Fast-growing domain sales platform adds new features to improve conversion rates for domain sellers.
Fruits didn’t set out to become a domain name-only sales platform. It just sort of worked out that way.
When the business launched in 2022, it was a marketplace for all types of digital goods. But the founding team quickly realized that domain names were the best market to tackle.
“With domains, it doesn’t take any time for sellers to create the products,” said fruits (the company stylizes its name with a lower-case f) founder Dr. Fabian Heuschele. “When working with content creators, they first had to build an ebook — often with our help — and then sell it for just a few euros.”
Indeed, domains are easy to create and sell for a lot more money.
It didn’t hurt that one of Fruit’s investors knew the domain name market inside and out. Investor Stefan Wiegard was a founder of the domain monetization company Team Internet, which was later acquired by what was then called CentralNic (and later changed its name to Team Internet).
Focusing solely on domains has helped fruits laser in on the faults of existing domain sales platforms.
Looking around the industry, Heuschele notes that many of the legacy platforms are “old and bad looking.” Innovation is lacking.
So fruits decided it could improve on existing platforms with a modern, fast system with low commissions (9.9%).
It also set out to solve a big problem with selling domains in Europe: VAT. The value-added tax can be a headache for domain sellers and buyers alike.
“If you’re in Germany and sell a domain to a private individual in Spain, you have to apply Spanish VAT and remit it to the Spanish tax authorities,” said Heuschele. “Fruits does that automatically and 100% correctly without any manual processes.”
Fruit’s simplicity, speed, and features have helped it attract 2.6 million domains, up from about one million a year ago.
Of course, there’s a big elephant in the room for many domain investors: will they use a domain platform that uses the domain fruits.co?
Heuschele said the company chose the domain based on the idea of “the fruits of your labor.” As for using a .co, he admitted that some people have bugged him about that. Now, he views it as just one more unique thing about the company. (The fruit company Del Monte owns fruits.com.)
From a buyer’s perspective, the company has little name recognition. But Heuschele said no other competitors, other than GoDaddy and Sedo, really have name recognition with buyers.
To gain buyer trust, the company has focused on credibility markers, such as displaying Trustpilot reviews on landing pages. It’s also a German company, so its imprint is linked to on each page.
This week, Fruits released a couple of new features. It has new, simplified landers that it believes will convert better (pictured above). It also resolves each domain to its own domain name, rather than forwarding to a page on fruits.co.
Looking to the future, fruits is working on partnerships to syndicate listings to other platforms and domain name registrars.
The market for domain sales platforms has gotten crowded during the past few years. Fruits thinks it has the formula to stand out in this crowded field.
.com supremacy is a crutch for domain investors sitting on dusty, overvalued scrap. You know the type…portfolio full of generic .coms no one actually wants, clinging to a myth that VCs, startups, or literally anyone under 40 cares about a .com. Meanwhile, the market moves on, .co’s, .io’s, and every other relevant TLD are thriving, and those poor clingers are staring at a massive haircut when the next wave of companies ignores their antiquated hierarchy.
Fruits.co isn’t a compromise—it’s the future laughing at your dusty .com graveyard.
Let’s be real: if your domain portfolio is largely non ultra premium .coms, you’re sitting on a ticking time bomb. What looks ‘unprofessional’ to a boomer .com elitist looks modern, intentional, and native to literally everyone else—and you can map that shift over the last decade in Crunchbase funding data from top VCs.
The only reason the .com myth survived this long is a trifecta of perverse industry incentives: investors talking their own bags, brokers defending obsolete inventory, and conferences endlessly echoing the same tired gospel. Actual builders and technologists moved on years ago. They saw the rent seeking hustle and flipped the table.
Now the punchline: registrars are finally incentivized to smash the myth to pieces themselves. Enjoy the paper gains—because when the .com narrative collapses, that portfolio is taking a Blockbuster-stock-level haircut.
Good luck with BestAffordableLocalPlumbingServicesInDallasTexas.com though!
Yes it’s clearly possible to do good global business on other-than .com
But given the choice, it’s very likely fruits would prefer .com to .co
We’re unlikely to see this domain sales platform seriously shake .com dominance with some demonstration effect. Traffic and email leakage to fruits.com may not be too costly, but …
I guess a domain sales platform would hope to position as brand builder and brand strategist. Why go sub-optimal? Cost? Did they consider many other domains? – maybe crowdsourcing would generate something better? (Sorry but) fruit and fruits go to different places, as do .co and .com All The Best for success.