The Domain Name Story Behind Wayfair.com

Wayfair is one of Amazon’s largest competitors. The publicly traded company (W on the NYSE) has a market capitalization of nearly $25 billion. While Wayfair.com is a major brand name today, the company started out by purchasing and utilizing solid keyword .com domain names and building out websites on them. Ten years ago, the company that had been known as CSN Stores rebranded as Wayfair, and the rest is history.

The move off of individual keyword domain name brands and into one larger umbrella brand turned out to be a prescient decision as Google changes deemphasized the search engine value of keyword matching .com domain names. Instead of smaller websites operating individually, the company wisely chose to operate under an umbrella brand name called Wayfair.

Last week on Twitter, Jesse Pujji (who runs the 3-1-4 newsletter) shared a history of the Wayfair, and it is worth a read. He discusses the company’s start as a domain name and SEO play and shared how it grew from there:

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

4 COMMENTS

  1. Ah the early 2000’s were fun for keyword stuffing and matching domains. Get any domain really, put the keyword a bunch of times in some greyed out text at the bottom of the page and bingo, top results on search engines.

    I never knew the story of wayfair, very interesting.

  2. Wayfair is such a crap name. I can’t believe a branding agency was paid to come up with that name. What the hell does Wayfair even mean.

  3. They used to buy a lot of aftermarket domains, there was another company Netshops doing much the same thing. They rebrand to Hayneedle. Google’s 2012 EMD change and these buyers dropping out of the market has really tanked EMD prices. It is 10% of what it was.

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