I think "Register your domains from just $3.98 a year" was better than "The Internet Needs People. To tell stories, open stores and share what matters."
Dirty little secret of the domain registration industry: all the money is in upsells to email, shared hosting, pre-rolled $30 a month shopping carts, etc. Domains themselves are cheap and fairly low margin.
You know who buys those comparatively expensive high-margin services? SMB owners and people planning to be one. Suffice it to say that Oprah is slightly more well-known than (pick a tech personage) in that demographic.
This is also why GoDaddy brands with supermodels rather than with "You'll love our automated tools to assist with SSL renewals." (Which, FWIW, are pretty good.)
P.S. Fun fact about GAAP revenue recognition which Bob Parsons hates with a burning passion: Suppose I spend $1,000 on domain purchases or renewals this year. How much revenue does GoDaddy book? Answer: $200 or so, because I renew for 5 years at a time, and they can only book a prorated amount of the $1k per day. The remaining $800 sits on their balance sheet as a liability. If they spend the corresponding cash prior to 2018, as an accounting matter, it looks like they are in debt to Kalzumeus Software. This is crazy to me as an operator, because I cannot ask for that money back and because I know that the carrying cost of my business to them is so close to zero as to be unmeasurable, but it makes the business look artificially over leveraged.
That fact of GAAP accounting actually makes sense. Suppose after 1 year, GoDaddy screws up and botches your registration. Your domain is permanently gone. Now GoDaddy owes you $800.
So yes, booking it as debt GoDaddy owes you which they pay down in services actually does make sense. It's extremely low risk debt, but debt nonetheless.
Thanks. Accounting isn't my thing at all. I recently heard that a previous employer of mine was begging staff to take some leave as all the leave on their books is somehow counted as a debt and it makes the books better if people burn off some of their accrued leave. People were forced to take 2-3 month holidays to clear their 10+ years of leave they had saved up. Quite how the workplace functioned with so many on leave at the same time is beyond me.
Prepaid services are technically a debt, but a very low risk one. In contrast, paid leave is a high risk liability - an employee with 4 months accrued leave can quit at any time and they are owed 4 months of pay when they do.
(I think the company can opt to pay out their 4 months of leave over the course of 4 months to smooth cash flow issues, but I'm not sure of this.)
The employer I worked for operated under one of the 2 systems allowed by New Zealand law. Leave is accrued as a percentage of hours worked. Overtime and penal rates could have one of two effects. Either the hourly rate payed out when on leave was increased, or the amount of leave you got increased as you did more shifts, call etc. They did the latter. The odd bit was that you earned leave while on leave (which I supposed has to happen). So after I was paid out when I left, I wrote to them and asked if the 3 months leave owed entitled me to an extra percentage as I'd have earned leave while on leave had I taken it. They paid me. So I wrote again, and they paid me again. Obviously this had rapidly decreasing returns, but it struck me as rather funny.
Companies allocate money into a contra account (to the leave liability) each period (i.e. monthly) so that its all "accounting money". Otherwise companies would go bankrupt if too many staff took leave at a time.
That is while staff with large leave balances look bad, they don't effect the profitability of the organisation.
In that case there is something I don't understand. If the company has a debt and an offsetting asset pegged specifically to that use, why does it look bad?
If anything, that should look good: "we owe $X to employees at 0bps interest and we have $X in the bank at 40bps."
It looks bad because they have a large liability on there balance sheet. Also you have to remember that your leave entitlement stays the same if you get promoted/ pay rise so the organisation actually has to pay more then what they've offset
But they are in debt, they are in debt with their customers. What would be crazy is to recognise a 5 year service commitment as 1 year. This is no different from how the NYT, The Economist, National Geographic... account for the yearly subs. http://www.fasb.org/revenue_recognition.shtml
Imagine that GoDaddy is acquired by another company, and this other company wants to pivot GoDaddy's business into only hosting. The new owners need to recognise that there is cash in the balance sheet from domain registration services, a service that is yet to be offered. It could even be the case that that cash from domain registrations is no longer in the balance sheet, but has already been distributed as a dividend. If GoDaddy stops providing a service it has committed to, they have to pay back customers. Plain and simple. That to me is a liability, but it is not financial "leverage" or debt as you imply. This liability is noted as "Prepaid revenues" and hence not recognised as financial debt a.k.a leverage.
I am currently at a cafe writing on my iPad, but given that you have just tapped me in the face with an Internet glove, I am going to walk back to my apartment so that I can access a machine which will let me do image editing. One moment please.
To assist you in identifying the parts of your company's checkout flow which are typically referred to as upsells, I have taken the liberty of taking a screenshot and highlighting them for you. The green highlights are what I expressed desire to buy, the red are the suggested upsells / cross-sells. Namecheap no-confirm opts me into one of them.
2) Enter any arbitrary string in the central search box. I used "patio11testregistration." Trigger the search.
3) A list of domains pops up. The .com was available (fancy that) so I clicked Add To Cart then View Cart.
4) The screenshotted web page pops up. I reduced to 50% screen resolution to get it all on one page, and cropped to only show the central column, then added the green/red highlighting and my comments. It is otherwise unedited and had no user input applied to it.
As others have said this GAAP/FASB principle makes sense. The only thing I'll add is that you mentioned not being able to ask for that money back. The accounting activity involved in a refund of prepaid liabilities would be to reduce both their cash and their prepaid liabilities. This would be a perfectly sensible transaction, so GoDaddy could certainly accommodate this from an accounting perspective.
As a long time namecheap customer, I am completely lost on this website. Ok, I agree, it looks very modern but "The internet needs people" is less likely to make me sign up for a domain than "Register your domains for 9$".
I commented elsewhere that you can find the pricing page. It's not that hidden and the pricing is not super expensive. We're a pretty ethical bunch at Namecheap. We have donated over $200k to EFF in the last 2-3 years and will be doing a similar initiative soon. Give us a try and I think you'll agree.
Yup, so much better. As someone who knows namecheap and what they offer very well, I know all the features are there, and with that knowledge the redesign doesn't look to bad. But this is a very ambiguous homepage to a new visitor. The old homepage may have been cluttered but you could just FEEL what they were offering. I don't think this flat design trend applied to all industries.
This is the worst redesign I've seen in a long time but has a really well redesigned logo. Sorry. Looks like they're trying to fit their content in one of those Generic Fad Layout Templates you find on ThemeForest. The LOGO is awesome though.
● Registering a domain is now harder. Before I could select a dropdown menu and see all the TLD options. Now I can't.
● Did you know that NameCheap sells .es domains? Guess how many screens you have to click through to find that out.
● Did you know NameCheap .coms are only $10 while other sites sell them for $14. Because this design doesn't tell you anything.
● I have to scroll so much to get so little. White space is good in moderation but this is just overdone. There's so little content and so much white space and meaningless grey elements and slideshows and giant icons that it makes the site look sterile.
● There's a slideshow with only 2 slides, one of them talking about Web Hosting (to sell web hosting plans), the other about Security (to sell ssl certificates). No other data. No other info. How many people do you think are going to click the second slide and find out that NameCheap sells really cheap ssl certificates.
● Lots of garbage information is taking up space.
● Less functional than the previous design.
● Some of the worst copywrite I've seen. "The internet needs people" and "Getting your site online is easier than you think."
● It tries to advertise NameCheap (poorly) and what it does (poorly) rather than letting me do it. Look, you guys won, I'm already ON your site. Stop selling your "image" to me and start selling your products and services.
Hopefully when their sales drop they'll revert to the previous layout and work off of that.
As a customer with over 100 domains, the new redesign is quite the eyesore. My main reason for choosing Namecheap was because it was technically designed, minimalistic, and had good prices. The new design says flat hipsterism with a splash of web 2.0 fruityness. It's not in the spirit of Namecheap. Something tells me that this design came from an external source. Why change for changesake? Eek.
How is the old website minimalistic? While I do agree the new design is confusing and put too much in form over function, the old website is way too cluttered IMO.
As patio11 says, the margin on domains are fairly small and so many domain companies survive on the upsells instead. Verisign's current .com price is $7.85 and for .net is $5.62. This is the minimum that the registrars (GoDaddy, NameCheap etc) need to pay - so when you think that NameCheap sometimes sell .coms for $8.95, the margin really is small... especially since I've left out the $0.25 ICANN transaction fee (many companies - GoDaddy aside - include this in the overall price). So a $8.95 .com sale leaves just $0.85.
So it does make sense for domain companies to market themselves as sellers of an online presence, instead of a sub-$10 domain name.
But having said that, the website seems a tad... boilerplate. I thought that big companies were done with rebranding to a Web 2.0 esque corporate web design?
Also the footer is 865 pixels tall on my 1920x1080p screen - does it really need to be that big?
I don't mean to be too critical - I do support the change to selling a 'story' instead of a domain name. But the design just seems... outdated?
It's not too bad. Unfortunately what I really wanted them to change wasn't just the "face" of their website, but the whole website, especially the domain managing features and whatnot. Those kept the same early 2000 design. I'm hoping it's because they didn't have time to finish redesigning everything, but why not just wait until they did?
I'm personally working on redesigning the account panel. We're about 6-8 weeks out but what we have so far is a huge improvement. Would love to hear your feedback - ted@namecheap.com
Hey Ted, loving what you and the Namecheap team have done with the website! Would it be possible to add a few mouseover/overlay tutorials in the control panel for new users?
I love the new look. It's very clean, warm and inviting. I look forward to the control panel getting a similar facelift.
However, regarding the landing page, I think the teal background for the customer quotes negatively affects readability and the text seems to big. Perhaps displaying one quote at time, within a slider, would be more appealing.
You know what that's so true. I avoided NameCheap the first few times specifically because of the name. Sounds like a guy running a company out of his basement. And with domain names being worth $2,000+ and on rare occasions getting hijacked and stolen, "cheap" doesn't sound like a good thing.
"I'm looking for a construction company, anyone know a good one.", "Oh yeah I use Cheap Construction Co. they're great!"... "Yeah no thanks."
Hopefully, they get higher quality support reps with better understanding of English. I'd also like the ability to be able to call someone, that's something that GoDaddy does better. I guess they take advantage of the cheaper technical salaries in Eastern Europe though so that's why customers aren't able to talk to someone.
Oh man, it looks like iOS threw up all over this redesign. What's the extra popout menu on the right for? it's all the same stuff from your navbar. And why are all the account management tools shoved in a tiny menu in the corner of the screen even when I'm logged in?
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Just a heads up if you're planning on using namecheap. I transferred a bunch of domains (around 70 or so) and they just refused to provide me with an invoice, so I couldn't deduct the expenses from my company's taxes. They will only sent you receipts, which are completely useless if you're in EU (and I think refusing to provide an invoice is even illegal here).
You should know that most US companies don't do full-fledged European style invoices. Who told you receipts are useless for company expenses though, that's simply not true.
In my experience, most US companies don't provide EU style invoices for everyone, but every single time I've asked for one, I got it, except for namecheap - and trust me, I asked multiple times. Receipts are useless in most EU countries, since you need a valid invoice to claim the expense. That includes listing both the buyer and seller legal names, addresses, what was sold, etc... as well as VAT numbers (or local equivalent).
We don't and have never had a system for invoices--nor have I seen that anywhere else. You do get a whole record of your purchases with the full amount spent.
We do appreciate the feedback though while we build out the interface even further!
I voiced my feedback before I left, several times in fact. Not that it stopped you from sending me emails asking why I was transferring the domains out.
Not everyone is in US. See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7086631. If you want to claim an expense for something you bought in a shop, you need to ask for an invoice at the time of the sale. In fact, even non-business entities can ask for an invoice (even if it's useless to them) and is illegal for the seller to refuse.
It seems namecheap is more concerned about small business and/or side projects. The market for small, "I'll try this thing out" sort of people: that is the market they, NameCheap, seem to be luring. Eventually, except in rare circumstance, the sites do not do too well and are sent back into Tao.
We'd love to hear your feedback on where you get that impression. We speak to lots of small business owners, but we also speak to everyone. The Internet needs people--and that is a blanket term. ;)
Seriously? You want them to spend thousands of dollars to show you a site that looks like it's from 2000 for the next six months, only to redo it more modern?
The menu on the right cuts off at the bottom of my screen and there is no way to scroll it down. Also, the default font size is too darn big, zoom out to 75%, thats how it should look.
They haven't rethemed the manage pages yet, looks hilariously out of place x)
