[EMAIL PROTECTED] 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
