Gee, those ICANN-accredited registrars are cool! Wouldn't it be great to be just like them? One registrar allows ISPs to do just that—seamlessly, transparently.

by Jeff Goldman [April 16, 6001]

Update: acquired by Tucows

The Chicago-based registrar ItsYourDomain is working to let ISPs do just that, by offering one of the most transparent affiliate programs currently available on the market.

InnerWise, Inc. was founded as an ISP in the fall of 1997. Three years later, the company was ICANN-accredited, using ItsYourDomain.com as its registration site. When the domain registration business proved busier than the ISP ever did, the company dissolved its ISP business and focused on registering domain names instead.

As a result, ItsYourDomain now offers no Webhosting or ISP services at all, so it can't compete in any way with its ISP customers. And that's not all—Taking non-competition a step further, ItsYourDomain offers an affiliate program so transparent that even whois lookups and credit card bills won't betray the name of the real registrar.

Gotta have friends
ItsYourDomain's transparent affiliate program gives ISPs a fully branded system for domain name registration. Once your ISP signs up as an affiliate, a simple online interface takes you through the process of choosing from a range of search box styles and color options. When your final selection is made, the interface generates the HTML code for you to simply cut and paste into your site. Similar processes allow your ISP to enable multilingual registration, domain transfers, and name generation tools.

Ted Cucci, ItsYourDomain executive vice president of operations, contends that the program's ease of use is unique.

"This is a front-end API," Cucci said. "Basically, you're going to sign up, you'll cut and paste the code, and you don't have to really embed anything into your Web site except the code for the search box. It's very simple—it takes five minutes to do. It's not like the back-end APIs where you have to reconfigure your whole Web site—ours is very, very simple."

Customers who use the search box on an ISP affiliate's site are taken through a series of pages, all fully branded for the affiliate, that allow them to register their domain. And the affiliates can manage their registrations and check up on current revenue through a password-protected online interface as well.

Pricing starts at $14.95 per domain per year, which is ItsYourDomain's retail rate. The affiliate can set any price they like for their customers, and the difference, less a 5 percent credit processing fee, is paid back to ISPs on a monthly basis. Affiliates who work with higher volumes can negotiate much lower rates, but according to Cucci, there's no set scale for volume pricing. Affiliates negotiate a price when they sign up, and can ask for adjustments as their volume changes. And for ISP affiliates, the agreed-upon rate is the same for both top level domains and multilingual registration.

Regardless of the arrangement, Cucci explains, there's no setup fee. ISPs tell ItsYourDomain what they want and it will work for free.

"We'll make a custom search box for you with whatever logos you want and whatever you want it to say, and we'll send it back to you, usually within two hours."

Wait, there's more
Transparent ISP affiliates can collect affiliates of their own. If an ISP chooses to sign up its own resellers, those resellers will be using all the same interfaces the ISP uses, but they'll only see the ISP's name—they'll never be connected back to ItsYourDomain.

A transparent ISP affiliate who's paying ItsYourDomain, say, $10 per domain per year, could sign up affiliates of its own and charge them $12 per domain per year. Those affiliates could then sign up their own affiliates at $14 per year, and on and on. And everybody's making $2 on each registration, all the way down the line.

Alternatively, for an ISP that really wants to keep things simple, ItsYourDomain does also offer a "co-branded affiliate" program. The co-branded option involves a setup similar to the transparent affiliate program, except that all search boxes and sites show both the ISP's name and ItsYourDomain. Customers who use a link through a co-branded affiliate are charged the standard retail rate of $14.95 per domain per year, and the co-branded affiliate receives a simple 10 percent commission on all sales. It's not fully branded, and it doesn't allow independence, but it certainly is simple.

Look Ma, no registrar
For its transparent affiliates, ItsYourDomain does everything imaginable to hide itself from the customer, going to unique lengths to do so. The ISPs affiliate ID is logged along with all registrations made through its site, and as a result, any whois search will identify the ISP and not ItsYourDomain. And credit cards charged for a domain name through any affiliate will just read "domain registration." Pretty generic, to say the least.

Cucci explains that ItsYourDomain has put in a great deal of effort both to develop a simple affiliate program and to conceal itself from affiliates' customers.

"It's not something we developed in a month," Cucci said. "It's over a year that this has been in the planning. It took over 80,000 lines of code to develop this program. It's top-notch—there isn't anybody in the industry that we know of that can duplicate it."

Cucci's excited about the program, and it's easy to see why. The simplicity of the setup is rare, but the degree of transparency is pretty much unique. And according to Cucci, it's paying off.

"We're in excess of 2500 affiliates right now," Cucci said. "The program is working out really well. The affiliates, they really like the ease of use. It's very basic and simple."

— End