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Amazon Becomes Domain Name Registrar
prostoalex writes "Internet's largest retailer is setting up a domain name registration business. Wall Street Journal recently found out that in December Amazon.com got approved as domain name registrar. According to people from ICANN, the registration included rights for .com, .net,. org, .biz and .info TLDs."
With all the recent competition this became such a low margin business. I wonder what amazon expects to get from it...
I am not suprised at all.
I use to be a member of the team that ran, maintained and added new domains to Amazon.com DNS's. While I won't tell you everything, I can tell you they did this to save money since Amazon.com owns something like 4,000 domains (Maybe less, maybe more).
Just paying the money to be a registar and then not having to pay to register new domains and also not paying to re-register all the domain names they own will save them a lot of money.
Smart move, IMHO.
Linux O Muerte!
Say what you want about Verisign, they had it right, and so it should come as no shock that Amazon.com has entered the domain registration business. Verisign operates in the two markets that are at the gateway to the net. they are the premier SSL certificate authority and the the primary (although far from the best) domain registrar. Amazon - as a well run business - is seeking to mazimize proffits so it follows that they would enter the domain registration business, since it has one of the highest margins of any known internet business with the possible exception of the sale of pornography, and, yes, sales of SSL certificates. If the bariers to entry int othe Certificate Authority weren't so high, I'm sure Amazon.com would have attempted entry into that market as well.
--CTH
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Domain Name: AMAZON.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
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I'll be they'll set this up to work closely with their ZShop businesses. Sign up as a Zshop business, and get your own domain for 8cents.
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The number of registrars keeps growing, and the competition is starting to really have a positive effect. A few years back, it was hard to register a domain name for less than thirty dollars a year, without signing some kind of heinous terms of service agreement that legitimately threatened your rights as a domain owner. Now, there are a bunch of places that charge $10 or so a year.
In a couple months, I've got to re-register my domain names. Does anyone have good info on cheap places to register domains that don't have evil contracting agreements that may endanger my future rights to the domain?
And, in a related matter, do all registrars nowadays feed unrenewed domain names to domain squatters, who undoubtedly purchase registration rights for a pittance? I noticed when I let a couple less-than-desirable domain names lapse, they went straight to a squatter gambling search engine portal scam page the day my rights ended.
At least Amazon is a Profitable company! Yes, they are on the wrong side of the patent sensibility fence, but they didn't get to be what they are without taking care of customers--something other registars seem to think is optional.
Also, this could be a good way to finally destroy ICANN! Talk them into joining the Open Domain projects [of course keep them from patenting it out from under us] Amazon, Yahoo, and Google...example only, could each run their own DNS out from under ICANN. The system is designed to do this--It's high-time someone did it. And Bezo isn't the type of guy to put up with ICANN's s#$%!
These days *anyone* can become a registrar, it seems.
That's how cybersquatters can afford to snatch up tens of thousands of domain names the moment they expire. The cybersquatters aren't paying $35 to another registrar for each name; they're just putting out a couple of thousand bucks to become registrars themselves then they get to snap up as many newly-expired domain names as they want, for free.
And then they easily recoup the couple of thousand bucks by finding people who didn't mean to let their domains expire, and extorting large sums of money from those people to give them their domains back.
Cybersquatters are scum of the earth, second only to spammers.
Here is my prediction:
Amazon has seen how successful Yahoo has been with the Yahoo Store concept -- offering shopping cart hosting for some monthly fee, then taking a percentage (3.5% in Yahoo's case) of gross sales for all sales which come through searches of Yahoo shopping.
This latter tithe is optional, but is the chief attraction of Yahoo Store -- your products automatically and instantly show up in a popular searchable directory (Yahoo Shopping, not Yahoo Directory). Other advantages:
- customers can use "yahoo wallet" to purchase items
- stores can participate in a ratings service which allows them to earn stars based on customer feedback surveys
This is a powerful model (though the feedback mechanism isn't as powerful as Ebay's), and one which makes Yahoo lots o' cash.
I think Amazon wants to do something similar and being able to register domains is just the tip of this iceberg.