Creating a smooth, reliable, and on-brand customer experience is key when reselling domain names. Whether your core business is offering hosting, building websites, or managing digital marketing services, including an intuitive domain management experience can strengthen customer loyalty and generate recurring revenue.
Understand your customers’ needs
Digital service providers offer domain names because it makes things easier for them and their customers. Let’s start with your customers. The first step in integrating domains into your existing sign-up flow, UI, or customer onboarding should be to consider their needs. What are they looking for?
This depends on your business. If you run a marketing agency, clients might expect you to take care of domain registration and management, but want the domain registered in their name. If you have an e-commerce solution, they’ll likely expect to be able to select a domain name for their website as part of the sign-up flow, and might want the flexibility to update DNS settings.
Thinking through the specifics of your customer journey and how domains will fit in positions you to deliver a seamless experience that builds trust, enhances satisfaction, and strengthens your overall value proposition.
Of course, there are some universal customer needs. They want a straightforward experience, reliability, hassle-free renewals, and support they can count on.
This is why it’s crucial for resellers to choose the right domain registrar to partner with. You’ll want a partner that makes it easy for you to offer an awesome experience to your customers. OpenSRS offers flexible solutions that allow you to resell domains your way. Whether you want to add a turnkey domain search to your website and let customers self-manage, take care of things on your customers’ behalf, or build out an API integration to seamlessly build domain management into your platform.
Once you have a high-level understanding of your customers’ needs, you’re ready to think about what your customers’ domain registration and management experience will look like. Just as importantly, you’ll also want to understand how you’ll deliver this in an efficient way, so you can stay focused on growing your business. Here are some things to consider.
Simplify domain search and registration
First impressions are important, and a smooth domain search and registration process can help you make a great one.
An intuitive domain search makes it easy to find the perfect domain name. Sometimes, your customer’s first choice domain will be available, and they can select it and head to checkout. Amazing. Other times, they’ll discover it’s already taken. When this happens, you can save the day by:
1. Presenting them with relevant alternatives. OpenSRS includes a name suggestion tool leveraged by some of the world’s leading website builders. It performs a real-time availability check for other great options based on the customer’s keywords, eliminating the need for repeat searches and ensuring a quick and satisfying experience.
You can get creative here. For example, Hover, a domain name and email provider, uses our API and name suggestion tool to let customers search by industry niche:
2. Offering a wide range of domain extensions. Presenting relevant alternatives is easier when you offer a variety of top-level domains (TLDs). While options like .com and .net remain essential, offering industry-specific TLDs such as .shop or .tech allows customers to find domains that align perfectly with their brand identity and vision.
For example, if you’re a website builder for musicians, you could offer extensions specific to your niche, such as .music and .band. It can also be smart to offer country-code extensions specific to your operating regions, such as .uk, .ca, and .us.
Built with resellers’ needs in mind, OpenSRS makes it easy to offer an effective domain search and registration experience. Resellers who use the API can leverage our powerful name suggestion tool, which leading website builders have embraced. It proposes relevant domain alternatives based on your customers’ searches, filtering for TLDs you offer.
For those looking for a turnkey approach, our Storefront solution leverages the same domain search technology. It lets you add domain search and checkout to your website in minutes, helping you offer an intuitive customer experience without any integration work.
Deliver a personalized, on-brand experience
Brand consistency builds trust and brand recognition, ultimately helping foster customer loyalty and distinguishing you from competitors. To achieve this, digital service providers often have to consider various touch points, including their website, platform, customer communications, invoices, marketing emails, and social media.
Offering domain registrations means adding another customer interaction into the mix: most domain registrations involve mandatory communications, like renewal notices. To avoid extra work and customer confusion, you’ll want to partner with a registrar that automates these customer communications for you and lets you customize them to reflect your branding. If you operate internationally, you may need to send these notices in multiple languages.
OpenSRS lets you brand your end-user communications for a cohesive customer experience, and supports 35+ languages, so you can tailor them for customers in different countries.
Offer straightforward pricing
Everyone knows that transparent pricing helps build trust. Ensure your customers clearly understand the costs associated with domain registrations, renewals, transfers, and any additional services, such as WHOIS privacy, SSL certificates, or email. Presenting this information upfront will minimize confusion and instill trust.
Flexible or discounted pricing options can also strengthen customer loyalty. Consider offering discounts for bulk domain purchases, multi-year registrations, or bundling domains with other services so customers save when they buy more from you. This provides value that keeps customers coming back and encourages them to recommend your services to others.
Automate for efficiency
Efficiency is important to all business operations, and delivering a seamless domain management experience is no exception. OpenSRS makes automation easy. Our API enables efficient domain registration, renewals, and domain transfers, eliminating manual intervention. However, if it doesn’t make sense to invest in API integration, you can leverage our turnkey Storefront to automate registration by adding a brandable, out-of-the-box domain search and checkout to your site and letting customers self-manage. Providers that offer a boutique service, taking care of everything for their clients, can rely on the Control Panel to maximize efficiency with intuitive workflows and bulk commands for domain management.
Whether you primarily use our Storefront, API, or Control Panel, we automate your domain-related end-user communications, like notifications for expiring domains and upcoming renewals.
Add value with bundled services
In today’s competitive market, offering bundled services can help you stand out. By delivering an all-in-one solution, you save customers time and effort, all while boosting your revenue potential. It’s a win-win approach that builds loyalty and drives long-term growth.
Many providers pair domains with complementary solutions like web hosting, TLS/SSL certificates, and professional email to provide a streamlined experience for clients. A hosting company might bundle these solutions together as part of tiered packages, while a website builder might build domain registration and an optional email address selection into their sign-up flow. You can customize what and how you offer value-added services to make life easier for your customers.
Ensure you can scale with confidence
As your business grows, so do your needs. It’s crucial to choose a registrar partner that enables you to scale so you can continue to deliver a great customer experience.
Ask yourself: Does the registrar have what you need to manage your domain portfolio as you grow? Look for things like bulk domain management tools and DNS templates for automated configuration.
And if you’re looking to leverage the registrar’s API—now or in the future—you want to make sure you can use it to automate all aspects of domain registration and management.
OpenSRS also makes it easy to reduce admin time and offer a reliable service, whether you opt to manually run your domains business through our control panel or automate using our API or Storefront solutions.
Choosing a flexible, scalable domain registrar platform positions your business as a reliable provider that supports your customers’ long-term growth. This not only fosters loyalty, but also opens doors for expanding your service offerings and revenue streams.
Conclusion
To offer an intuitive domain registration experience and keep management simple for you and your customers, you have to understand their needs, deliver an effective search experience, and automate wherever possible while staying on-brand. OpenSRS helps you do exactly that. Whether you leverage OpenSRS Storefront or build an API integration, you can offer a reliable, on-brand service that helps you meet evolving customer needs as your business grows, positioning you for long-term success. Level up your customer experience today by getting started with OpenSRS.