How to Effectively Sell & Merchandise Domains for Your Platform

Domain names are a key anchor to a modern digital identity. As such, business owners aim to differentiate their online identities through a unique, custom domain—allowing B2B service providers to fill that demand. 

By incorporating domain reselling services into your site, you can attract customers looking for a convenient way to grow online. This offering helps solidify your platform as a core element of your customers’ digital presence. 

That said, leveraging the full benefit of domain reselling takes more than simply offering domain names to your customers. Domain names must be highly relevant to your users and offered within an existing purchase flow—increasing the appeal and impact of domain name add-ons. 

Consider these best practices for merchandising domain names to maximize your reselling tools, engage your audience more deeply, and enrich your existing services.

Best Practice #1: Include Domains in Your Onboarding or Checkout Flow

To optimize the impact of your domain name offerings, positioning is key. Much like the thoughtfully placed product displays that increase purchases at physical retail stores, you should organize your online purchase flow to influence consumer behavior.¹

For example, by integrating domain services into your checkout process, you offer a high-value add-on to consumers already primed to purchase. 

This right-place-right-time moment within your existing customer journey can significantly impact conversions and help you increase revenue from reselling domain names. 

Encouraging Purchases Through The Art of Convenience

When platforms fail to offer integrated domain name services, customers must find a third-party registrar. Registering and linking their domain names through another site can distract the customer, causing them to rethink their purchase. By eliminating the requirement to visit a third party for their domain name setup, you enhance the usability of your solution. And usability matters. 

Incorporating domain name offerings into your checkout process makes the domain search and registration effortless. This convenience removes any potential barriers to purchasing a domain add-on. 

Encouraging purchases Through Seamless Integrated Domain Solutions

Domain reseller tools offered by Name.com, an Identity Digital company, make it possible to offer domain name purchases to your customers without complex integrations and lead time. 

Identity Digital & Name.com offers partners two primary solutions for domain resellers: embedded iFrames and custom Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Both options allow your customers to find and link their domain names without leaving your site, but they involve different levels of integration.

iFrame Implementation

An iFrame is a simple snippet of code that allows you to embed one site’s features and services into another. In the world of domain reselling, iFrames make a direct connection between your platform and a domain service provider’s site. This low-code solution allows you to launch domain services instantly without a large technical investment. 

Plus, because it allows you to embed domain search and registration directly into your site, it offers a convenient experience for users—encouraging add-on purchases and discouraging cart abandonment (win-win-win).

API Integration

APIs take domain services integration to the next level by allowing you to customize the customer experience. Instead of granting users access to a domain registrar’s service through your platform, you create your own branded interface for the entire domain registration process, from search to management. This customization offering gives you control over which functions to offer, design elements, and the pricing of your domains. 

Note: The enhanced customization level involves more technical setup and maintenance, making APIs ideal for businesses seeking maximum impact on their domain sales.  

Best Practice #2: Show the Most Relevant Descriptive Domains to Customers

Once you’ve optimized the positioning of your domain name services, consider how you’re advertising and promoting them. Not all customers will immediately understand the value and impact of having a relevant, customizable domain name. By showcasing relevant examples, you can pique their interest and encourage them to find the right option for their business.

The most effective domain names are short, memorable, and relevant to the customers’ offerings. Customers may struggle to identify available domain names that meet those requirements independently. Many classic domain search options only generate domain names using the keywords provided. This limitation puts the onus on the customer to brainstorm other options when their first pick isn’t available.

That’s where intuitive domain name search tools come in. 

Tailoring Search Suggestions with Domain Engine

Identity Digital equips its reseller solutions with Domain Engine. This powerful domain search tool offers the most relevant suggestions based on the keywords your users enter. When a customer searches for domain names within your platform, Domain Engine immediately provides an array of highly targeted domain names that match your customer’s search intent. 

For example, a deli owner in Dallas may input ‘Dallas deli’ into their keyword search. With Domain Engine, they’ll see a curated list of suggestions such as:

• dallasdeli.food
• texasdeli.menu
• Delitexas.cafe
  

Partners who integrate using iFrame or the API will automatically enjoy the power of Domain Engine and will be positioned to convert customers from day one. 

Best Practice #3: Educate Your Customers About Custom Domain Value

As a domain name reseller, domain registration may be an add-on to your core products or services. This can cause customers to not immediately understand the benefit of a strategic domain—especially if they weren’t initially searching for a custom URL. As such, education is a key step in upselling your customers and helping them establish robust digital identities through your domain name offerings.

Communicating the value of domain name services is essential for keeping customers engaged with your platform. Research shows that companies with robust customer education initiatives enjoy higher revenue and increased brand loyalty – partly because an educated customer ² has realistic expectations about their purchase and can envision its long-term value.

Remember that a domain name is a business asset, and many business owners hope to secure a valuable domain that they can keep for their entire business life. You can make it easier for your customers to commit to a domain name with your platforms by:

• Teaching your customers about the value of domain names
• Sharing best practices for choosing domain names
• Providing quality, relevant suggestions and examples
  

Customer Education Tips

Effective customer education initiatives make it easy and convenient for customers to understand the value behind a custom domain. You can start with the information you feature during the domain registration process. Include information on benefits, testimonials, and case studies³ —the latter providing additional social proof to help drive home the advantages of owning a custom domain name.

By learning how your platform used its domain offerings to build other businesses, prospective customers can better understand how custom domains could support their digital identities. This ensures that securing a custom domain isn’t just a simple impulse buy for your customers—it’s an informed investment in their online presence.

But you don’t have to wait for customers to go through the checkout process to educate them about your domain services. Reach out to your existing and prospective customers with content outlining how a custom domain can work with your core offerings to support customers. 

Best Practice #4: Leverage Domains to Drive Premium Conversions & Tiered Plans

Although domain reselling can be a revenue stream through affiliate pay or custom pricing, it can also drive freemium customers to your paid plan. You can offer domain registration services as a perk for your premium plans, creating an additional incentive for customers to sign up or upgrade. 

If your customers are already curious about how they can use your paid services to enhance their presence online, the offer of a custom domain name may give them the final push they need to sign up. And because reselling tools allow them to get started within your platform, they can immediately enjoy the benefits of their custom domain.

Boosting Retention and Product Stickiness 

Because domain names are such a core element of a business’s digital identity, there’s a clear benefit to facilitating domain registration for your customers. By signing up for a domain through your platform, customers tie their online brand to your services. 

This incentivizes them to keep using your platform year after year. Instead of transferring their domain services to another registrar, they can enjoy the convenience of working with a consistent, reliable domain partner. 

Enhance Your Domain Offerings With Identity Digital

A thoughtful domain merchandising strategy ensures you get the most out of your reseller tools. Not only does offering domain registration services set you apart from competitors, you also distinguish your brand, attract new customers seeking a comprehensive solution, and unlock an additional revenue stream. 

And with Identity Digital, you can get more out of your domain resale offerings. 

Identity Digital’s reseller solutions are customizable, making it easy to develop a high-impact strategy for selling domains, boosting revenue, and attracting new customers. Choose from one of many simple implementations and provide your customers access to intuitive domain services at the perfect moment in their customer journey. 

Reach out to the Identity Digital team today to learn how you and your customers can get the most out of your domain services.

Sources:

¹ National Library of Medicine. Motivational and Affective Factors Underlying Consumer Dropout and Transactional Success in eCommerce: An Overview. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7351522/‍

² Intellum. New Research Reveals the Real Impact of Customer Education Programs. https://www.intellum.com/news/new-research-reveals-the-real-impact-of-customer-education-programs‍

³ Entrepreneur. 3 Ways to Educate Buyers Online. https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/3-ways-to-educate-buyers-online/366397