I am currently having a really poor experience transferring a domain to Shopify and I’m curious if this is the expected behavior.
First, we connected the domain (added the A and CNAME records) using our third party registrar. This let us access our website so we officially launched on social media and began taking orders. Then, we decided to transfer the domain using the steps outlined here - https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/domains/add-a-domain/connecting-domains/transferring-domains. According to this documentation, it could take up to 20 days for the process to complete, however the domain will continue to work properly during this time.
Unfortunately, this was not the case. After we did the steps outlined in that document (unlocked domain, received auth code, initiated transfer, confirmed new ownership, etc) our website went dark. Complete outage. A dig lookup shows that the domain is using Shopify’s nameserver (ns1.systemdns.com), however our admin site just says “Transferring Registration” and the domain is “Not Connected.” I called the old registrar, who confirmed that the domain was successfully transferred to Shopify and they should have complete control over it. Our domain has stayed in this unavailable state for over 20 hours so far. To make matters worse, I also cannot add any MX records so the entire company is without email. I called Shopify tech support numerous times and was told they are looking into it.
This domain handoff process seems deeply flawed. Why does it take so long for Shopify to internally configure the domain after the successful transfer? Is there anything I could have done differently or is an outage like this inevitable?