My company concentrates on business/commercial clientele. What I have
noticed is that when dealing with businesses they don't care if the price is
$5 or $30 (I sell my domains at 40-50$ Canadian) as long as the service is
there. Customers are willing to pay considerably more (always within
reason) if you are providing a personalized service. As a matter of fact
you can lose corporate clients if you sell to low!
Why compete on the low end scale when you can increase prices by adding
value into the relationship? Competing at the $5 level is a recipe for
Chapter 11.
Jason Stadtlander
President
Daslweb Inc.
tel: 514.874.9809
fax: 514.874.0660
e-mail: jason@daslweb.com
www.daslweb.com
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-bizops-list@opensrs.org
[mailto:owner-bizops-list@opensrs.org]On Behalf Of Xen0nine@aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 10, 2002 10:50 PM
To: bizops-list@opensrs.org
Subject: more domain reg issues
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.
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!
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