Xen0nine@aol.com wrote:
> OK so we went over the good guy/bad guy issue of working with
> Tucows/OpenSRS vs Enom or whoever. At the very least we can feel
> self-satisfied that we are taking the high road even if we're not
> making enough money to support the service.
>
> Now on a different level, what do you say to a customer who complains
> when you tell them your price of say $14.95 which seems to be pretty
> standard for OpenSRS resellers, and despite the fact that you are
> underselling Verisign considerably, they respond that that is twice as
> much as someone else. Names that I hear are dotster, enom and today
> "sharpregister.com" I took a look at their site and they offer
> resellers a $6.99 wholesale price and direct to customers for $8.88
>
>
> This bugs me for a whole lot of reasons. But I thought I read
> somewhere that some minimum rates for domain registration had been
> setup by ICANN or somebody? Even though it is only a matter of $6 or
> so, customers don't think that way. They are looking for the best
> deal and while you can convince them about quality of service and
> infrastructure for hosting, it seems to go on deaf ears for domain
> registration.
You have a point there.
While it could be much better to be an OpenSRS reseller compared to a
whatever reseller, for the customer who wants to register a domain (and
period), it is kind of strange to pay $14.95 when the same service (that
is, domain registration) can cost less than $10. You just register, pay,
and that is it! If you do not need anything else, a register.com domain
works the same as an OpenSRS domain.
> It takes a lot of effort to even get one new customer. If we're lucky
> and make $5 on a domain registration that's $500 for 100
> registrations. I don't know about most of you but 100 domain
> registrations is a lot for me. It takes a lot more than $500 to get
> 100 new customers. Heck it can take a lot more than $500 to get 10
> new customers.
> That $5 doesn't even consider credit card charges and all of the other
> costs involved. There seems to be no way to do this profitably and
> it's frustrating to offer it as a "value added service" and have
> customers complain that the cost is too high!
The days when you could make profit on domain registrations are gone. I
think you (and we) should just forget about it. IMHO OpenSRS is not more
(any longer) but a registar, where support is excellent and you have a
nice API (with a donate_charles action, which you cannot get elsewhere!
:-)).
- Csongor
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Oct 19 2004 - 23:37:25 EDT