----- Original Message -----
From: "William X. Walsh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 7:07 PM
> Adrian, if you are offering a premium service, $1 to $2 isn't going to
> make a difference to the decision of the customer to do business with
> you.
It is if their first requirement is a domain. If I don't sell them a domain, I
have minimised my chances of selling them any other of our services immediately.
Out other services are very technical, and require support, but they usually
need a domain first.
Analogy - mobile phone companies giving away free GSM phones to get the talk
traffic. if you try and charge people for a phone, when others are giving the
same thing away for free - you dont get the signed contract,and all of the
lucrative talk billing down the line do you?
When establishing a customer relationship, in a business where everyone looks
the same, e.g. doamin registrars (even though they are not equal ) price is your
most effective weapon, and if you don't have the ammunition you don't gain
anything - these things are truisms in business.
> It really isn't. And if these customers are going to make a decision
> on your service based on the difference in price on one component in
> that service being $1 or $2 more, then chances are they weren't too
> keen on your offer in the first place.
No - they are going to make a decision based upon the cost of registering the
domain. They need the domain for their web URL's and their mail addresses and so
on. Give them the price for the domain, and then upsell them to everything
else. No domain - no business - it is fundamental. It just won't so to say to
people - pay us an extra two bucks a year for the domain, because we are the
greatest web/mail hosts. Human psychology just doesn't work like that
unfortunately/
>
> If you provide a quality service, the small difference in price
> doesn't really matter. This is based on real world experience.
Agreed - but you have to first get that business to establish that.
>
> I have people who have come to me and transferred their domains away
> from those cheaper registration services, simply because they
> recognize that you get what you pay for. These are people who are now
> paying almost twice what they could have paid through one of those
> lowball registration services.
Yes - it happens. But I would far sooner get those customers in the first
place - and keep them.
>
> There are extensive discussions in the archives of the
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] list on the price issue. You will see that many
> of us, myself included, do not see the price issue as being of that
> much importance. We are much more concerned about OpenSRS continuing
> to innovate in this arena and providing us with a quality service we
> can continue to interface to and offer to our customers.
I agree generally speaking - OpenSRS provides a valuable, and effective service
which we are all better off being able to avail ourselves of. But they have to
keep their eyes on the ball - this is a business which is getting more and more
competitive, and it is encumbent on OpenSRS to provide their resellers with the
means to compete effectively - i.e. competitively.
>
> If you are trying to compete by offering the lowest price, its a
> hopeless battle, and one that many of us would much rather not see
Price is not everything, but it is a primary weapon in the greater battle.
Also - just on domains, would you sooner make 100,000 times two dollars, or
10,000 times three or four dollars?
Adrian Cooper.
