You may find yourself in a situation in which you are unable to access your storefront due to issues with the domain. For example, if you change your store's domain in the control panel before the domain is pointing to your store, you and your shoppers will be unable to access the storefront.
Knowing how to find your permanent address can help you access your store's control panel in situations like this one.
Requirements
- You must be assigned as the store owner to view your store’s permanent address and domain details from the BigCommerce Account Dashboard.
- You must have the Manage DNS Records permission enabled in your user account to view your IP address in Settings › Email & DNS records.
Your URL and How to Find It
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), also termed a web address, specifies the location of a web resource (your storefront) on a computer network (the Internet) and a means for retrieving its information. When customers visit your site, your URL appears in their browser's address bar. It will look something like www.mybcstore.com. If you're on a trial account, your URL will be something like store-mystore.mybigcommerce.com.
You can view your storefront and your store's URL by logging into your store and clicking View Store located at the top left of the control panel.
If you've connected your store to multiple channels (such as WordPress), click View Storefronts to select which storefront to view.
Permanent Address
The permanent address is a URL associated with your individual store. It will never change and can be used to help you access your control panel in situations like the one mentioned in our introduction.
If you have a custom domain and SSL certificate, your control panel URL is the permanent address for your store. While logged into the control panel, your store's permanent address can be found in your browser's address bar.
If you are the store owner, you can also find your store's permanent address by logging into the BigCommerce Account Dashboard. From there, click your store name within the My Account page and scroll down to Details to see your Current Domain, Permanent Address, and Control Panel address URLs.
Multi-Storefront (MSF), the permanent address for additional (non-default) storefronts looks like this:
Format:
https://store-store_hash-channel_id.mybigcommerce.com
Example:
https://store-xyz123-123456.mybigcommerce.com
Your store_hash is the alphanumeric value that follows store- in your default storefront’s permanent address.
In the control panel, the channel_id for additional storefronts can be found in your browser’s address bar when visiting that storefront’s settings page in Channel Manager. It is a 6 or 7-digit number that follows /manage/channel/.
You can also use the Channels API to see channel IDs.
Secure URL
Secure URLs are used on pages which require the data being transferred between the page and your browser to be encrypted, such as checkout and login pages. They always begin with https and are accompanied by a padlock in your browser bar. All stores have free SSL certificate and Sitewide HTTPS enabled by default.
Locating Your Store's IP Address
To find your store’s IP address, go to Settings › Email & DNS records and click the Web Hosts tab. There you will see a table which includes an A record with your store’s IP address listed in the Value column.
Using Multi-Storefront? Your default storefront and any additional native storefronts all share the same IP address visible in the A record.
Locating Your Store's IP Address via Ping
You can ping your storefront's Permanent Address to return its IP address. There are various free tools available online, such as the one at https://centralops.net/co/, which can be used to ping a URL.
Your store was assigned a Permanent Address when it was first created and uses the following format: store-xyz123.mybigcommerce.com. Even if you use a custom domain or change domains, the Permanent Address will never change.
