I read in some forum that verisign charges $6.99(correct me if i'm wrong) for .com & $0.2 for icann. So the wholesale price to get .com from the base company is $7.19. But, Dotster .com's for $5.95 Godaddy .com's for $6.95 few others .com's for $2.85 How can these companies give it below the wholesale price of verisign ? Name.com is charging $8.99 with a net profit of $1.8 for each .com, this sounds reasonable.
These companies are doing it for the first year only, after that they mark it up for subsequent years. GoDaddy, for example, charges around $7.xx for second year onwards for .com and they charge higher for .net and .org.
On first year you may choose a cheap price company.After that transfer your domain on other company.For promotion some company give loss on first year.
Exactly! what if a 10 million users do the same trick? i heard godaddy has about 25 million domains. So if 10 million domains get transferred to other registrars then godaddy would loose many million dollars! So i think every registrar bears a loss(millions) in first year and then profits from second year.
Yeah, and website selling it for 2.89 generally ask for you to register a set number of years and/or buy hosting packages.
Dotster's offer is if you also sign up for hosting; they make the money on that. Godaddy 6.95 excludes ICANN fees, if I remember correct; GD also has a 1.99 domain reg offer with any non-domain purchase. Go figure what your actual cost is...
With ICANN fees it comes to 7.19. Also they make money on selling private whois or domain by proxy, for which they charge $8 per domain / year. While that is being offered free by some. Overall, they do make money. BTW: Verisgn charges $6.86 for .com and $4.23 for .net
If the registration fee is too low then the renewal fee would be 2 times higher than that. I am sure about that.
They get large sales and i think it doesnt cost them a lot they have to pay the ican fees per domain and probably the license charges
This is called bis strategy. Which mean registrar use a low price to get client,then next year they charge it high price such as Yahoo domain service.
The cheapest price i ever had for .com, is about USD0.30 per year. It was a promotion done a hosting company. And they only allow me to register one .com domain. On the following year, they charge me USD12! Well, i just transfer it out to another Registrar!