Domain Names: The Golden Keys of E-Commerce

[mandy]

Today, in order to have a commanding e-commerce presence with universal access, domain names must be treated like very special golden keys. Without an effective domain name, the entire exercise of Internet-centric commerce becomes almost useless.

Super success in cyber-branding lies in the sophisticated creation, development and ownership of these powerful and magical keys, so that they may open the door to an undiscovered universe of billions of unknown customers around the world. Without this power and access, what's the point of being in the race for leadership and image positioning?

It only takes a minute to establish if one is holding that magical key or just toying with a rusty screwdriver...

full article: http://ecommercetimes.com/story/Z8jVkMYw...erce.xhtml

[accentnepal]

Well, yes and no.

Is the perfect domain name necessary for e-commerce success? No, YouTube and eBay are crummy names.

Can the right name help? Yes.  A good brand is good, although no substitute for a good product.

What makes a good domain name? Glad you asked:

Relevance. If you saw an ad for Duck.com you would expect the site to be about ducks - the flying quacking kind, most likely, or the water/land vehicles, or even duck (formerly duct) tape. You would not expect a site about cabbage patch dolls or toaster ovens. Search engines rank sites with their keywords in their name higher. To find your best keywords play around with the tool at:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchin...uggestion/

Memorability. If they cannot remember it they cannot find it. If they cannot spell it, if they forget that you are at a .net instead of a com, if they leave out the hyphen that is in your name, if they type one letter when the last letter of the first word is the same as the first letter of the second (ex: SecondDay.com), and many other pitfalls, then you lose.

Length. Shorter is better, but  as long as the name is no more than about 15 characters (plus the .com) then it should be OK.

.Com.  While a strong keyword domain helps with search engines, there is no substitute for .com for being memorable. Any other extension will lose traffic to the .com version. I built my website on a net because the .com with my prime keywords was taken. I then marketed an inferior name in the .com because people would remember that (it forwarded to the .net).

One month ago I was able to purchase TibetanJewelry.com. My future has brightened considerably.

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[BellisimaJ.]

Excellent post----and appreciated!!

[marsh]

A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet, based on the Domain Name System (DNS).
Domain names are used in various networking contexts and application-specific naming and addressing purposes. They are organized in subordinate levels (subdomains) of the DNS root domain, which is nameless. The first-level set of domain names are the top-level domains (TLDs), including the generic top-level domains (gTLDs), such as the prominent domains [tt]com[/tt], [tt]net[/tt] and [tt]org[/tt], and the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Below these top-level domains in the DNS hierarchy are the second-level and third-level domain names that are typically open for reservation by end-users that wish to connect local area networks to the Internet, run web sites, or create other publicly accessible Internet resources. The registration of these domain names is usually administered by domain name registrars who sell their services to the public.