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Comment by marketingtech | Hacker News Reader

This is a result of Apple limiting the entropy of marketing data that can be received from a domain (defined as an eTLD+1) to 6 bits.

This causes problems for platforms like Shopify or marketplaces like Alibaba or eBay that may have multiple sellers trying to run ads on a domain and competing for the same small pool of entropy.

This solution? Leverage the "public suffix" list to define your domain as an eTLD and give every seller a separate subdomain so that everyone gets their own data entropy namespace.

Now every hosting provider or online marketplace is scrambling to re-architect their site into subdomains with public suffixes to maintain the status quo.

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Pretty much all Shopify shops have their own domains, only a minority drive traffic to their .myshopify.com subdomain

I was a bit surprised that a shopify biz that could not be bothered to use its own domain would be very concerned about monitoring ad performance.

Seems someone would first effect to have a better branded site. As in, a decent TLD.

And that if anything, this is a kick in the pants of an ecommerce site to get its own domain(s) to deal with this.

Do I have that right?

There's probably a decent number of sites that get most/all of their traffic from impulse purchases off of Facebook ads, and who have no actual branding. Obviously they should go ahead and just get a domain name, but they likely haven't had any reason to care up until this point either.

Maybe shopify domains have better SEO than randomwebsite.com

This is a good point. It looks like google treats subdomains as internal links to the main domain. No idea if they treat myshopify.com this way.

FWIW, it looks like a 301 to a new domain should transfer the seo juice. If the site is valuable, a new domain should stand up pretty well. It also decamps from myshopify.

This all seems more valuable to the store owner, but I get why people would want to avoid all those changes and just try to figure out the thing "Apple is making them do."

Well, I could own google.myshopify.com and be happy with it but have no way to buy the .com

Just suck it up and buy google-calculatorstore.com or whatever - if you're happy with the myshopify domain you clearly don't care _that_ much.

Of course, that specific example, since Google is trademarked and well known might get you on the wrong end of Shopify's ToS or a UDRP request either way.

> This causes problems for platforms like Shopify or marketplaces like Alibaba or eBay that may have multiple sellers trying to run ads on a domain and competing for the same small pool of entropy.

This is essentially https://github.com/privacycg/private-click-measurement/issue....

Effectively it boils down to, "how can you distinguish the seller from the website owner?", if you want to give both seller and website owner entropy.

> One thing that will not change is the existence of small businesses; in particular, small merchants who do not have their own eTLD+1 registered. Registering an eTLD+1, and hosting a website specific to a your business is a pretty high bar to demand of all businesses.

Benjamin savage is with FB I assume...? Registering a domain name should be table stakes if you want to run a business and have ad tracking with increased entropy online.

Is it reasonable to deny access to individuals without a phone number but unreasonable to give less ad tracking entropy to businesses without their own domain? Something about mosquitoes and camels there, no?

If a business cares more than 10$/year, registering a domain is a nobrainer. “Small businesses” are just being pawns in the chess game here - I’m yet to see an legit “small business” owner who cares or thinks this is an actual issue

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