, you can only do so with their Gsuite business email service. As each inbox provider is different, we recommend you consult your provider's documentation to confirm whether or not this service is available.

TIP: Zoho.com, a top-rated email service for small businesses, provides domain name connections at no cost.

Connecting your domain to your store's email is a 2-step process:

1. Follow your inbox provider’s setup instructions
2. Set up eCom to use your new email address

1. Follow your inbox provider’s setup instructions

1. Log in to your email account with your inbox provider.
2. Follow your inbox provider's instructions/on-screen prompts to connect your domain to your email.
3. Test to make sure the changes were applied properly: send a test email to your new address and confirm that it's delivered to your store's inbox.

2. Set up eCom to use your new email address

1. Log in to the Lightspeed eCom Back Office.
2. Go to Settings > GENERAL SETTINGS > Company.
3. Enter your new domain email addresses for your store's Generic and Service emails.
• Generic email address - this is the email address for receiving inquiries from the Support page as well as general requests for information.
• Service email address - this is the primary email address for communication with your customers. This is the address customers will receive order confirmations from.

TIP: You can set up separate email addresses for your service- and generic-related emails. For example:

• orders@yourdomain.com for service Emails
• info@yourdomain.com for generic Emails