eNom now officially sucks

[Together]

I have kept silent for long enough and now have had enough.

I have been dealing with eNom for years. As a domainer eNom is a good company as far as options and price goes. I have a HUGE problem with their redemption period names that have traffic now costing customers $160 to renew. The problem is that as a reseller you want your customers to not know about eNom yet eNom forces you to charge your customers $160 to renew a redemption name that costs them about $6 to renew. This is not only unfair but alienates good resellers who genuinely want to help their customers.

 

[JMJ]

They don't reach this status until 30-45 days after expiration. If the name was that important why not spend the measily $6.95 or whatever to renew. Most registrars are doing the very same thing. Atleast you have the opportunity to buy it back whereas if it were Godaddy they would have sold it to the highest bidder by now.

Your clients receive numerous emails warning them of the expiration. And if their email isn't getting them for whatever reason then they default to you. Then its your responsibilty as the master reseller to figure out why and contact your customer.

Either way being in the domain business you should know this is a fee imposed by Verisign and Ok'ed by ICANN over a year ago.

 

[ForumDomains]

As far as I know the fee imposed by Verisign and ICANN is $60 and not $160!

 

[JMJ]

As far as I know the fee imposed by Verisign and ICANN is $60 and not $160!

Right but the industry standard with the registrars is $160+.

 

[labrocca]

Well they snaked in the $30 registration fee after everyone had an account there...that really ticked me off...I think enom is a price gouger whenever they get the chance.

 

[mike031]

they can do as they please, they are in control...you think you are? yea right! you really gotta stay on top of things this days because the registrars are pulling all sorts of sh*t. not just enom...only going to get worse, of course.

 

[Together]

they can do as they please, they are in control...you think you are? yea right! you really gotta stay on top of things this days because the registrars are pulling all sorts of sh*t. not just enom...only going to get worse, of course.

I guess the thing that bugs me about eNom is that they used to be great to deal with. I understand many registrars are taking advantage of their position but the fact that eNom does this makes me sick. It costs eNom $6 to renew a name and they charge $160 to end users.

I understand people let their names lapse for 30 days. I also know that there are sometimes very legitamate reasons for this. I guess one of the things that bugs me the most is that eNom is set-up to remain invisible to the end user and therefore we resellers have to pass-off their $160 rip-off to customers as our own without the luxury of divulging who the real source of this racket is.

 

[diverge]

Here's my understanding on eNom: They actually renew your domain for you (at their cost) when it expires, and "artificially" expire it (internal only -- check the official WHOIS and you will see it still has 11 months until "official" expiration). This way they can sell it via Club Drop without having to worry about the RGP system. If you look at it in this light, the $160 fee is quite reasonable, as this represents a mitigated risk on their part -- either sell it back to the original owner at $160 or sell it to a Club Drop buyer at $10 to $1000. If a domain is not renewed and is not caught by Club Drop, they simply delete it manually, which causes it to drop, and they incur a reduced price with ICANN.

I may be wrong on some of this, but this is how I understand it from several conversations with eNom on this subject.

 

[Together]

ACtually you have half of the story right. Here is the whole sordid truth. When a domain name expires, they change the nameservers to point to their paid landing page. They get paid on resellers customers traffic during the 30 days they so kindly give end users to renew the name. During this time they are tracking how much traffic the domain name gets. If at the end of the 30 days the name gets traffic or makes money, they pay the $6 to renew it. There is no risk to eNom because they know exactly how much traffic is generated and how much PPC traffic is generated. They disregard the fact the reseller is the one who paid the advertising and support for the customer. They disregard the fact that resellers have on numerous occasions asked for the option to point the expired domain to a generic landing page designed by the reseller. They will not even entertain the idea of the reseller paying for the time the name has expired in order to appease customers. And the thing that bugs me the most is the fact that the poor end user is unaware of all of this and can not be made aware of this unless the reseller wants to tell them and risk the chance that eNom will scoop them as direct resellers of their own (which they have done on several occasions to me personally).
They suck,
They suck more
and they just keep on sucking.

 

[bocajohnh]

Excellent post Diverge. You spelled it out well. I think anyone that is an enom "reseller" and has sub-accounts, should never let their customer's name expire. They should be on top of the issue, otherwise they don't deserve the small markup they get for "servicing" the sub-account. Whether this means monitoring your sub-account domains, or making sure you have an email addy you control on their domain's whois info, or whatever, do what it takes to serve your direct customers. If you don't, then you deserve to have the customer taken away, by enom, another enom reseller, a GD/wildwest reseller, whomever.

And yes, enom, and many registrars, used to be "cheaper" to deal with, yes. In all my interactions from years ago to last week, I've been pleased with dealing with them. Are drops at Club drop pricier than years ago and are bid minimums higher than before, yes. For expiring names, have renewal fees grown and the grace periods shrunk, yes. But I think their service then and now is good.

But, then again, I'm the type that doesn't complain when its my fault. I still bitch and moan about the lost money, but not to the bank/credit card company/registrar.

 

[Theo]

The only one that "sucks" is the owner that failed to renew their domain on time. If a domain is so precious, renew it for 10 years in advance. The rest is just whining. When we had to pay $50 /year to NetSol's monopoly to register domains, noone was complaining. Now that we have options, we are being lazy.

Incidentally, Stargate charge $250 to bring a domain out of redemption.

 

[manueld64]

for domains with go daddy / wwd, the redemption fee is 80 bucks, however in day 19 to 29 after it expires, you can bid on it for less in tdnam.com, on day 43 you would get the domain if the original registrar, if the domain flew under the radar in tdnam, the cheapest option is to backorder it for 18.95, that would still be considered a bid in tdnam and the day 43 rule would apply

 

[Together]

Although I agree it is the domain owners fault for not renewing their domain name, I think you may be missing the point I am making. It would seem you may be a little confused as to who eNoms customers really are. Their customers are not the end user in this case but rather the reseller. If they truly wanted to be an invisible backend provider, they would not impose such ridiculously heavy penalties that sheds their resellers in a bad light and that their resellers can not justify. I do not have any clue how one could justify charging $160 for something that costs them $6. Since when in a free market is a 2600% markup considered to be reasonable for a service that takes little to no effort and has zero risk attached to it? My suggestion is that the only place where this happens is where there are no true options. (Does the word extortion come to anyones mind?)

 

[Rubber Duck]

Enom does suck, but not for the above reasons.

I recently ordered a dot JP through one of their resellers only for it to take two days for them to advise me that that they don't support dot JP in Japanese! Suppose it was my own fault. Went with them as the price was right!

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[mole]

If a domain is so precious, renew it for 10 years in advance. The rest is just whining.

Agree.

 

[Theo]

Together, I see your point however you're having the delusion that by using Enom as a reseller - or GD for that matter - you're using some bulletproof, custom-made system of a registrar that your clients cannot uncover. Unfortunately, Enom's rules are what they are and it's your responsibility to deliver to your clients the message that they will be charged that particular fee if they fail to renew their domain almost 2 months past its due date.

 

[manueld64]

a decade of love baby! that is what i am talking about!

actually google give you higher page rankings if you do it for more than 7 years out

they are making efforts to wipe out search engine spam (United States Patent Application 20050071741). because of spammers using these automatic processes to increase 'junk domains' to the top of the list.

 

[jdk]

$160 is nothing if the name is that important. It is up to the user to renew and not the registrar's fault. It's about money and the registrar should charge since they could drop the name, but give the owner a chance to reclaim name before it goes back into the pool to be registered.

 

[Together]

$160 is nothing if the name is that important. It is up to the user to renew and not the registrar's fault.

How you could possibly say it is not the registrars fault? Does not the fact that they charge $160 for something they pay $6 offend your sense of justice? If it's not their fault, whos is it? The poor unwitting registrant who was out of town for a few months or whos spam filter caught the renewal notifications? It seems to me that most people here are domain name specialists instead average Joe who doesn't understand how this whole system works and that the registrar (eNom in this case) is more concerned with the dollar they can extract from them instead of giving good resellers who actually care and empathize with their customers the opportunity to cut them a break.

 

[JMJ]

Everything has a higher price once past it's due date. Let your lights get turned off and find out how much more thats going to cost to get reconnected. Your cable, cellphone, late fees on your car note, your house nearing or in foreclosure.

What you're forgetting here is the registrar has to "pay for your domain" the very day it expires to allow you/your client the extra time to finally get around to paying your bills if you decide to do so. Imagine how many thousands of names large registrars have to foot the bill on because people are waiting until the last minute to renew. This is why they change the DNS to their parking pages because essentially it's their domain at this point.

I do agree enom should mabey give it's resellers a break on this price but mabey, just mabey they believe they are? As someone else stated other registrars charge more so couldn't you charge more? Either way as a reseller would you like to be footing the bill on all of the names in your sub-accounts during the redemption period?