• This looks great, but commission is too high, though. I pay 2.8% for a Worldpay online credit card handling system (and less for retail PDQ transactions). I would expect you to charge a little more for this, as you are providing a fully featured back-end. Further, the only point of using this would be for me to get my customers to pay for the whole service (domain name and hosting) in one transaction. You don’t provide any of my hosting services, so giving you 6% of that part of the fee just to handle payment processing is too high for it to be worthwhile. From your blog demo, it seems that I can add pricing for email forwarding within the storefront. As you update the storefront offering, would you consider allowing resellers to add other associated sales items to their storefront (eg hosting services), so that the reseller can put ALL of his sales through the one screen. If not, I have to make a separate charge to my customer to sell the hosting package (which is the more expensive part of it). If I’m doing that and collecting that money from my customer, I may as well collect the registration fee at the same time and save 6% commission. I am very happy to pay you a commission to collect my hosting fee as well, so long as you offer the option in your storefront and reduce the commission rate on that part of my sale that doesn’t relate to services that you provide.

  Would you consider a sliding scale, whereby you charge 6% on the registration of domains (I would charge my customers 2-3 times your wholesale price) and (say) 3% on additional services sold at the same time for which you merely take payment, but do not provide any of the underlying service (eg hosting)? As an example, I currently charge £79 GBP + VAT (sales tax) per annum for a .com domain, including hosting, email services, support, etc. This equates to about $120 plus UK sales tax = $141; if I pay you 6% of that, your fee will be $8.46 on top of the $6.86 registration fee (a total fee to you of $15.32 for one domain!). That price destroys my business model. The only way around this would be for me to sell the domain name via your storefront and sell my other services separately, which doubles my work and removes the advantage that I get of having you process the fee for me.

  My other question is to wonder whether you are considering allowing sales pricing in sterling or euro currencies as well as dollars. I’m not worried about your wholesale prices being in dollars, but I wish to charge my customers in sterling.

  Thank you
  Charlie

  Comment by Charlie C → November 19, 2008 at 11:20 am

• I agree, the commission is high, even paypal is less than that.

  My other thoughts:

  - integrate with existing management or add a new one that is compatible with existing domains (no “transition” required)… If I point *all* my domain management tools at storefront, it seems as though they are no longer available in RWI. RWI and API use the same backend data, why can’t Storefront?

  - integrate other products into Storefront on a reseller-preference basis. Eg, SSL certs.

  Comment by Matt S → November 19, 2008 at 12:14 pm

• I agree with the above. The cc commission is more than double even the highest cc processors. In addition why can’t the parked pages revenue sharing programs be accessed. What happens If a domain is purchased through that program and later we want to move the domain to the revenue sharing plan?

  Honestly, as long as the processing fees are as high as they are, I am not interested.

  Comment by Tom Diehl → November 19, 2008 at 1:27 pm

• I agree that 6% is a whopping big fee, even if you take into account the cost of hosting, keeping the software up to date etc.

  A couple of questions:
  1. Can the currency be to sterling (GBP) or is it only in dollars?
  2. Can the colours etc be changed on the templates, or is it just one of four colour sets and you can upload a logo?

  Comment by Ben W → November 19, 2008 at 3:34 pm

• I am currently developing an integrated site using the API together with my other services – payment through my own merchant account.
  Just about to go live to be greeted by news of this free storefront – suddenly online competition will multiply gigantically as anyone anywhere can open an online domain shop at zero cost and zero experience.
  Wow – thanks.

  Comment by Paul Axford → November 20, 2008 at 6:30 am

• In the past 10-years or so that I’ve been with you you’ve seen my account see-saw up and down.

  With server issues, writing and re-writing scripts, costs and constant maintenance of over a dozen sites on top of network admin and everyday life, everything was just taking up way too much time … so piece by piece I let things slide. In fact I just finished “down-sizing” again.

  That said, I obviously see this is a real help; and vs. a low volume merchant account, I doubt that I’ll miss a couple percent. There’s another pain I can throw in the trash.

  You have no idea how much this storefront should take off of my hands. With this I will definately start taking an interest again and revive domains and SSL certs an active part of my setup.

  Thank you!

  James W.

  Comment by James → November 20, 2008 at 10:37 am

• Thanks for the comments everyone. Most appreciated.

  I think we’ve covered most of your questions over at the main blog post introducing Storefront (http://opensrs.com/blog/2008/11/a-sneak-peek-at-the-new-opensrs-storefront/) but I did want to point out that the service charge on Storefront purchases is the cost of the credit card processing and the cost of using an (otherwise) free storefront. I think you’ll find that this is very competitive for domain storefronts.

  Of course you can always develop to the API if you feel you can build better for cheaper and get a good price on payment processing. We’re happy either way. This is just another option for you to consider.

  Cheers,

  Ken.

  Comment by Ken Schafer → November 20, 2008 at 10:56 am

• Where can we see a sample of the store?

  Comment by Mike → November 21, 2008 at 10:37 am

• @Mike @8: If you have an OpenSRS Reseller, log into the RWI and provision your Storefront. The setup guide is available here: http://opensrs.com/resources/documentation/storefront_reseller.pdf.

  Or, visit our live demo site (for the end-user experience) at: http://domainstore.bostoncityinternet.com/.

  Liam

  Comment by Liam → November 21, 2008 at 2:10 pm

• 6% is too much (4% would be a good compromise I think), but when is it going to be fully operational? At the moment you can’t get past the new customer registration page.
  Also we can’t use it until charges are in UK Sterling and there is access to all ccTLDs – when will this be happening?

  Comment by jude → November 25, 2008 at 6:53 am

• @jude: We are exploring the feasibility of adding different currencies at some point, but for now the US dollar will be currency of choice for Storefront. As well, it will only support new registrations until January, when we plan to allow pulling in domains previously registered through the RWI or API. Also, as outlined in the FAQ, ccTLDs will be added by December 1st.

  Comment by James McNally → November 25, 2008 at 10:45 am

• @ jude @10: Thanks for your question regarding the 6% payment processing fee. I’ll dig into a few things that we considered when determining this fee:

  1) Maintaining your own merchant account is costly. Processing fees are typically in the range of 2.5% (high volume) – 4.5+% for a small-medium online merchant. Now add in fixed transaction fees of $0.25 (high volume) – $0.50+ per transaction. Add another $10 – $20 for a monthly statement fee and don’t forget to factor in the one-time setup-fee you paid to apply for a merchant account.

  If you don’t have a merchant account and want to sell our domains services right away, our Storefront offering is a practical solution with a predictable cost of conducting business online.

  If you have your own merchant account, our API is a probably a better fit for your needs.

  2) There is no yearly subscription fee to use Storefront (unlike other turn-key solutions). Storefront is free to existing OpenSRS resellers. We don’t make money until you make money reselling our services.

  If you are a new reseller, you pay a one-time $95 fee to create your OpenSRS Reseller account, giving you a choice of reselling our services via Storefront, API or manually through the Reseller Web Interface.

  3) The OpenSRS Storefront payment processing fee is straightforward. We don’t levy a % + fixed fee on transactions like other reseller solutions. This approach is favorable to you, the reseller, on transactions USD$35 and less.

  -Liam

  Comment by Liam → November 25, 2008 at 11:06 am

Sorry, comments are now closed.