Master Your Domains

Building a successful online business entails many factors, not the least of which is ensuring that current and potential customers can find you.

Retailers that possess only one domain name – a website bearing the company name – may be missing out on potential sales from online customers who misspell the company name or use a search engine to seek a retailer by category or geography. Conversely, purchasing domains with names that attract the kinds of customers a company covets significantly boosts opportunities for website visits – and sales.

With a background in technology, Keith Riewe is not your typical small business owner. After purchasing 34-year-old Bice’s Florist and closing all but one of its stores, Riewe managed to increase sales 38 percent or more than $1.5 million.

Realizing that customers “don’t walk into flower shops anymore,” Riewe focused on developing a strong web presence with multiple domain names. With reduced labor and operation costs and reduced in-store product expenses, Riewe achieved the sweet smell of success.

Riewe spent 12 years as a computer consultant to businesses such as Frito-Lay, but always wanted to own his own business. Bice’s, he says, “was a top 100 [seller] with FTD and was well-known in the Fort Worth, Texas, area.” The business was far behind technologically, however, with only three PCs and a website that was informational only.

The previous owners had secured the domain name “Bicesflorist” but not “Bices.com,” Riewe says. “When people in the Dallas/Fort Worth area think of our shop, they think of it just as Bice’s, so I had to get that domain name.”

Problem was, it was owned by a German man who didn’t want to discuss a sale, so Riewe contacted Sedo. The company undertook negotiations between Riewe and the seller: “It was relatively simple,” Riewe says. “It took six weeks to acquire the domain.”

Sedo is a German company that bills itself as a global marketplace for buying and selling domain names and websites. “Domains are your piece of online real estate,” says COO Jeremiah Johnston, and with 800,000 users in 120 countries, “we are the eBay for domain names.”

Speculators have already purchased most domains with any potential for business, he says, so Sedo helps connect buyers and sellers through auctions of domain names – and, in some cases, a knock on the door of a domain holder to see if a sale is a possibility.

Johnston works out of Sedo’s Cambridge, Mass., headquarters, “which covers half the world.” The company has another headquarters in Cologne, Germany, covering “the rest of the world,” and offers customer support in 20 languages.

To increase his e-commerce traffic, Riewe had to think like an online flower shopper. If a customer is looking for a wreath from a florist near Fort Worth, odds are the customer is plugging “flower” or “florist” and “Fort Worth” into a search engine. This might bring up fortworthflowers.com, a domain owned by Riewe. When you click the link, it seamlessly redirects you to bices.com, the store’s main website. Riewe estimates that he now owns more than 20 domain names.

“The other day a lady in Switzerland called us,” he says. “She has someone living in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and located us on the Internet. “We are capturing orders from Ireland, China and Australia. It’s crazy,” though most of the florist’s orders still come from Dallas/Fort Worth.

Benefits of a trademark
The local competition isn’t what keeps Riewe up at night: “I’m more concerned about FTD, 1-800-FLOWERS and Teleflora, the ones with the advertising dollars,” he says. Having multiple domain names, he says, “levels the playing field” for smaller operators like Bice’s.

When building an e-commerce profile and presence, businesses should cover their bases by seeking domains for the company name “and the subject matter of your business,” Johnston says. As a trademark attorney, he observes that one of the limitations of a trademark is the fact that generic terms cannot be trademarked. “If you’re a florist, you can’t just name your business ‘florist’,” he says. “However, you can get domains that match descriptive terms of your business.

“It’s almost as if you’re getting the benefit of having a trademark without worrying about the legal issues, so it’s very cost-effective,” Johnston says.
The catalyst for Sedo’s business is generic description domains, he says. “All the good [domain names] have natural traffic: People type in the generic domain expecting to find goods related to that subject,” Johnston says. “If you have that domain, you receive the benefit of this, similar to using a search engine like Yahoo! or Google.

“Generic domains send traffic to websites every day without extra costs, which is a significant savings, especially for smaller businesses.”

Defensive strategy
Johnston recommends obtaining variations on a company’s name because web shoppers often mistype. If a business name ends in “s,” for instance, it makes good sense to also purchase the domain name without the “s.”

Some businesses want to gather domain names for defensive purposes, in case someone tries to exploit the business. Securing hundreds of domain names is becoming a common strategy for large companies, Johnston says. “Calvin Klein has underwear.com, bras.com; Barnes and Noble has books.com. A one-word descriptive can be very valuable as a domain.”

Online browsers are akin to walk-in traffic at a bricks-and-mortar store, Johnston says. “We want to make it easier for businesses large and small to search for domains [and] get the domains they want ... as affordably as possible.”

Riewe, he says, “sees the long-term value [that] domains can have for his business. He is using his imagination to collect a portfolio of descriptive domains, which is like bringing people to your business’ doorstep.