Despite All the Promotion, Amazon Doesn’t Own Prime.com

Yesterday was dubbed “Prime Day” at Amazon. According to Amazon, “Prime Day is a one-day only global shopping event exclusively for Prime members.” There were a ton of news stories devoted to Amazon and its Prime Day deals all day. From my perspective, Amazon seems to be building a brand around its “Prime” membership. Of note, Amazon does not own the exact match Prime.com domain name.

If you visit Prime.com, you can see that it is a standard Uniregistry parked page with pay per click links. There is a message at the top of the page that says “This domain has recently been listed for sale Click here to inquire,” and clicking the link takes the visitor to a standard Uniregistry inquiry form. The domain name has been registered under private Whois for many years.

Prime.com has been up for sale before. In 2011, Prime.com was listed for sale in the Moniker / SnapNames year end auction. At that time, the domain name had a reserve price range of between $1 – $5 million. I searched through my email archive, and I see the domain name had been brokered in recent years. I looked at NameBio, and it does not look like the domain name sold during the Moniker auction, and I do not see any other public sale records.

My wife and I have a Prime membership. Generally when buying something on Amazon, I will tick off the “Prime” box on the search menu so that I only see items that are available for the free shipping. I think Prime is a great idea, and it definitely contributes to the regular Amazon shopping that my wife and I do.

It is somewhat surprising that Amazon does not own Prime.com. I understand every company has a price limit and the current asking price could exceed what Amazon would be willing to pay, but it sure seems like the company likes the Prime branding. Amazon also owns quite a few domain names with Prime in them in various TLDs. For instance, Amazon owns the following “prime” domain names:

  • Prime.club
  • Prime.shop
  • Prime.VIP
  • Prime.site
  • Prime.wang
  • Prime.buzz
  • Prime.click
  • Prime.mom
  • Prime.live
  • Prime.london

I only searched a handful of new gTLD extensions, so it is likely that Amazon owns many other “Prime” domain names in various extensions, and it is also likely the company owns domain names that have “AmazonPrime” in them as well.

Despite the fact that Amazon is building its Prime brand, it certainly could not claim any type of exclusive right to the “prime” keyword. In fact, the dealership where I bought my car is part of the Prime Motor Group  (MB of Westwood is great if you’re in the market) and one of my favorite domain industry memories was a dinner at the Prime Grill after Lonnie Borck  came to New York City and  acquired E.CO. Like any other generic keyword like “prime,” there are a ton of companies using the keyword in their branding.

With all of Amazon’s efforts to promote Prime, I would think they should have worked out a deal to buy Prime.com. Of course, it is easy for me to say from the sidelines, but it seems like a name Amazon ought to own.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

9 COMMENTS

  1. Asking is $5 million.
    Does it add real value to the business and the Amazon / Prime brand or is it a vanity play at that price?

  2. Amazon also owns Prime.discount, but not PrimeDiscount.com, which would be the most logical name to have, besides Prime.com, since the brand is mainly for the “Discount business”.

    If you check TESS and TMview (for EU and some other contries TMs)you’d see they own and they are still filing a lot of PRIME-related TMs worldwide, for both world and figurative TMs.
    Their first TM goes back to 2005, when their Prime service was launched, for “Customer loyalty program services featuring rewards in the form of discounted shipping services; retail services, namely, administration of a discount program for enabling participants to obtain discounts on shipping services through use of a discount membership program. FIRST USE: 20050202. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20050202”

  3. I don’t see why Amazon would want Prime.com.

    I’ve had Prime Membership since its inception. One of the purposes of “Prime” is to keep you on the Amazon site and keep adding and clicking.

    • My opinion is that Prime is becoming a brand, and even though it is a part of Amazon, I would assume they would (at the very least) want to keep it out of the hands of a competitor.

      Imagine if Target, Walmart, or a new entity created a line of products known as “Prime” and sold them on Prime.com.

      I am not a lawyer, but I would think they could do that since Amazon’s Prime is a service and a product line called Prime doesn’t seem like it would conflict.

  4. Because Amazon is extremely cheap on the domain buying front! I own a similar domain that goes along with an Amz offering, and via marksmen, came to table with shockingly low (max) offer. Yea, I know it was them.

    Amz is not the buyer for premium stuff like this, and never will be.

  5. They don’t have primeday.com, either. This one is an active company website.

    I am not so sure prime.com is a “must have” for Amazon, though.

  6. By the way they don’t own echo.com and fire.com which are both important product lines. They do own alexa.com but are not using it for their Alexa AI brand.

    They also don’t own S3.com

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