Ask HN: Selling domains, upselling, coupons and others. | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Selling domains, upselling, coupons and others.

1 pointmaushu3 comments

After a few hours of getting harassed with a management panel from a famous domain registrar (that should not be named), I asked myself why couldn't there be a domain seller focused on selling domains with a no non-sense control panel, no upselling and no "coupons"/"discounts".

I knew the market was saturated, but I decided to research about it anyways and now I have the following question:

Would you buy/transfer your domains to a place where the fixed price would be $10 per domain/year, with no upselling (none at all), no hidden fees, free privacy (turn it on and off at any time) and a modern uncluttered control panel?

If not, what makes you stay with your current domain registrar?

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I spend a decent amount of money on domains every year. I think I own or take care of maybe 100 domains.

I use EnomCentral because I have a reseller account with them through hostgator (~10$ per domain) but they have grown more and more into an upselling machine. They automatically assume you want a free trial of their Content Writing program. I uncheck it everytime. This is annoying.

I've lately been buying all of my domains through NameCheap. They offer a free SSL cert and free privacy. They don't do much upselling, as I recall. If they do, it didn't bother me as much as Enomcentral.

I don't think upselling is a bad thing. I think it can be a good thing if I see value in the product they are upselling. If not, that's when it's a bad thing. Automatically adding a free trial (w/ a monthly fee after the trial) to my cart when it's something I don't want is horrible.

So you don't like aggressive upselling but don't mind passive upselling so much?

The problem here is that it is difficult to know if the user sees value in the product that they are upselling, might as well don't upsell or leave a small information at the checkout about related products.

Sure. Passive up-selling is fine. I hate aggressive up-selling.

You have a very good point. I don't think there will be an easy way to figure out how much value each user will see in a product. Maybe try to up-sell through a mailing list? People interested in new offers could sign up.

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