My father has been in the home fashions business for his entire life, and he has owned his store in New Hampshire since 1984. Although he has a 3,000 square foot store, custom window treatments, which take up about 20% of the store, generate about 80% of the business.
On occasion, I would hear my father complain about companies that would advertise their window treatment “stores” in the Yellow Pages, when in fact, they operated out of a van. While nothing can really replace the comfort of going into a store, working with a knowledgeable sales clerk and purchasing a product, the people who run their van-stores are onto something. They have little to no inventory, they outsource what they can’t do, and they have no physical overhead except van maintenance.
This is a great business model that should be applied to domain names in the form of a PPS (pay per sale) store. Many domain investors have few connections with product manufacturers. Likewise, most product manufacturers have few connections with domain owners. What we need is for a middle man development company to be created to form relationships with product manufacturers and domain owners to create custom stores where the domain owner only has to change his DNS. No templates to mess with, no customer service call center to train, no more work than a standard PPC page. If the domain owner wants to enhance is site(s), the templates should have the ability to add content to make them more unique to build brand loyalty and encourage customers to return. This is similar to what Joe Davison was talking about in the “Niche-Specific Stores” section of his July post
I think this is one way in which PPC aggregators will evolve into PPS aggregators. Current web advertisers will be happy when they are paying on a net sale basis rather than on a per click basis. Domain owners will be compensated nicely because the value of a customer would drastically increase. The PPS aggregators would be happy to receiving a % of all sales. I believe this is much more beneficial to all parties.
There are some domain owners/investors who already do something similar, and I think they have a great business model. The idea behind this post is for something that can be applied to everyone who owns a domain name on a large scale rather than a few companies who are well ahead of the game.
