I’m not so sure.
Over the past few days, I’ve received press releases from Escrow.com and Clothing.com about the upcoming sale of Clothing.com and related domain names.
Escrow.com is playing the role of escrow agent like it did for the successful sale of Fashion.com. The domains are being marketed in a similar way. (The sale price of Fashion.com was not made public.)
Fashion.com is a great domain for many companies. I’m not so sure about Clothing.com. People tend to shop for clothes by brand: the label on the clothes or the brand of the merchant.
I posed this question on Twitter to see if I’m the only one that thinks this:
Yeah I honestly don't love this domain. Too generic for a brand-based industry.
— Joshua Schoen (@jstenn13) August 19, 2020
Agreed.
— |🎙️| Josh.co |🌐| (@JoshDotCo) August 19, 2020
There’s no doubt that Clothing.com is a great domain. I’m just not sure about the potential use case for this domain. What do you think?
L says
I wonder if this purchase was boosted by the booking.com TM ruling? Would love any insight from others…
Andrew Allemann says
I don’t see any way the booking.com decision would help clothing.com.
L says
The booking.com tm decision confirmed that a generic name with .com at the end is indeed brandable and is worthy of TM protection. I’d have thought that this is an important consideration for whoever is launching a brand on clothing.com?
Cheers
Ethan says
I don’t understand the point of doing TM protection for “booking.com”.
There is only one booking.com in the world, so I think no second company dare to say “we are the booking.com”.
Andrew Allemann says
It’s such a limited decision. And booking.com had to show decades of use and understanding by the public to get the TM. I would hope that anyone buying clothing.com doesn’t put much value in the idea of eventually getting a trademark for it, and I don’t see what purpose it would service. It’s not like it can go after other sites using ‘clothing’ in their domains.
Lifesavings.online says
I run clothing website. Interesting niche. Conversions are generally low. Factually, it has the lowest CTR of *ANY NICHE* on Google SERPS.
A lot of people ‘window shop’ perhaps.
They would RATHER see these items IRL, at a physical store IMO.
If you *aren’t* a BRAND website, they are suspicious you are gouging them…
Margins/sales can be on the LOW end (most buy one thing!)
Going to be dealing with a lot of RETURNS.
It’s hard to run a *generic* clothing store online. You’ll look like the Good Will.
Just a few of the many problems in this niche from my observations.
Observer says
Dex struggled to gain traction with Business.com and was shut down and later sold:
https://searchengineland.com/dex-one-to-shutter-business-com-55482
Mark says
For a consumer brand, it could be a serious challenge. However, for a B2B brand within the garment industry, it could be a winner. It does pass many tests: short, easy to spell, memorable, etc… The sewing, material producing and processing of garments is a gigantic global industry. So this could be a nice B2B brand.
Mark Thorpe says
I love Clothing.com domain name for a business! Being too generic is BS IMO. Better than a made-up name that no one has ever heard of before!
I wonder what thay are selling on Clothing.com, maybe clothes!
I would go to the website to see what types of clothing they are selling.
Andrew Allemann says
Where do you go now to buy clothes online? I type in a brand name like Nordstrom.com. I’ve never thought to type in “shirts.com” or “shorts.com” or “pants.com”
Mark Thorpe says
If the new owner of Clothing.com was smart, they would offer many brands of clothing without having to go to different brands websites.
One-stop shopping.
Andrew Allemann says
Like Nordstrom.com
L says
You probably didn’t think about going to hotels.com to book a hotel until it popped up on Google or knew it existed.
Ted Stalets says
Sometimes I think a single word dot com is too generic. Iif the potential industry sales within that single word Clothing.com market is sufficient – one can hone in on clothing sub-markets and capture “top of mind” for these emerging markets.
Because they (single word dot coms) were mostly all gone when I started in 2004, I was forced to focus on 2 and sometimes 3 word dot coms. I.E…
3dpClothing.com
ClothesOnDemand.com
Clothing3dPrinting.com
VirtualClothingStores.com
PrintedFootwear.com
Lifesavings.online says
A lot of generic domains aren’t as nifty as some domainers suggest. First in SOME cases they are the bees knees…
BUT more often than not, to shoppers, it looks like a CRUTCH. So while they might visit, actual performance isn’t so great because customers are questioning the very SOURCE of items.
Generic domains = generic business = mainstream middle man.
Customers can’t believe they will ever get anything special or unique.
As for anyone suggesting they use this as a forward…you need to explore reality:
Look at nike for example. They use swoo.sh in ads. Not nike.com. Honestly why do you think that is? Let me clue you in – it’s because it performs BETTER.
Now if they had clothing.com or some other generic to promote. How effective WOULD it be? If swoo.sh gets TWICE the clicks why would they EVER drop clothing.com?
Not a perfect example..but the gist. People are looking for CREATIVITY. They want to be intrigued/impressed/experience.
Clothing.com offers none of that. It suffers from the hindrances I wrote about above.
snoopy1267 says
You haven’t been “forced” to buy names like that. Think about other ways you can get better domains.
Karen K says
What do you think about this Andrew?
if someone owns —— . Whatever and had clothing.com to forward to that brand I think that would be awesome
John says
I think two separate things are being intermingled here.
Fashion.com, Style.com, Beer.com, Cars.com, Hotels.com are awesome brands.
Clothing.com, Apparel.com, Beverage.com, Automobiles.com, Accommodations.com are just really boring versions of the above brands.
One can definitely make an argument that you are better off with something other than one of these boring brands.
But I think it is very hard to make an argument that any brand would be an improvement over Fashion.com or Hotels.com.
snoopy1267 says
Fashion.com isn’t particularly great either.
Clothing.com is a 6 figure name, EMD and -ing ending, not the kind of name that companies are buying now.
Steve says
Hotels.com….too generic.
domainer111 says
Good point by Steve. You still need to knock it out of the park with awesome content, perfect design etc. and somehow get the crowd on board. Clothing is trickier than hotels but let’s see what they do, then they could get a virtuous cycle going.
snoopy1267 says
The two names aren’t comparable.
There is an obvious business model for hotels.com, same is true for most generic travel names. Probably why there is a tonne of businesses on similar names, hotelscombined.com, booking.com, hotelbooking.com, ebooking.com etc.
I have no idea what the model would be for clothing.com. Type in “clothing” and the results are all brand names, not companies using generic names.
XZB says
What about clothexpert.com?
Ethan says
I would say no.
To me, context-related generic words never are good brand names because they can easily confuse audience if the domain extensions are not mentioned.
Some other obvious examples are Fashion.com, User.com, and Escrow.com. (Sorry to say that, Escrow.com, I mean no offense.)
99% of successful companies in the world don’t need their domain extensions to be mentioned when they do self-introductions or when people are talking about them.