For service providers seeking a well-established domain name service with a broad range of partnerships and affiliate options, Registrars.com may be just the ticket.

by Jeff Goldman [April 23, 2001]

The company was ICANN-accredited in April of 1999 as Internet Domain Registrars (IDR). Registrars.com, the company's registration site, became operational that October. It was one of the first twelve registrars to be accredited, and one of the first five to become operational.

Paul Lum was one of the company's original founders, and is now its Vice President of Sales and Marketing. He notes that Registrars.com benefited greatly from jumping on the bandwagon early.

"Because we were one of the first, we ended up capturing a lot of the market for domain names," Lum said. "We also signed up a lot of partners because we were one of the first to have a fully operational affiliate program in place."

In December of 2000, the registrar was bought by Network Commerce Inc., a global infrastructure and services company that offers web hosting among its many services. Lum is confident, though, that partners won't have to worry about competition from the registrar's parent company.

"Network Commerce only provides services to end users directly, and if we offer a program to end users, we offer the same program to resellers at a much discounted price," he said. "If we launch something new, then we usually offer it to our resellers first before offering it to our end users."

Pick Your Own Partnership
Registrars.com offers three levels of partnerships, including Affiliate, Referral and Global agreements. The Global Partnership offers the most autonomy and is by far the most appropriate option for most ISPs.

Affiliate Partners simply place a banner on their site, which takes their customers to Registrars.com's main page. The partner is then paid a commission for every referred customer who registers a domain name. The referral system is pretty advanced—using cookies, Registrars.com can appropriately credit affiliates whose visitors clicked through as much as two weeks earlier.

For referred customers, though, the prices are steep—Registrars.com's retail rates are $35 per domain per year. And those customers will, of course, see Registrars.com's site, which includes a page—which any partner can join, advertising dozens of competing web hosting companies.

For partners seeking a slightly more in-depth relationship, the Referral Partnership is the next step: Referral Partners are given a custom-branded search box to place on their site, which allows customers to register names without leaving the partner's site.

Other than that, though, the setup is similar to the Affiliate agreement: customers pay Registrars.com's retail rates, commissions are paid out to the partner on a monthly basis, and there's no setup fee or required minimum. Commissions are slightly lower than those for Affiliate Partners, though they increase with volume (below).

Global Partners pay Registrars.com directly, and can charge their customers any rate they like. Discounted domain registration fees for Global Partners are also available (below).

This is by far the most transparent of the three arrangements: the only way a customer will ever see Registrars.com's name is through a whois search.

Partners of all kinds can track their progress using Registrars.com's online Domain Control Panel, which provides data on names registered, domain information, and dollar amounts. Customers can access a similar control panel to administer their own domains. And as a bonus, Global Partners receive daily emails updating them on recent registrations.

Powerful friends For ISPs seeking additional services, it's important to note that Registrars.com's partners also have access to all of Network Commerce's other offerings, all of which have partnership programs of their own. Those include eHost web hosting, FreeMerchant e-commerce solutions, and GO Software payment processing.

All partners can also register multilingual domains in Japanese, Korean, and Traditional and Simplified Chinese, and can register ccTLDs through Registrars.com's affiliation with 1GlobalPlace.

Lum is optimistic about the future opportunities for Registrars.com's resellers as new TLDs are introduced. "There will be new extensions towards the end of this year," he said. "Within a couple of years there might be as many as fifteen new domain extensions. That will open up the market for ISPs and resellers to promote services."

Its prices may not be the lowest, but with over 700,000 domain names registered, Registrars.com is a significant player. And according to Lum, the company currently boasts over 10,000 partners. With its extensive history in the market and its three solid partnership options, it's easy to see why.

— End