If part or all of your target market is in Latin American, you will want to get to know Parava Networks—a domain name registrar that can help take your ISPs Webhosting business south of the border.

by Jeff Goldman [May 21, 2001]

The bilingual registrar Parava Networks, based in Houston, Texas, offers three levels of affiliate agreements, with a good degree of flexibility allowed, through its English-language registration site nAAme.com and its parallel Spanish site RegistrateYa.com.

The company was founded in September of 1999, and was ICANN-accredited two months later. Patricio Valdes, Parava chief executive officer, recalls that the registrar was initially focused solely on the Spanish-language market.

"We wanted to cover a hole in the registration business," Valdes said. "We were one of the first registrars to actually target Latin America in Spanish. We then expanded into English, and that's where we're at right now—we cover both Spanish and English web sites."

Programs in process
Parava's nAAme.com and RegistrateYa.com sites list three affiliate programs, aptly monikered Affiliate Program, Affiliate ISP, and Affiliate Gold. They're really all the same basic program, with adjustments made for increasing registration volume. The affiliate is given the code for a basic search box to place on their site—that search box leads to a co-branded page from which their customers can register domains. Those customers pay Parava Networks directly, and the affiliate receives a commission check every month.

Affiliate ISP members receive the same commissions as Affiliate Program members, but customers who register a domain at an Affiliate ISP member site have their DNS information automatically entered to match the ISP—it's a key bonus for web hosts. Affiliate Gold members, on the other hand, get a better volume deal—in exchange for guaranteeing a minimum of 100 domains registered per month, they receive a flat 45 percent commission on all registrations.

According to Valdes, however, the affiliate information on the web site is just the default setup—each affiliate's agreement is customized according to their needs. In particular, the commission percentages are often replaced by just defining an affiliate price. In that case, the affiliate can determine any price they like for their users to pay for the domains—the commission is then simply the difference between that price and Parava's bulk rates, which vary from $9 to $15 depending on your ISPs domain name registration frequency.

"We tailor it individually; it's not the same for everybody," Valdes said. "I'll give you a price per domain, and then you decide what price you want to resell it to the customer for, and you keep the difference." Valdes noted that regardless of the affiliate program, the actual registration pages are customized for each client as well.

"It can be as co-branded as the reseller likes," Valdes said. "We have some resellers for which everything up to the confirmation email comes up with their name, and we have a control panel where the users can modify their domain information without going back to our web site. So we try to make it as co-branded as possible."

In all cases, there's no setup fee.

While the co-branding is extensive, the site is still required to have a "powered by nAAme.com" link and "whois" search box connected to it. Of course, credit card bills will also identify the registrar's name. But when you're dealing with Parava Networks that really doesn't matter—none of Parava's sites offers any services whatsoever that would compete with an ISPs service offering. And there's another way to guarantee non-competition as well.

Let's say the ISP is paying Parava Networks $10 for their domain names and charging their customers $15 per domain. Should those same customers find their way to nAAme.com, they might want to register their domains directly with the registrar instead, right? Wrong. nAAme.com's and RegistrateYa.com's retail rates are $35 per domain.

And according to Valdes, pricing their consumer direct programs outrageously high is part of its plan to not compete with its ISP affiliates.

"If their customers ever find our web site, there's no reason for the user to register at our web site for $35 when they can go to the reseller and register for a lower price," Valdes said. "That's a good position for a reseller to be in."

All affiliates receive an online tracking tool that allows them to log in and check the number of domains registered and when, the total number of years, and the commissions earned.

Regional differences
In Latin America, where Parava established most of its initial customer base, there's one key difference in the way that resellers like to work.

"In Latin America, most people still don't have any payment platforms—they don't want to bother with that," Valdes said.

"What they want to do is just offer the service and then get commissions based on that. And that's still the case for Latin America," he added. "Here in the U.S., it's the other way around—ISPs and web hosting companies want to perform the whole service themselves and then just pay the registrar."

In order to accommodate the needs of US affiliates, the registrar is in the process of developing a fully transparent API for ISPs and web hosting companies to use. Valdes anticipates that the API should be ready by the end of June.

"We're working on that as we speak," he said. "There's a lot of small details to work out—it's going to be completely different than what we currently have."

In the meantime, though, the registrar is doing just fine. Parava currently boasts over 450 affiliates, the majority of which are based in Latin America. Once the API is up and running, Valdes expects that number to increase exponentially.

Parava doesn't currently offer any multilingual top level domains, but they're in the process of implementing a number of options for country code TLDs.

"Currently, we're working on the .tv and .cc domains, and we partner with 1GlobalPlace," Valdes said. "We are working with 1GlobalPlace to be able to set up our resellers to offer that as well, and that should be available in the next week or two."

The registrar may be small, but they don't let that get in their way. Valdes notes that they currently have five "hard-working" employees. If you give them a call, the response is impressive—it's unlikely you'll ever hear a recorded voice.

"We pick up the phone every time, and we always answer emails within five minutes," Valdes said. "We try to give extremely, extremely good customer service."

— End