One of my biggest complaints of Network Solutions has been their high prices and unwillingness to offer hassle-free, competitive pricing for domain investors. Every registrar I’ve worked with has been willing to negotiate down domain renewal fees when asked. But the three registrars that made discounted bulk pricing more difficult were Network Solutions, Register.com, and eNom.

Network Solutions
The lowest I was able to negotiate at NetSol was $8.75 / year but that was only after going up at least one level of escalation after calling customer service. Getting the first account discounted could be difficult. However, calling back with a subsequent account was easier because you only had to reference your previously discounted account. But the prices were not permanent which meant you had to call every time you wanted to register or renew with the discount.

Register.com
Similar to NetSol, they required a call and could not save pricing. It has been so long since I renewed a domain that I don’t remember the lowest price I was able to negotiate, but it was probably between $7.75 and $8.75. The real problem with Register.com is there requirement of a phone-call during 8-5 EST in order to retrieve a transfer auth-code.

eNom
By far the toughest company to negotiate prices with. Even when faced with me transferring away over 1000 domains, they wanted to charge me $99 every year for a BulkRegister account, they would not match competitive prices ($7.75 was the lowest), and they would not give free privacy (as many registrars will do, if persuasively asked). They said it was because they outsource their privacy services and would lose money if they gave it away for free. I escalated as high as I could go but eventually transferred every domain out.

Today I received e-mails to the Network Solutions account contacts of previously discounted accounts. They were letting me know that discount pricing had been approved for my account, and was now built-in to the account manager so I could stop calling them. Here is a copy of the e-mail that is going out:

Get the price you want without the hassle.
Discounted domains are now available through Account Manager.
	Dear Valued Network Solutions Customer: We’re pleased to announce that you have been chosen to participate in a pilot program that provides discounted domain pricing through Account Manager.  That’s right—no more calling Customer Service to request reduced pricing for your domain purchases or renewals.  Going forward, you can simply log in to receive your discount. You can purchase or renew .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .us and .name domain names for just $8.75 per year. This pricing is available for both purchases and renewals of applicable domains currently associated with (your e-mail address). Your discount will be applied in the shopping cart at the time of purchase/renewal.  If you do not see the price you expect in the shopping cart, please log in to your Network Solutions® account and then go back to your shopping cart. For renewals, please note that your discount will apply regardless of whether you Auto Renew or manually renew. Should you have any questions about this email or any of your Network Solutions products or services, please contact Customer Service at 1-800-333-7680. Sincerely, Network Solutions® Customer Support

This is interesting because their business model has been to charge super-high prices ($34.99) to existing customers who are not aware of current market rates and who don’t know how to transfer domains. This is the first sign of two possible trends within NetSol: 1) a significant number of bulk domain customers have requested discounts, which impacts their call center volume. And 2) they are not totally ignoring the trends and market power of discounters such as GoDaddy, and might actually decide to once again complete as a registrar.

I’ve used to think that Network Solutions fit predictably well into the Product Life Cycle model:

because their product—a monopoly on most TLDs—pretty much died when competition was introduced on June 7th, 1999. As more and more discount registrars came online, their position quickly changed from “Maturity” to “Decline”.

Their domain registration division would be considered a “cash cow” in a BCG Matrix, which indicates a high-margin product with low growth (they actually have negative growth, down over 100k domains this year). The only problem with calling them a cash cow is that you don’t spend money dressing up a cow as Network Solutions has been doing. By dressing up, I mean they’ve done an expensive redesign of their website every couple years, they have the largest and most expensive call centers, and they are dropping prices for bulk domain owners. This hardly fits into the cash cow template where keeping margins as high as possible by eschewing spending is the rule.

They have been doing more targeted web, e-mail, and radio advertising but are still losing customers at a fairly good rate. At $35 / year they can certainly afford to spend a lot of ad dollars on customer acquisition, but how can this be sustainable if they are still losing customers?