I'd like to offer domain names to webhosting clients but it's just
as an added service to make it easier for folks new to hosting. Most of the material I've seen from reseller providers assumes that domain name reselling will be the primary focus of the business. Would any of you care to show me examples of sites
offering domain name services from Wild West, Enom, etc or offer any suggestions for reliable name services I can offer on my own site? A turnkey operation would be great if I could choose the payment service; I don't want to make customers make two payments or wait for a check for services for which I have current costs.

OK, it must have been a dumb question as there are no replies.

Who will take registrations from total newbies with prepopulated
nameservers per a referral without too many options displayed, just search and payment. Give them a "more options" button, maybe. They'd still sign up and become your paying clients and free to use all of your services (give them the address in the welcoming email) but they wouldn't get bogged down in all the choices. Give them a "done" button to return them to the referring site.

Hi
I would say that eNom are easy to use and sound like an ideal solution for what you need.

If you get a sub account you set your own prices above the price that your ETP provides. Visit http://www.etwebhosting.com/domains/resellers/
They offer free registration, and you can set what profits you make per domain registered. You also can use there payment processor Registry Rocket to register the domains and take payment automatically. Then all you have to do is provide support to those that need it.

I would highly recommend them, although I have not officially launched my site i am in beta testing mode right now and hope to launch my domain services through my eNom account soon. Its basically just a side line for me and to help my customers get domain names cheap and automatically rather than having to email for a quote etc.

If you are not doing too many why not just register them manually yourself ?

Customer fills in form and pays you.
You register at the registry.

We have it down to a fine art and can do a dom reg in 120 seconds

Gordon

Thanks, Barry, that's about what I'm looking for. The thing I don't like about manual registrations is keeping track of renewal times.
Bad enough keeping track of my own domains.

Enom has also been helpful.

I hate to bust your bubble, but if ETWebHosting is an ENOM.com reseller, then they can't provide rates lower then $8.95/yr. according to ENOM's new policy change.

Unless they have the account already made before Oct. 10, 2002.

Thats why you will find they only have an order link for the basic reseller plan!

I wish people would pay attention before posting comments like that.

Sorry, no harm intended.

Originally posted by GordonH
If you are not doing too many why not just register them manually yourself ?

Customer fills in form and pays you.
You register at the registry.

We have it down to a fine art and can do a dom reg in 120 seconds

Gordon

I think this looks like an option to consider but what if someone else registers the exact same domain name before you?

I know that will not happen very often but considering that you'll register the domain manually (after receiving the customer's order) and someone else will register automaticly, there is chance of being late.

How you can explain to that customer later?

Well

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times this has happened, and of those three were actually due to technical failures (the domain having been registered years previously).

I am only talking a few minutes, not hours or days.

We also have an automated system that sets up weach domain with 10MB of web space, POP3 email, sets up the DNS and sends out a welcome email.
So its not a fully manual system in the strictest sense.

The domain registration side is manual though.

Gordon

So Gordon...sorry to sound like a dumbass...but all you do is have your customers fill out a form on your site as to which domain they want, they pay you, and then you go manually buy the domain at some registrar? And when the year is coming up, you simply ask them for payment again?

And as for the ETWebhosting...is there a setup fee or something or how do you get started there...I couldn't find much info on the site.

Well
I have a system that sends out the renewal reminders from our access database every monday.
Its like a mail merge but its email merge.
Just run the reports once a week and it mails customers with domains expiring in the next 8 weeks.
Each customer gets 8 renewal reminders.

Its a very simple system really and not as much work as you would think.

Gordon

Actually, there is a funny story about customers registering domains that were already registered.

Due to a failure at www.nic.uk one Friday i managed to sell sex.co.uk 7 times in three hours.

All .uk domains were showing as available for a while and it was a melt down situation.

Gordon

Hey GordonH...one other question...

I've also though a lot about doing what you do...but a couple things have held me back.

1) When the term is coming up on the domain, and you are sending them notices, how close to the deadline do you wait for a response before you choose to not renew the domain from the registrar. As I understand, the charge will be on YOUR credit card, so if they never do pay, you're out some cash right?

2) And the thing that has really held me back...what if someone requests to access a control panel for their domain because they want to make contact changes or nameserver changes? How do you handle that?

Thanx.

The bulk of our somains are com/net/org/info etc
and these can be done through opensrs.

The .uk is the other largest tld we handle and we are official registrars.
The changes which can be mae are limited so we just have a name server change form that mails us back to make the change manually.

We also have the change forms inside the control panel that they get with their domain name but its a manual system.

I suppose its just the way the business developed over the last 2 years.

If you are just going to do the usual tlds then using something like enom and automating it makes sense but one of our USP's is the large range of extensions that we offer.
Everything from .ac to .com.au

I decided early on that what we did had to be different, hence offering additional services free with the domains.

Gordon

Now I'm just confused...

You use OpenSRS?

I think the way I'm going to attempt to do it is just manually as well.

People will pay us and select a domain and we'll go do it manually at godaddy.com or somewhere (no discount, just normal register). Then I will develop a form on our site that matches the options form at godaddy.com, and when they submit that, we will make the changes manually at godaddy.com.

That seems like the easiest way for us to do it. That way we have a lot of control, and don't have to worry about how many domains we sell. I don't suspect it will be more than 5/month so this way seems feasible.

But if you plan to add a profit to your domain names people will just go directly to godaddy.com, it seems pointless ordering from them as they are already big domain registrars.

I would say a reseller account is your best option, and get one with no setup fee and then you dont have to spend money to make money. Even if your just making cents per sale they will build up over time and by the sounds of it your looking at this to please your customers rather than gain profit.

As for updating manually, time zones may mean your customers request will be delayed for a few hours, which may cause problems if they where trying to change nameservers because there old host went down or something similar.

Automated is the way to go in my opinion.

As for updating manually, time zones may mean your customers request will be delayed for a few hours

Now I am VERY confused.

Gordon

Well I would not make godaddy.com visible. It would appear as though the whole system was run through my site. GoDaddy would not be visible to my customers.

But as for a reseller...have any suggestions of some with no start up fees? I know Dotster is one...but it's $12/domain and I don't really wanna charge higher than $15...after processing fees, that doesn't leave much of a profit to make it worth while.

And Gordon, he means that if someone overseas or something tries to change their nameservers, and it is 4am here, we may not change them manually until 9am. However, that won't be a problem because we'll be live 24/7.

It depends who you want to resell from really as every registrar has different features as standard with some charging extra for certain features.

As I stated in an earlier post, http://www.etwebhosting.com/domains/resellers/ offer a free startup account with domain names from $8.95 which means you could add markup and earn a little profit before you hit GoDaddy prices (although I have not checked there prices but I do know they have a lot of optional extras) and still be competitive. And if you are wondering why they are giving away free setup its because they earn commission per domain sale.

By the way, im a customer not staff:stickout:

Okay...

Are these Electric Toad guys reliable or what? Good name? I don't want to get screwed if I do choose to resell.

And 2nd...could you give me some details? Their site really lacks details. There is a customizable control panel, etc?

Any details you could give me would be greatly appreciated!

Well first of all there an eNom reseller, so its all on eNom who have a good reputation and are reliable.

Theres not much detail I can give, you basically sign up, add the links to your site and your away. You cannot customize the control panel as its set on eNom's server all under a secure server connection.

You can see a demo of the way eNom's system works at dedi-isp.net

Okay so you sign up...you get that interface shown there (yuck...but that's okay hehe)...

Are you required to give support or does Enom or ET give all support? And as for billing...our responsibility or does ET handle it and send us a cheque?

eNom bill them on your behalf. Its not really anything to do with ET they are just the main reseller that give out the accounts.

And you provide your clients with support if they need it, but its all automated. I suggest you email ET if you have any further questions as I have said all I can on this matter really.

As for the layout, You can opt for the PDQ option which will set you back $100 a year and mean you can customize it with a better layout.

Originally posted by Chaps
And Gordon, he means that if someone overseas or something tries to change their nameservers, and it is 4am here, we may not change them manually until 9am. However, that won't be a problem because we'll be live 24/7.

I had a customer once who thought that a 5 hour time difference meant his emails went into a 5 hour time warp before they came out at the other end.
It took a lot of explaining.


Gordon

lol

that's hilarious!

Anyways, I think I might lean towards Dotster since they have a customizable interface...they provide the support, and the processing fees are built into the price.

Anyways, thanx for the suggestions!

Originally posted by Chaps
Anyways, I think I might lean towards Dotster since they have a customizable interface...they provide the support, and the processing fees are built into the price.
This is what I found out after I signed up with Dotster last week:
TLDs - $12.00
DNS Management/domain/year - $7.00
Email Forwarding - $6.50
URL Forwarding - $2.75

So if you want to provide these services to your customers as well, your own price will be $28.25/domain/year.

See what others had to say about this at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=84496

Also, here's what I learnt about eNom resellers's accounts from another member:
- You need to pay eNom directly for any amount that you want (there is a minimum of $100) by credit card. 3% of that amount is deducted for credit card processing fees. In other words; you pay $100 and $97 is added to your account.

- Then, you'll be able to use the credit in your account to order domain names at the rate of $8.95 (or whatever your resell price is), part of which is credited into your reseller's account.

hmmm...thanx for the heads up on Dotster! And I already knew most of that stuff about Enom.

The more I think about it, the more I think we are going with the manual registration system.

I just wanted to throw something out here...I'm now selling domain names thru enom...but in the past I registered name thru godaddy for my clients....it's silly to suggest that you cannot have a markup...

Now that we have an enom account we're working on making a big push into the domain name business...and actually have the sign up available on our site, etc.

But in the past when a client would ask us if we could register a domain for them, or how they did it, we were always honest with them....

We told them they could do this themselves...that there were places where they could get a name for anywhere from 8.95 up to 35.00 per year....but if they wanted us to register it for them, that we charged 15.00 a year (we did many at 20.00 per year at first)...this included a one year registration fee, along with our administrative fee for doing the work for them.

In two years we probably had over 100 people take us up on our offer, knowing that they could in fact save money by doing it themselves....many people are intimidated...they think it's a big deal to get a domain name, and would rather have someone else do it.

As I said...we were always up front and hohest about what the cost we're involved.

Thats exactly what I find too.
If you are offering to help people sort out theoir domain name problems you can easily get $15 per domain.
We get very few transfers out but many transfers in.

Good luck to you.
At $15 you will be around for a long time.

Gordon

Thanx for that EZhost...I think that's the approach we will take as well!