Between high premium prices and renewal fees, opportunities for investing in .store are slim.
I was originally excited about the launch of .store today. It’s one of the better top level domain names, and it seemed Radix had priced it similarly to .com. Many registrars are offering the domains for about $15.
Alas, it’s not actually that cheap.
It turns out that’s just a first-year promotional rate. After that, the wholesale price is $40 per year. Ouch.
So if you register a few domains at launch, you need to sell them within a year or make the tough decision a year from now if they’re worth keeping.
A bigger problem is that just about everything you can think of has a premium price. I think Radix has gotten its premium pricing wrong across a number of domains, and here’s another example.
I randomly thought of pickle and typed it in. I don’t think online pickle sales are a huge business, but you’ll pay $6,500 at GoDaddy per year to own Pickle.store.
Or, you could make a one-time payment of $4,999 to buy PickleStore.com outright.
Doesn’t make sense.
Pickle.store isn’t a great domain, but I thought of some worse ones. Here are a few less-than-pleasant domains, all priced at a premium of $6,500 per year at GoDaddy.
jockstrap.store
poop.store
scraps.store
crap.store
Now, just in case there’s a business model for selling scraps online, you can pick up ScrapsStore.com at registration fee. And HugeDomains will sell you crapstore.com for only $2,595.
I think a lot of registries have gotten premium pricing wrong. This is another example.
Again, I don’t want to knock .store as an extension. It’s one of the better ones. But I think a) it doesn’t look like a good opportunity for domainers and b) much of the premium pricing is out of touch with reality.
crap.store , loooooool! Doing this is a big mistake… less registrations or less renewals equal inferior visibility and a vicious cycle.
crap.store sums it up perfectly
It will be 88 cents soon enough not to worry,it’s just a big joke I
88 cents is over paying…
wait until the price goes down to a penny like .xyz
none of these new extensions are a good opportunity. Just domainers giving money away to their competition, since the new extensions owners are just other domineers.
They forgot to premium price fart.store, because fart.game is $1699.00/yr.
I pre-ordered two non-premium .store domains that I was pretty confident in. Everything else I was interested in was way overpriced. I got one of them and I still feel good about it. Even if I have to renew it a couple times I feel like it’s three years max before I can sell it. We shall see.
Hi Kellie, mind sharing the name?
Not at all. I got merch.store.
That’s pretty good. I gave up after searching for an hour.
Ugh. That’s crap. I think I spent maybe 20 minutes. Came to the same conclusion as you.
Andrew, do you think the plurals makes sense with .store?
Not for the examples I’m thinking of.
Baseball.store better than baseballs.store
Vacuum.store better than vacuums.store
Grocery.store better than groceries.store
They’re made even worse by the double s: s -dot -s
I forgot to update this. Sold merch.store earlier this year. Wasn’t a blockbuster sale, but I was pretty happy about it.
The other day I looked for a few niche things other people don’t care about, they were wide open, of course, yet today they want $5500 to $27k for them. Ridiculous. They obviously monitor what people look for, and then start to price them as premium. Small time domainers with limited inventory who are hard up sometimes do that. Registrars, no. This is quite shady for this type of marketplace.
The less niche domains I placed backorders for, primarily through GoDaddy. Hopefully they go through. If they don’t go through, or at least go to auction if others bid on them. If they decided to suddenly make them premium simply because I or others looked for them… I can smell a huge backlash and lawsuits coming forth.
From what I’ve seen so far, I’m guessing Radix may need .store removed from their care. Too many boundaries broken. Too much conflict of interest. Poor stewardship.
“The other day I looked for a few niche things other people don’t care about, they were wide open, of course, yet today they want $5500 to $27k for them. Ridiculous. They obviously monitor what people look for, and then start to price them as premium.”
You may have seen them on pre order then when they were released they were in the premium categories? Placing a domain in a premium tier from GA is at least a 30 day notice period due the registry agreement. With go daddy, they will demand 90. A registry can reserve stock at will but placing it in a premium tier constitutes a price change and thats regulated. Pre order means nothing really as although the registrars can ask for the premium lists pre GA, (and do) many cant be bothered toactually read it and just put up what they want to drive pre reg sales, then they have your money and its an easier switch sale rather than you bother to get a refund on a small amount.
.VIP also has the high renewal pricing.
Higher, but still under $20 retail.
I tried to register bbq.store along with a load of other LLL’s when I first searched it showed the normal reg fee, but in the time it took to finish my list and buy the other LLL’s the bbq.store price had shot up to a premium.
Glad to have picked up a few decent 3 letter domains at normal price though, I think these will do well, I have notice that people are registering a whole load of 3 character’s (maybe the Chinese also jumping on this one)
I suspect that was a glitch on the registrar side, not a sudden increase by Radix.
It does seem that China registered the bulk of .store domains, which is a bit of a surprise.
It will probably take at least 5 more years for the store tld to catch on. So i gave up most of my store domains, because of the renewal fees. I could not justify the expenses in light of the obvious risk. But i kept my best 3 store domains. So if the store tld grows into a success, then these 3 domains will be enough, i think……. I am not greedy, i believe.
evermore.store
galore.store
streetwear.store
The pricing policy for .store is just right. The initial first year registration is cheap making an easy entry for buyers. Expensive renewal means, only serious buyers who plan to develop it are going to keep it. The expensive renewal price keeps domaineers from hoarding tons of it for nothing but to make money instead of developing it to something useful for the world.