Tucows offers its resellers a wide range of options for purchasing and managing domains, along with a focus on transparent pricing.

by Jeff Goldman [January 16, 2008]

Tucows was one of the initial group of 34 registrars to be ICANN-accredited in 1999, and now manages more than seven million domains. The company offers ISPs and webhosting companies the ability to resell not only wholesale domain name registration but also e-mail services, digital certificates, and web publishing services.

It also provides a wide range of retail services, including Tucows' original software download offering as well as the retail domain site DomainDirect, the own-your-name service NetIdentity, the web calendar Kiko, and the BlogRolling link list manager, among others.

In 2005, the company's Platypus billing software was integrated directly with Tucows' wholesale solutions—and in July of 2007, Tucows acquired the wholesale domain name registrar ItsYourDomain, which is also gradually being integrated into the company's own wholesale offering.

Management interfaces
Tucows' wholesale domain service gives the company's partners a number of options for purchasing and managing domains, all based on the company's OpenSRS platform. "We've adopted the tagline 'reseller-friendly,' because what we try to do is give resellers as many different ways to implement our services as possible," says Adam Eisner, the company's product manager for domains.

There's a straightforward web-based interface that allows resellers to purchase and manage domains on their customers' behalf. There's also an extensive set of APIs for deeper integrations, as well as sets of script in both PHP and Perl that call into those APIs. And Eisner says there's also a solution in beta called QuickCode, which allows a reseller simply to check a few boxes regarding how they'd like their service to be set up, and it automatically generates JavaScript that they can then simply plug into their website.

QuickCode, Eisner says, provides precisely the middle ground that many customers have been seeking. "They want some flexibility in terms of designing their purchase process, but they don't really want to go down the full API route," he says. "So in developing QuickCode, we're letting our customers take advantage of our APIs without having to do any of the messy integration work if they don't want to."

OpenHRS
The OpenSRS platform is also available to ICANN-accredited registrars as the Hosted Registrar System, or (logically enough) OpenHRS. "It takes a lot of work to build a system that allows you to function as an ICANN-accredited registrar, so we offer a system that lets customers do that without actually having to build anything—and they just pay us a management fee," Eisner says. "So they have an entire domain name registrar business in a box."

Eisner says Tucows manages the OpenHRS offering just like its own systems. "They basically run in tandem," he says. "If VeriSign, for example, says there's some big system maintenance coming down the pipe that we have to fret about, or ICANN, as they have just recently, introduces some new compliance requirements, we take care of it for them, because we have to do it ourselves as well."

Transparent pricing
All wholesale pricing for the domains, which ranges from $9.62 for a .com name to $15.20 for .mobi, is published on the company's website. In August of 2007, Tucows launched a new initiative to break down the pricing and make it as clear as possible to its partners. "What we wanted to do was provide a lot of visibility into how much we're paying versus how much we're keeping, and what our customers get with that," Eisner says.

Each domain name price is broken down into three parts: the fee paid to the registry, the fee paid to ICANN, and a $3.00 Tucows Management Fee. Wholesale partners pay a one-time $95 setup fee, but all services after that are covered by the $3.00 fee per domain. Those services, all fully branded to the reseller, include whois privacy, managed DNS, and an advanced name suggestion tool, among others.

Additional services
The name suggestion tool combines a traditional domain name search and suggestion tool with the ability to search the domain name aftermarket for premium domains. "Because all of our customers are webhosting companies and ISPs, their sales depend a lot on the initial successful sale of the domain name," Eisner says—the point being that finding the perfect domain name can be key to making the sale.

Tucows' domain parking programs allow partners to share in the ad revenue from parked and expired domains. "And if our resellers should choose to do so, they're free to turn that on for any of their non-expired domains as well, if they want to share in that revenue," Eisner says.

Overall, Eisner says, the aim is to keep things as simple as possible for the company's resellers. "What we want to do is to be reseller-friendly, to let them focus on what they know how to do—which is to operate their actual business and not have to worry about the technical rigamarole in the background," he says.

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Related articles:
	[May 25, 2007]	Tucows Has Work to Do
	[Jan. 6, 2006]	Tucows Says E-Mail is Critical
	[Nov. 3, 2005]	Common Sense in Selling Services
Online resources:
	Registrar Directory
	Registrar Directory: Quick-Reference Chart