Sub-stores

Merchants can open their own storefront on their own domain, selling your products, their own, or both.

First make sure their merchant tier grants sub-store permission — see member and merchant tiers.

Showing main-store products

Under User centre → My store, the merchant chooses whether your products appear:

• Shown — they sell your catalogue and earn sub-store commission
• Hidden — they sell only what they list themselves, effectively an independent store (requires supplier permission)

Binding a subdomain

For merchants to use xxx.your-domain.com, you need to do three things first.

1. Configure the panel

Under Site settings → Other:

• Main domain — for example abc.com, making sub-stores xxx.abc.com
• DNS CNAME — either abc.com or cname.abc.com; any domain that points at your server IP and is not behind a CDN

2. Add a wildcard DNS record

At your DNS provider, add a record with the value * pointing at your server IP:

*.abc.com  →  158.65.45.1

3. Bind the wildcard domain on the server

This is the step people miss. DNS alone is not enough — the web server also has to accept the domain.

If your site currently has www.abc.com and abc.com bound, add one more:

*.abc.com

In BaoTa: Website → site settings → Domain management → add *.abc.com.

With all three done, merchants can bind a subdomain prefix from the user centre.

One more thing: a wildcard certificate. Subdomains are created dynamically, so a normal certificate cannot cover them — you need *.abc.com, and it can only be validated over DNS. See domains and HTTPS certificates.

Binding a custom domain

If a merchant has their own domain and their tier grants domain binding, have them point it at your DNS CNAME with a CNAME record.

If it resolves but still will not load, your server has no default site configured. When a server receives a domain it does not recognise, it hands the request to the default site — so make your store the default.

In BaoTa: Website → Default site → choose your store.

Who owns sub-store users

Users who register on a sub-store belong to that sub-store's owner. Their future spending earns the owner referral commission.

Sub-store markup

Sub-store owners can mark up your products in their own store and keep the difference.

Checklist

Symptom	Cause
Subdomain will not load	No wildcard DNS record, or *.domain not bound on the server
Custom domain will not load	No default site configured on the server
"Domain unavailable" when binding	Main domain or DNS CNAME not configured in the panel
DNS is right but it still fails	The DNS CNAME target is behind a CDN — use one that is not