----- Original Message ----- From: "GB" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: tucows.services.domains.general To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 6:33 PM Subject: [domains-gen] 12.88
> How are we supposed to make any money or get any new business when we are > paying $15.00 USD for a .CA from TUCOWS and many other domain sellers are > charging end users well below that? ($12.88 - namespro.ca) ($9.95 - > netfirms.com) > > Are we wasting our time here or is TUCOWS planning on dropping the price > for resellers. My guess is that you like your business to make a profit, I know that I do, but many of those below cost companies are making no profit. I know because I see their executives cars when we attend the same meetings ;) Its all paying interest on loans and not making a real surplus. To me this would be no fun. It is similar to the UK market where many companies sell at below registry cost price. I have proved that its possible to charge what seems like a high price ($15 for .com) and still sell enough of them to make it worthwhile. The reasons for this are probably: - very simple ordering process (have you ever tried to order anything from Godaddy? people get put off by that sort of thing) - we sell domains to hosting resellers who value us sorting out the name server delegation for them. - we bundle lots of extras with the domain names. - we provide a simple upgrade path to our web hosting service. The market research I did last year showed that people would only switch to a lower cost provider if the price was so low it was below cost price, which is exactly why those companies are using that strategy. I think I can increase the number of domains we sell by selling them to people using our new free hosting service. In fact the profit on selling domains to even 10% of those customers could be considerable. I don't think any of us could or should try to compete with $8.95 for .com. It is just not workable even if you are paying $6.25 -- Regards Gordon Hudson Hostroute.com Ltd www.hostroute.net _______________________________________________ domains-gen mailing list [email protected] http://discuss.tucows.com/mailman/listinfo/domains-gen
