The world's largest wholesale registrar offers two ways to resell domains: a robust API or a fully pre-configured website.

by Jeff Goldman [December 26, 2007]

The domain registrar eNom was founded by Paul Stahura in 1998, and was ICANN-accredited in August of 1999. In May of 2006, eNom was acquired by Demand Media, and Stahura became the company's chief strategy officer.

In the same year, Demand Media also acquired BulkRegister and made it part of the eNom brand, with eNom now focusing on resellers and BulkRegister on corporate customers. As a result, eNom is now the second-largest registrar in the world (second to Go Daddy), and claims to be the largest reseller-focused registrar.

According to Chris Sheridan, the company's vice president of services, the Demand Media acquisition has been particularly helpful in expanding eNom's strengths beyond domain registration. A good example of that, he says, is Demand Media's launch of eNom.tv in May of 2007, which combines .tv domain names with a free suite of social networking tools.

The company continues to look for new ways to add services, Sheridan adds. As of October 15th, 2007, customers can choose to place Demand Media-sponsored ads on their .tv social networking sites and receive a share of the revenue. "We've gotten a lot of positive feedback on that, because it allows our resellers to differentiate themselves from the thousands of other resellers selling similar products," he says.

In October of 2007, Demand Media also launched NameJet, a name auction platform that markets both eNom's and Network Solutions' expired domains. While that might not hold much interest for ISPs right now, Sheridan says the company is working on an affiliate program that will allow ISPs to earn a commission by referring their customers to the site.

API and PDQ
There are two ways for an ISP to take advantage of eNom's domain registration services—either by making use of the company's API, or through the PDQ pre-configured website. Each option has strengths for different types of clients.

Sheridan says the vast majority of eNom's customers use the API, which gives them direct access to 64 domain name extensions as well as to value added services including e-mail and webhosting. The API also lets an ISP connect to eNom's merchant billing solution, allowing the registrar to handle all billing on the ISP's behalf.

And the API gives ISPs a great deal of control over how they interface with eNom. "We've been in this business long enough that we know the kinds of needs they're going to have around renewals, around multi-year registrations for domains, around bulk management of domains, around offering services like whois privacy protect—and the API is able to seamlessly do those things," Sheridan says.

The other option, PDQ, provides a fully pre-configured reseller website for $99 a year. "As the market's evolving and less technically savvy customers are trying to get into the business, this has been very successful," Sheridan says. "Within an hour, you can be selling domains, e-mail, SSL certificates, and webhosting. You drag and drop your logo on the website, and you're your own business moving forward."

Both PDQ and the API, Sheridan says, allow the reseller to select which of eNom's services they want to offer to their customers. "Even in the out-of-the-box solution, the only thing that's really locked in is the domains," he says. "That's it. If you don't want to sell e-mail, just uncheck the box and it will disappear from your site."

Pricing and branding
Aside from the $99-a-year fee for PDQ, the domain pricing is the same for both options. Wholesale prices range from $7.45 to $10.45 a year, depending on how much you're willing to pay in advance. And in each case, you have two options: for example, if you want the $7.45 wholesale rate, you can either pay a flat setup fee of $1,595.00—or you can make an advance deposit of $6,995.00 into your account, all of which can then be used towards future domain registrations.

Encouraging people to make advance deposits like that, Sheridan says, has been enormously helpful in weeding out fraud. "It helps us focus on the customers that are very serious about getting involved in this space, working with them and getting them up and running right away," he says.

Still, Sheridan says the real strength of eNom's offering lies in its range of additional services. "We're going to give you access to markets you probably don't have access to today, through tools like the social networking value added services," he says. "And you can now introduce your customers to online advertising where they can opt into ad revenue sharing programs—and who else is doing that? Nobody."

And keeping everything fully branded to the ISP, Sheridan says, is a central focus for the company. "One of our big selling points is that we like to consider ourselves invisible," he says. "Our whole philosophy on this is that if we give you the right tools, the more successful you are, the more successful we're going to be… we're here to support you, our direct reseller network, and we'll let you manage your retail customers or the sub-resellers below you."

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