Back in April of this year ICANN, the domain name authority and regulator, approved price increases for certain registries. One of these registries was Enom, which is one of the leading domain registries on the internet and the company I have used to register domains for more than 6 years now.
These price increases have concerned me because of my domain reseller site 815 Domains. I have been able to resell domains at this price ($8.15) for years because I had a premier Enom account. With my premier account I was previously charged $6.95 per domain but 10 days ago this increased to $7.45. You can see Enom’s announcement about this here. In the 6 or 7 years I have had this account this is the first ever price increase.
Why does this concern me?
You might be reading this asking why this bothers me. After all, a 50 cent increase is hardly gonna cripple me!
The reason this concerns me is because of the affect it’s going to have on my reseller site 815 Domains. First off, this site was never started to make a lot of money. When I created the site in early 2003 my plan was to simply provide cheap domains for visitors of my sites. At the time I had a few webmaster related forums and it made sense to look after them in that respect and with a $99 a year fee to host a PDQ site on Enom, clearly any profit margin would be low, particularly as I set the price of the domains at $8.15 compared to the $8.95 most other PDQ sites were charging.
You would have thought that $1.20 a domain is still a nice profit to get but unfortunately I never made that per domain as Enom charged for credit card transactions ($0.95) and also a 3% charge.
Strangely, Enom have allowed me to sell domains at $8.15 however if I try to make it less they state that ‘Register Retail price is not higher than parent reseller account by sufficient amount. Minimum price is: 8.66’.
I’m keen to keep selling domains at $8.15 however my main concern is that now, selling domains is going to cost me money rather than make it!! I should really contact Enom about this but if I do there’s a chance they will realise the bug in their system which allows me to continue to sell domains at this low price. Of course if I cant sell domains at this price I will have to change the name of the site, I can’t exactly call the site 815 Domains if all domains at $8.66!!
I’ll look into this more and let you know what I decide :)