Hostcentric's Domain Services Group, Alldomains.com, offers a variety of business relationships for ISPs, from passive referrer to active co-merchant.

by Jeff Goldman [February 20, 2001]

Alldomains.com, the Domain Services Group of the managed service provider Hostcentric, offers five different partnership options for ISPs. The newest is their recently announced Co-Merchant Program, which combines the best features of both affiliate and private-label relationships.

Alldomains.com was founded in 1996 as the domain registration site for the web hosting company NetCorps, which is now also a part of Hostcentric. Alldomains.com was accredited by ICANN in July of 1999, and in May of 2000, the registrar joined with four other companies in forming Hostcentric, which offers registration, web hosting, and application services.

Chris Bura, Alldomains.com's President, explains that the merger was a good thing for all involved. "It wasn't a rollup by any means," he said. "It was a dovetailing of companies with differing services that all melded very well together: a data center, virtual hosting, streaming media, complex hosting, and a domain registrar. So it made a good fit."

Shopping for domains
Alldomains.com's greatest strength lies in its D-Cart, a domain registration interface with the look and feel of a shopping cart. Bura describes it as Alldomains.com's attempt to incorporate the best of the best. "We came in after some of the big guys, and we definitely scoured their sites," he said. "We signed up multiple domains and tried to see how we could make it better."

He feels the shopping cart arrangement allows for a degree of functionality that most users don't expect to see in a registration site. "I think the coolest thing that we came up with is the fact that we have a cart and a trash," he said.

"You can just search for domains, say 'I don't want that one,' put it in the trash, then move it back from your trash to your cart. You can just do research: you don't have to buy anything."

In addition to the D-Cart, Alldomains.com's D-Gear solution provides a range of automated services including site forwarding, email forwarding, and DNS.

Four standard options…
Alldomains.com offers a total of four standard partnership arrangements (plus a co-merchant program), though the rates are the same for all.

There are no setup fees regardless of the program, and domain pricing for the partner depends on volume, ranging from $8.50 to $15.00 per domain.

For all of the arrangements except for the Co-Merchant Program, the partner can set any retail price they like for their customers.

The most rudimentary option is the straightforward reseller login. The partner receives registration requests from its customers, then logs into Alldomains.com's system with a username and password, and manually registers each domain. The customer pays the partner for the registration, and Alldomains.com then either debits the partner's credit card per transaction, or bills through monthly invoices.

The second arrangement is the typical email template system, similar to that used by Network Solutions. The partner collects the money from the customer and forwards the request through email templates to Alldomains.com, which provides immediate registration or rejection results. Alldomains.com then bills the partner either per transaction or through monthly invoices.

A similar third option replaces the email template with an API which allows the partner to automate everything from a whois lookup to multilingual registration. Like the email template arrangement, the customer pays the partner directly, and the partner is billed by Alldomains.com.

The fourth option is most appropriate for higher-volume partners, those who regularly register more than 500 domains per month. For these partners, Alldomains.com will create a completely customized private-label D-Cart, incorporating the partner's look and feel.

With this arrangement, unlike the others, payment can be processed either by Alldomains.com or through the partner's credit card merchant account. If Alldomains.com collects the money, then the difference between the bulk rate and the retail price is paid to the partner on a monthly basis. If the partner collects the money through its merchant account, then Alldomains.com invoices the partner on a monthly basis.

…and the Co-Merchant Program
The fifth option is by far the most attractive for partners of virtually any size. Just announced on February 19th, Alldomains.com's Co-Merchant Program allows the partner to select from a gallery of D-Cart "skins" or styles, and replace the Alldomains.com logo with theirs.

Bura is extremely enthusiastic about his new offering. "Check this out: it's going to be so cool," he said. "We're basically 'skin-izing' our D-Cart, so for any small ISP, medium-sized ISP, or anybody for that matter, they can come to our site, they can immediately sign up, select from 24 so skins—one's bound to match their company—or if they're a fairly substantial customer, we'll create a unique skin just for them. They can actually create a skin on the fly, pick a color: we have combinations like marble, we have funky things like tie-dye, grass, wood tones."

The unique look and versatility of the D-Cart make the Co-Merchant Program an excellent arrangement for ISPs. There's room on the interface to incorporate a number of links to whatever the partner chooses to include, as well as a billboard to advertise the partner's services.

An online management interface allows the partner to make adjustments to the D-Cart's look or to view usage statistics. And any aspect of the D-Gear service can also be incorporated into the customized D-Cart.

The D-Cart's automated setup allows the partner to select one of four retail rates for the domains: either $17.50, $19.95, $24.95, or $29.95 per year.

Billing options are similar to those for the private-label arrangement: Alldomains.com can either take care of the billing and pay the partner a monthly commission, or payments can be charged through the partner's merchant account. And setup takes as little as ten minutes.

D-Gear is in D-Cart
Despite the fact that Alldomains.com is now part of Hostcentric's web hosting group, Bura is confident that no conflict will arise for the registrar's ISP partners. "The only thing we can't help is if a customer does a whois on their domain, they'll see Alldomains.com as the registrar," he said. "But by all means, our license agreement says we will not market to their customers. Even the email that the customer gets just saying thank you for your registration, that's all from the company. We'll hide ourselves completely."

And Alldomains.com offers a number of services that help it to stand out in a fast-growing market. In addition to the usual top level domains, the registrar offers not only multilingual domains in Japanese, Chinese and Korean, but also a wide range of international country code domains, or ccTLDs. According to Bura, the ccTLDs account for as much as 35% of their business.

Ultimately, though, it's the sleek look and adaptability of the D-Cart that makes this offering particularly strong. The Co-Merchant Program allows just about any ISP to maximize their registration abilities with a quick setup process. "The ISP might have no experience in domains," Bura said. "Now, by using the D-Cart, they have multi-lingual domains, they have ccTLDs, they have .com, .net, .org, they have D-Gear-basically anything our D-Cart has, they have, in a seamless fashion."

— End